This is the newly rebuilt Five Random Songs: chock full of posts, each featuring five random songs from my collection of music. Along with some other junk. Everything is tagged by artist. Poke around some, it’s been here since 2017. Starting in 2026, I shifted to twice-weekly posts with a little longer format. If you want to keep up, you can use RSS, sign up for email, or follow me on Bluesky.
So hypnotic and pleasant.
Goddamn, this rules. I need to find more experimental drummers. I’m sure there are others. Listen to all that brushing! So exciting!
One, “Sex Breath” is an incredible song name. Two, a band named Maggot Heart should really be a lot more discordant. It should be filthy, squalid, with the kind of skronks from a guitar that I can’t really describe.
[Read More]I poke fun at Screeching Weasel pretty often when they come up here, mostly because their formula most didn’t change over the course of a zillion albums. But their early albums are still a lot of fun - just cheerful, energetic punk. There’s nothing at all wrong with this formula when it’s hitting.
This song is one of the pillars of post-punk, a template for so many following bands. That’s the reason this still sounds fresh more than 40 years later, because it was groundbreaking at the time, and bands still try and sound like this.
[Read More]No, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
A thing that’s cool about this song is how restless it is. They’ve gone through multiple ideas in the first minute of the tune, which is nice to see. This is a very fun album.
Kind of a throwback here, off of 2020’s The Day Before Halloween. Those sawtooth synths there are very primitive but nice.
[Read More]I only have three Stereolab albums, and that’s dumb, because I like them quite a bit. I caught onto them pretty early, but didn’t really keep up with them. I think because maybe in the early 90s, I was really focusing on loud and angry stuff, and depite recognizing deep inside that this was cool stuff, I just fell off. I should really loop back and pick some more of their stuff.
[Read More]I know that Pink Floyd is probably regarded as hopelessly stodgy and dad-ish by people today, avatars of the leaden excesses of 70s rock that sparked punk. And, yeah, this is some ornate shit and all. But dammit, I love it, I sincerely do, whether because it was largely inescapable growing up in Spokane or just because I am also stodgy and dad-ish.
I got this as part of a Hydra Head album grab bag, and it’s awfully different from the usual Hydra Head fare. This is really more on the emo side of the fence than anything else. It’s pleasant enough, I suppose.
[Read More]U.S. Maple more or less perfected devolved rock, where the songs are recognizable as being rock songs, but the form of them is perverted to the straining point. Any more mutated, and it probably ceases to be something you could credibly describe as being in the same genre as, I dunno, the Dave Matthews Band (to choose a band that was popular when U.S. Maple made this record). We need these sort of tricksters, as they set the boundaries of what is acceptable by pushing them further out.
[Read More]This is good! I bought this on Bandcamp, and I don’t remember listening to it. I still can’t decide if that’s sad of me or not. It probably is.
The first Yo La Tengo song I ever heard! I read about them and eventually picked up a combo CD of President Yo La Tengo/New Wave Hot Dogs, and from the moment I heard Ira Kaplan’s calm, peaceful vocals married to that little repetitive figure of guitar squall, I was hooked. That push-and-pull, between noise and peace, is at the heart of Yo La Tengo, and it’s kind of all here in capsule form.
[Read More]The Wedding Present decided to release a single every month for 1992, cranking out originals and covers during the series. They were collected into two records, Hit Parade 1 and Hit Parade 2, and both are great. The band was at their absolute best in the early 90s, and so getting this many tunes from them at that time is great. There’s no real reason to pick between them, both are outstanding.
[Read More]This is, of course, an all-time jam. Also, it makes me remember this (sadly deleted) tweet, which is also nice.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: this image was lost during a changeover on the blog. At some point. Sorry to anybody reading this in the future. It was a screenshot of the “I’m sorry Miss Jackson / ooh / I am four eels / never meant to make your daughter cry / I am several fish and not a guy” tweet. IYKYK.]
[Read More]Just a brief thing from the Roots’ live album, I won’t spend more time on this than it lasts.
The way the drums start up on this track, that’s such a RZA move. The distant piano loop also is a signature. These days, if I came into a beat blind, I couldn’t be sure if it’s a RZA track or not, because his style has been adopted by a lot of folks. But in 1997? Yeah, I could easily pick his stuff out.
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