The Emotions, “I Could Never Be Happy”

Late period Stax single here, which you can hear in that much more 70s funk sound. And of course, the production at this point is much richer than some of the earlier stuff.

The Slackers, “Feed My Girl Ska”

This comes from the 2007 album Boss Harmony Sessions, which is sort of a bit of an odd record from them. They have some originals, some arrangements of other people’s songs, and some songs written by other folks from the band than Vic Ruggiero. It’s tied together with an intro and outro by “Boss Harmony”, which I think is one of King Django’s (Skinnerbox) many aliases. At any rate, the Slackers are great, so this is a pleasant listen, but it’s not one of their top tier records.

DJ Logic, “Abyss”

My kids and I often joke about “dog logic”, where dogs try to reason about the world from their first principles, and it leads to some funny places. So now, I’m trying to figure out what are the axioms of DJ logic, and what the precepts you’d reach based on them. But it’s late, and my head hurts, so I can’t really follow this through to its conclusion.

Superchunk, “Precision Auto”

Superchunk’s No Pocky For Kitty is one of the records that really busted up my listening habits and helped broaden my tastes. That sounds stupid for someone that listened to a fair bit of punk prior to this, but it was pretty much all California punk. At any rate, I adored that record, and had high hopes for the followup. This is how it started, and my head was blown clean off.

Eddie Purrell, “The Spoiler”

There’s that early Stax sound here. Dig those Memphis Horns!

Otis Redding, “Let Me Come On Home”

Hell yeah! Stax/Volt forever, y’all!

Ghost Funk Orchestra, “Fuzzy Logic”

Staying super cool today, I see. Ghost Funk Orchestra play around in that funk/soul space, with their spin being a fair bit of psychedelia and jazz folded into the mix. It’s not a totally unique formula, but they handle it well, and there are some real cinematic elements to their sound that is super appealing.

Eddie Floyd, “Don’t Tell Your Mama (Where You’ve Been)”

We Love Song Titles (With Parentheticals)!

The Books, “Smells Like Content”

Can I engage in some old-fart bloviating? Of course I can, nobody else has the password to this site so nobody can stop me! The labeling of all videos as just “content” is really unfortunate. It signals a commodification of creative work that only serves the massive aggregators that control what we see, and yet people have willingly adopted the nomenclature. And lumping together criticism, reviews, buying guides, how-tos, and everything else together as just a homogonized slurry doesn’t even help viewers find what they want. I hate it!

Negativland, “I Am God”

It’s always kind of a difficult thing to categorize Negativland as music. Usually, they’re more performance art who happens to use audio as their medium. There are exceptions in their catalog, though. Escape From Noise has plenty of things on it that you can characterize as songs, fractured as most of them are. Free, their full album that followed up the whole U2 imbroglio, is maybe the most musical thing they’ve ever put together. Which isn’t to say it’s full of toe-tapping tunes. But hey, this song has a beat, and you can dance to it! Not bad for an album which is mostly a meditation on free will and freedom in general.

Mudhoney, “In My Finest Suit”

Ever the self-sabotaging band, Mudhoney found themselves on a major label during the grunge gold rush and released Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge, one of the least grunge-y records they ever released. Sales were not great, and by 1995, Kurt Cobain was dead and the grunge bubble was collapsing. So, of course, they headed back and released one of their MOST grunge-y records, My Brother The Cow. This song, for instance, would have sat comfortably on their self-titled record without anybody really noticing stylistic problems.

At The Drive-In, “Pattern Against User”

At The Drive-In is probably best known for one of their successor bands, the Mars Volta, but they also totally ruled. They were less prog-y than the Mars Volta, with more post-hardcore and straight up punk going on. But despite being more conventional, that doesn’t at all mean that the songs were uninteresting. This is from my favorite album by them, Relationship of Command, their final album (before the 2017 reunion).

Mastodon, “Black Tongue”

I spent a bunch of time with The Hunter last year, seeing if I could really get to the point of appreciating the record. It was a really big break with their previous two albums, and my initial reaction when it came out was that I didn’t care for new path. After that time spent, I can say that I still prefer the big prog-y compositions, but there’s a lot to like in this leaner album. It’s probably the right on-ramp to begin listening to Mastodon, truthfully.

James Plotkin, “Caught In Your Orbit”

Well, I don’t remember getting this one. It’s from 2002, old enough that I don’t think it was from a grab bag or anything. It does sound like the kind of thing that might have caught my attention, some kind of strange combination of grindcore and drum’n’bass. At any rate, this is pretty interesting, might put on the rest of this album after I’m done with this entry.