By and large, I tend to prefer the early material from Marley, where there’s some more ska rhythms as opposed to reggae. Of course, that doesn’t mean that his later material isn’t brilliant. At any rate, Catch a Fire is pretty early, his first album for Island Records, and it’s the one that really put him on the map for most folks. It’s a tremendous record, and probably where I’d recommend folks start with to move beyond Legend.
[Read More]Y’all, it’s ska weather right now in Seattle. It’s still sunny, but not oppressive, and some breezy tunes to go with it is just perfect. I’ve had Hepcat on while making dinner a few times recently, and it’s going down niiiice. Right On Time is my favorite record from them, but Scientific (which provides this song) is excellent as well.
Mudhoney’s singles were pretty great, kind of across the board. They’d pretty consistently turn in either bruising performances, excellent covers, or fun larks. As a result, March to Fuzz, a collection of those singles, is a very good time. The guitar tone is just all-time on this song.
[Read More]See! Two days in a row! Nice job team, let’s take the rest of the month off.
Shuffle in a Motown mood! We’re in 1965, and you can really hear how much Motown has upped their game. This song isn’t that far from the previous one in terms of composition, but the arrangement and especially the production are so much more sophisticated. Of course, by 1965, Hitsville U.S.A. was really rolling, so it’s not really a surprise. It’s still fun to hear these back-to-back and hear the leap forward.
[Read More]Sorry about that, I kind of got out of the rhythm of doing this daily. I’ll get there!
I’ve been listening to a lot of noise rock recently. It’s a genre that really opened my ears up to a lot of possibilities, what with encountering Big Black pretty early, and then being huge into the Midwest scene in college. Weirdly, it’s kind of comforting to me to go back and lean kind of heavily on this genre again.
[Read More]Well, it’s been an interesting seven months, I guess. I stopped updating Five Random Songs because I was doing another blog (Game & Tonic) and that was taking up my time. And then, uh, a global pandemic hit (you may have heard about it!), and my creativity just went to shit.
So, yeah. Without any fanfare, I’m back. I wanted to listen to more of my music, simple as that.
[Read More]UK punk band Leatherface play it pretty much straight ahead, but they do a nice job with it. The thing that’s hard to adjust to is Frankie Stubbs’s voice, which is rough, to put it mildly. But, this entire album (Mush) is pretty good overall, and it’s worth giving it a try if you like this song.
Sure, why not. Apparently it’s Punk With Vocals You Really Have To Adjust To Day around here.
[Read More]Zion I always incorporates other styles of music into their hip-hop, and here, we’ve got something that kind of sounds kind of like conventional adult contemporary rock. Maybe there’s a reason other bands haven’t tried this sort of thing much?
From the extras on the deluxe reissue of Armed Forces, I sort of wish that the first bit here turned into the live version of “Surrender” from Cheap Trick. Or, uh, “Jimmy James”, which used the sample from the live version of “Surrender”.
[Read More]The Regrettes’ debut record from 2017, Feel Your Feelings Fool!, is a delightful slab of garage rock. Like any good garage rock, it’s full of energy, hooks, and attitude. This kind of record is perpetually welcome as far as I’m concerned, and I really recommend it.
Groundbreaking post-punk band The Birthday Party, featuring a young Nick Cave, in a lot of ways set the template for noise rock. While there are plenty of bands after them that kind of sound like them, or tried to, there aren’t really any predecessors that I’m aware of. One of the truly inspirational bands in music history, at least for the kind of stuff I listen to.
[Read More]One thing I’ve always loved about Tortoise is their willingness to name songs things totally different from what they might sound like. A song called “TNT” should sound like, I dunno, an AC/DC knock-off, not a cerebral post-rock tune with a trumpet solo.
That’s the Roman numeral for 5, not the letter. All of the songs with Roman numerals on this record are little interstitials. I, uh, remember listening to this record several years ago, but that’s the extent of what I remember.
[Read More]We here at Five Songs are big fans of EPs, when bands treat them seriously. You get a good chunk of new material, enough to be satisfying, but they often come out as a surprise. It’s good stuff! This comes from Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell, an EP that came out in the wake of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, so during their peak period. The remixes of songs from Yoshimi are fine, whatever, but getting four new tunes from this period is fantastic.
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