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Post-rock, rap, stoner rock, whatever the hell the Flaming Lips are…this is a good cross-section of the kind of music I listen to. Check it out!

M83, “Let Men Burn Stars”

Fitting alongside bands like Godspeed You Black Emperor in the “post-rock” bucket, M83 plays mostly instrumental music that always sounds like the soundtrack to something. In some ways, this stuff is kind of shameless emotional manipulation, but if you just ignore that and let yourself be manipulated, it can be fun. This is a bit of a throwaway track, though.

Without fanfare, I’ve been doing this more than a month now. I think I’ve missed two days. Not bad! I think I’ll keep going for now, I’m still having fun. Here’s today’s music!

The Couch of Eureka, “I Got The Boom”

This is a track from a Lookout Records sampler called Heide Says, released in 1996. Despite being on Lookout, this sounds more like a song from a Dischord band than the typical pop punk of Lookout. I actually like this track a fair bit, and don’t really remembering noticing it when I got this sampler.

Yesterday, I actually briefly had six songs in the post. I only discovered it when I was going to put the entries in the index. I have one job! I only need one hand to count! Anywhere, here’s today’s random count of songs (hopefully five!).

Preston School of Industry, “History of the River”

When Pavement broke up, Stephen Malkmus went solo (later adding a backing band called The Jicks), and Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg founded Preston School of Industry. He put out two records under that name, neither reaching anywhere near the heights of Pavement (but, to be fair, neither has Malkmus). They’re both decent records, but they’re missing the spark that really elevated Pavement.

In most of these playlists, I try and find the actual version of the song I’m listening to. But, if I can’t find it exactly, I’ll go with something close, because I don’t think it’s necessarily that important that it matches exactly, and I don’t want to go through the hassle of uploading if I don’t have to. I hope that’s OK with folks! Here’s today’s playlist, which does feature one of those “close enough” tracks.

Would anybody be interested in weekly summaries, or merged playlists of this stuff, or a “best of” thing periodically? I’m not sure if I want to do it or not, but it might be interesting. I’m also unsure if people want me to throw in random related songs onto these playlists or not. As always, I await your deafening silence down below. Accompany that silence with some tunes!

Ooh, we had our first repeated song today! MU330’s “Tune Me Out” showed up again. I’m going to skip it, because repeating songs is not what this project is about.

I’ve made the decision to try and just embed Bandcamp stuff directly here, in cases where the track isn’t easily available on YouTube. I could upload it, but since Bandcamp embeds well, I think this will work fine. Let me know if that’s too big a hassle! Your playlist today (but note, Kröwnn is down below!)

Kröwnn, “For the Throne of Fire”

Any metal track that begins with a quote from the Conan movie is really leaning into the camp. And this track sounds exactly like you’d expect a metal track starting with a Conan quote to sound. It’s pretty much just overt Black Sabbath worship. I mean, come on, the band is called “Kröwnn”. The proper place to be writing about this band is on the side of a van. I mean, look at that album cover! There’s a wizard on it!

Driving on through Sunday! Even though I’m actually writing this on Friday! Time is confusing! Music is forever!

Einstürzende Neubauten, “Trinklied”

We haven’t hit Neubauten proper yet, although we did encounter Alexandre Hacke with his work with The Unsemble. Einstürzende Neubauten (literally, “collapsing new buildings”) is sort of the prototypical industrial band, as opposed to industrial dance. They make use of noise, atypical percussion, and the sounds of industry to make challenging music. Early in their career, it was about noise and chaos. Towards their mid-period, there was a steer towards more recognizable rhythms and even, yes, some danceable stuff. Later on, things moved more towards ambient compositions. Always, though, their music and art has had an edge, and they’ve always been one of the most interesting bands working. They even did crowdfunding way before the crowd did, way back in 2002.

I think we’re on a streak here, with another strong collection of songs for this entry. Take a listen and see if you agree.

Willie Nelson, “Undo The Right”

This is from Crazy: The Demo Sessions, a compilation of very early demos of Nelson performing a bunch of his songs, some of which ended up becoming very famous. “Crazy” as recorded by Patsy Cline, for instance. The songs on this album are all pretty spare arrangements, mostly just Nelson and his guitar. I’m far from a Nelson expert, so I have no real pointers on where to go with his discography, but this album is very good. Makes for a disorienting duet when you have two copies of the song going at once, though.

See, this batch of tunes is a good example of the kind of thing I wanted. Obscure Seattle ska band! Old-ass straight edge hardcore! More of that stuff! Here’s your eclectic bunch of tunes for today.

Easy Big Fella, “Joey & Ranma”

The third wave of ska even reached Seattle. There aren’t really any bands other than Easy Big Fella that I listened to back in the day that were part of that scene here, but they were a good one. The last two albums in particular, Eat At Joey’s and Tasty Bits and Spicy Flicks (both on Moon Ska) were very strong, and good examples of what the third wave could do well when it was on.

Just in case anybody is curious, I’ve started using ToVid to upload songs to YouTube. It seems to work with a minimum of hassle, the only drawback being that I sometimes need to convert songs to MP3 before uploading them. For that job, media.io seems to work pretty well. Between the two of them, it means I don’t really need to do very much to get things uploaded. As for today, let’s hope today’s songs are a better bunch than yesterday.