Posts

Michael Kiwanuka, “Black Man In A White World”

Kiwanuka’s second album, Love & Hate, is an ambitious album that roams all over the R&B and soul maps, unafraid to stretch out the songs, play with lush arrangements, and challenge listeners. It’s an album that I really prefer to listen to as a full album, because I think it builds on itself well.

DJ Shadow, “Good News”

DJ Shadow followed up his excellent 2016 album The Mountain Will Fall with an EP the next year, called The Mountain Has Fallen. It features a couple of nice collaborations with Nas and Danny Brown, and then it has this. The spastic pace, blurting synths, and swaths of noise seem deliberately hostile paired up with some of his most accessible stuff. Overall, though, it’s a solid EP.

Primitive Man, “Loathe”

Primitive Man is very aptly named, a knuckle-dragging sludge/doom act from Denver, putting out punishing, bleak records that are unsubtle in the extreme. This little ditty comes from Home Is Where The Hatred Is, an EP from 2015 that is just basically sunless and crushing like this.

Thou, “Feral Faun”

Thou is actually one of the bands I think of as being closest to Primitive Man, so nice pull, shuffle. I suppose there’s more nuance to Thou than Primitive Man at times, as you can hear in the intro to this song. But, overall, it’s the same kind of bleak approach to things. There’s more melody here, I suppose, if you squint hard enough.

The Pietasters, “Without You”

You know, for a dude who claims to not like live albums, I sure have a lot of live albums. The Pietasters only have one good studio album, Oolooloo, but it’s tremendous. I bought this album because it was the next thing they put out, and I wanted more. This live album captured them at about the same time as their studio masterpiece, and it finds the band in roughly the same form. As a result, it’s probalby their second best album, which doesn’t say a ton about the rest of their career.

Windhand, “Halcyon”

Windhand are usually categorized as playing doom metal, which is to say that they kind of follow in the footsteps of Black Sabbath or at least Sleep. There’s aspects of the sound here which really kind of blur into adjacent genres, which is to say that there’s a certain psych-rock thing going on here, as well as more than a little grunge. Genre categorization aside, this is pretty easy listening for heavy music, and is just kind of pleasant. At least for me.

Happy birthday to the most important listener/reader of Five Songs! YES, YOU.

The Pixies, “Where Is My Mind?”

I’m not sure a week doesn’t go by where Dave Lovering’s entry into this song doesn’t go through my head. And that’s without talking about how often the rest of the song goes through my brain. Where is my mind? It’s on the Pixies, most of the time.

The Jesus Lizard, “Mouth Breather”

Speaking of drum parts that go through my head all the time, Mac McNeilly’s drums here are indelibly printed into my head. When I die (probably crushed by a stack of board games falling on me), you’ll be able to slice me open and find the chunk of gray matter assigned to keep track of this. This is essentially a perfect rock song.

Sumerlands, “Blind”

We’ve talked around here a lot (well, I talked…typed…whatever) about metal’s many genres. One thing that these genres can do is result in pigeonholing your listening too much. So, I periodically sample from genres that I’m not big on. Usually it doesn’t work! This album was one of those experiments, where I decided to go for a modern heavy metal record. It doesn’t really do much for me. Oh well!

Muddy Waters, “You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had”

For as much as I joke about not knowing shit about jazz (and I do not), I know even less about blues. I’m clueless! So, I’ll just say that this comes from his 1978 album I’m Ready and get out of the way.

Noisem, “Voices in the Morgue”

Well, that’s jarring. Noisem, a death/thrash act from Baltimore, got some positive press a while back, so I picked up this album. But I don’t know, I think I’m pickier about this end of metal, and this doesn’t do a whole lot for me.

Modest Mouse, “So Much Beauty In Dirt”

This comes from the 2001 EP Everywhere and His Nasty Parlor Tricks, which in turn pulls a few songs from an earlier EP and adds a few new ones. This is from the peak Modest Mouse period, from their three album run from The Lonesome Crowded West through Good News for People Who Love Bad News, so it’s good stuff.

Mudhoney, “Here Comes Sickness”

If there’s one album I’d point to that defines grunge to me, it’s not Nirvana’s Nevermind. Sure, that’s the commercial breakthrough, but I’d instead point at Mudhoney’s first, self-titled record as really being the heart of grunge. It marries the energy of punk and the power of metal, with a certain grime that really sets the genre off. This is basically the sound that so many bands were chasing in their own way before grunge got huge and changed into sour grunting.

Jan Jelinek, “John Cage, I’ve Been Told To Ask You The Following Question: Where Are You Going?”

Jan Jelinek, expiremental sampling wizard, is best known for creating glitchy, minimal electronic work. Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records is a masterpiece, one of my favorite electronic albums. This, however, comes from a much later album, Zwischen, distinguished by being more avant garde, with more vocal samples. Also, the song names are something else. This is not remotely the longest song title.

Czarface & Ghostface Killah, “Back At Ringside”

Czarface is Inspectah Deck, 7L, and Esoteric, making the sort of superhero/villain inspired hip-hop that MF Doom and Ghostface used to make. So, of course, they have teamed up with both Doom and Ghostface, which makes all the sense in the world. Ghostface managed to outshine the other folks on this album, but it’s still kind of a fun romp.

The Olympians, “Sirens of Jupiter”

The Olympians are a Daptone act featuring a remixed set of the same kind of usual suspects, with members of the Dap-Kings and Menahan Street Band, among others. They’ve put out just one album thus far, and it’s a fine slab of instrumental soul, if not at all groundbreaking. If you need more of that Daptone sound, you can certainly do a lot worse.