If I wanted to point to a “lol random!” kind of playlist, today might be the day.
This song, from The Punch Line, really shows off what made the Minutemen so great. Listen to that rhythm section! Listen to D Boon hanging back on guitar until he can come in for maximum effect! And it’s only 1:20! That this is from their debut album makes it all the more impressive.
[Read More]A couple of sweet hip-hop beats today.
You can just hear the dust on the vinyl on that drum loop. And that sax! My god, for a short track, this is just great. Madlib is a genius.
I can just picture the faces G.E. Smith is pulling while playing this song. Which led me here, for pictures of guitarists making faces. Also, apparently G.E. Smith is a big Trump supporter, as I learned from the search “G.E. Smith making faces”.
[Read More]A b-side on the “Why Does The Sun Shine” single, I’ve always loved this song. I don’t think they’ve put it on anything else, so this counts as a little bit of a rarity.
A very early song from Green Day, this originally appeared on the “Slappy” EP, and was later included on 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours, the compilation that combined the LP 39/Smooth with “Slappy” and another EP, “1,000 Hours”. It’s a solid collection of songs, one that really showed the potential for the band that later turned into massive stars.
[Read More]One of the big trends of rap beats was taking old soul music and speeding it up so that it sounds like the Chipmunks. Here, Amon Tobin sounds like he’s doing kind of the same thing, only with cartoon sound effects. Why not?
Beautiful drum loop on this song.
Negativland hosted a show called Over The Edge on Berkley’s KPFA, providing an outlet for surreal radio strangeness. I actually caught the show once while going to camp in Berkeley, and it was a mess but also entertaining. They also put out a set of (lightly) edited shows on CD, and I have a bunch of those. This is from Volume 6, the Wilsaphone Stupid Show, which was pieced together out of old found audio and family recordings from David “The Weatherman” Wills. What you hear on this, um, song is pretty representative of Over the Edge in general.
[Read More]Seems like we’ve had a lot of new bands recently. That’s cool! Here’s the music for today.
Early 90s underground rock act Girls Against Boys stood out from the pack for a couple reasons. First, the sound wasn’t just all grim pounding or punk gallop. Instead, Girls Against Boys always sounded like a rock band you could dance to, which was kind of a rarity. The second distinguishing feature probably drove the first, which is that the band had two bassists, a good idea that far too few bands take advantage of. This album, Venus Luxure No. 1 Baby, is probably their best.
[Read More]This is from the first Mars Volta album. So, as you can tell, the Mars Volta were swinging for the fences right away. You never really know where they’re going, and that just was more and more true as things went along.
Oh man, you’re all in for a treat. Señor Coconut is a project of electronic artist Uwe Schmidt, who created this album to document a fake Latin group doing an entire album of Kraftwerk covers. It’s pretty much all note-for-note covers of the originals, but with little flourishes here and there. It’s all played with a totally straight face, and it’s 100% delightful. I never knew that I needed fake Latin covers of Kraftwerk, but I did. Very much.
[Read More]I discovered this album via Bandcamp’s Album of the Day feature, which is always deadly. I like it, it’s always nice to pick up on random punk records now and again.
As before, still don’t know anything about this.
Long-running UK punks Leatherface made ten albums, which is probably about eight more than we actually needed. They play very back-to-basics punk that evokes all the first-wave punk bands from the UK. I’ve got two albums from them, and I’m not totally sure I could tell them apart.
[Read More]I love the urgency in this song, it’s always driving forward hard. And it sticks around for just two and a half minutes. Get in, do what you want to do, get out. Nice.
OK, you ready for what is probably the most obscure and dumbest thing we’ve had on here yet? Right. This is from the “Head Like A Hole” extended CD single. Four different mixes of “Head Like A Hole”, two of “Terrible Lie”, three of “Down In It”, a b-side, and then this. Four seconds of someone saying the title of the track to close out the CD single. And now, you’ve all listened to it. Somehow, it was already on YouTube.
[Read More]Kind of math-rock, kind of death metal, this kind of hybrid makes me happy. Which it probably shouldn’t! This comes from the EP Songs of Lament, the followup to their excellent Songs of Descent. Both are worth looking into.
Bathory were black metal pioneers, with the singer Quorthon’s strangled croak setting the template for black metal vocalists that persists today. The primitive recording and washes of guitar noise also formed one of the pillars of the genre. But, not content to provide some of the building blocks for one type of metal, Bathory re-invented themselves. The album prior to this one started experimenting with breaking out of the template, but Hammerheart showed that the template was gone. This song is the opener of that album, featuring Quorthon actually singing, and the songwriting now was focused on the epic rather than the squalid. And, indeed, Bathory had now invented the subgenre of Viking metal which, yes, is a thing. Bottom line: there aren’t very many bands that have ever been as metal as Bathory, and there aren’t very many bands more influential on the genre.
[Read More]This song comes from Freaked Out And Small, by which time most people had long since moved on. The major labels certainly had, as the Presidents found themselves back on an indie label. But that’s fine, they were still putting together fun stuff. And maybe that’s what’s so enjoyable about the Presidents. They always legitimately sounds like they’re having fun, and it’s infectious. I don’t think this album beats their second one, but it’s still very good.
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