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.
I think this might be a repeat, but I’m gonna be honest - it’s a little hard to tell with Bricks songs. Let’s check.
OH MY GOD, this is the fourth time this song has come up! And we’ve never had another Bricks song from this record. This is the first tune, so that feeds into my pet theory that the Plex randomizer prefers the first track of albums.
[Read More]This is a track from Demolition Pumpkin Squeeze Musik, where Q-Bert pretty much goes out of his mind. Some of the finest turntable work around, I highly recommend this whole record.
Goddamn, I’m a sucker for a loop built on a piano riff. Here, “Love Finds Its Own Way” by Gladys Knight & the Pips is the source, and the resulting beat is a thing of wonder. I just can’t get enough of this.
[Read More]DJ Premier is one of the best to ever do it, and Daily Operation captures him near the top of his form. His beats are spare but bracing, with everything having a purpose, which is to hit hard. Guru is similarly direct, without a lot of embellishment, leading to a record that sounds almost businesslike. That’s not a complaint or anything, it’s nice to hear something that takes itself seriously and has the chops to back it up.
[Read More]A while back, I wrote some code to pull data from Discogs for my collection to see what year albums were released for another project that I was working on. That project might still see the light of day! But I’m wondering if there’s some way I could pull data for genres. Discogs doesn’t have genre tags in their structured data, but I could scrape the band description for specific words, I suppose. It would be neat to see what percentage of my collection is, say, punk.
[Read More]There are a lot of questions raised by this blog, most of them unanswerable. Foremost among those questions is “why do I have so many damn albums from the Queers?”
After ten years apart, during which Mark Eitzel pursued a solo career, American Music Club got back together in 2004 for a new album, Love Songs for Patriots. Not only did they pick up where they left off, they really picked up earlier than that. I like it better than San Francisco, and maybe better than Mercury. I think it has a little more vigor than those two albums, although that’s always kind of a relative thing with a band this downbeat.
[Read More]A thing I admire about Johnny Marr (who guested on this song) is that he’s cheerfully helped on about a zillion things in his post-Smiths career, and they’re pretty all over the map. And he seems happy to do it. Good for him!
I’ve tried on multiple occasions to love The Hunter, and I just haven’t gotten there. It’s not that it’s bad or anything, but I dunno, I just want them to be more elaborate than this. Although it’s pretty funny to call this tune as not elaborate.
[Read More]A thing that is easy to forget about Hüsker Dü is how ridiculously productive they were in their salad days. Zen Arcade, New Day Rising, and Flip Your Wig all came out within a 14 month period, a rate of output that’s even more impressive when you remember that Zen Arcade was a double album. Adding to the awe here is that all three records are bangers, with New Day Rising being my favorite hardcore record (which I’ve definitely never said about any other album!). Flip Your Wig somehow is the weakest of the three, and it’s great! It’s a little lighter, a little poppier, but it’s still full of energy and is probably a bit easier to get into than the other two.
[Read More]Indonesia duo Senyawa are avant garde in just about every possible way. They play homemade instruments. The music is experimental. The album was released by a bunch of different labels across the globe with no ownership rights to any of them, to challenge the way music is distributed today. And it’s truly unusual stuff, with a sensibility that is at odds with a lot of what I listen to. I genuinely enjoy listening to things that surprise me, so I really like this record.
[Read More]After yesterday, it’s nice to get some noise rock in here to offset that kind of thing. Variety is the spice of life, after all, and around here, loud rock is salt. Uh, or something like that. I’m saying it’s a lot of what we do get around here? So it’s salt, the biggest component of the spice mix? I think analogies work best when they’re laborious and opaque, how about you?
[Read More]Even over the course of just a few years (this is from 1962), the Motown sound evolved very rapidly. That’s not to say anything wrong with this, it’s delightful, but Motown moved really fast, and by 1965 they would be in a pretty different place. I mean, “Nowhere to Run” is from 1965.
Man, Revolver was really revolutionary! (For the record, this is from 1966, after that Martha & the Vandellas ripper.)
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