Tad Hutchinson is really going the extra mile on the drums here. He doesn’t have to, Scott McCaughey’s singing can carry this little tune. But Hutchinson was always the Fellows’ secret weapon, I love his work across the board.
Hot Space contains the magnificent “Under Pressure”. It also contains a bunch of other songs, about which the less said, the better.
[Read More]A repeat! I think we’ve actually had it at least twice before. Still smokes, though.
God, the opening of this song is so menacing. This is from Grundstück, the second supporter-only album that they released in 2005, back when crowdfunding was still something pretty far out of the mainstream. They successfully funded and released a series of albums, relying primarily on word of mouth to find folks and doing payments directly. The resulting albums were no compromise, they’re full-on Neubauten records and this one in particular is excellent.
[Read More]You know what? We’re trying it again today!
Better! WE DID IT, FOLKS
Long forgotten Bay Area punk band, they put out a couple albums in the early 90s and then disappeared. I’d characterize their sound as, uh, early 90s Bay Area punk. It’s fine, I listened to a ton of these bands at this time and a lot of them were pretty undifferentiated. This band included.
[Read More]A big part of the ska scene in the late 80s and early 90s was an active trade in compilations. It allowed bands to get their music out and prime the audiences for touring, which is where bands built up a following. One series of comps was the Mashin’ Up The Nation series, which this was part of volume 2 of. It’s an unusually raw track for Bim Skala Bim, but a lot of the songs on these comps tended towards the raw, because many of them were low budget or live.
[Read More]2011 was an insanely productive year for Boris, with four albums showing up that year, all of them being unusual in some way from their standard. To the extent that Boris has a standard. Anyway, this is from New Album, which continues in the grand tradition of Boris albums being named things that are a pain in the ass (one of the other 2011 albums was called Heavy Rocks, which is the second time they’ve named an album that). At any rate, New Album is sort of a remix, with much of the material here being reworked songs from Heavy Rocks (2011) and Attention Please (another of the 2011 releases). If this is all confusing, welcome to the Boris discography!
[Read More]Samiam were part of the punk scene that would eventualy spawn Green Day. As the labels moved in, hunting for the next big thing, Samiam found themselves on Atlantic Records for a single album, which is as close as they got to breaking through. I always felt like they deserved a bigger audience, and it was a little sad that they didn’t connect. At any rate, this actually comes from the album right before their major label record, Billy, which is my favorite album from them.
[Read More]Majestic. I’m just going to fuck this up if I try and write something.
Last time we had a track from this album, I expressed mystification that the Chemical Brothers had a moment. But you know what? This song is a fuckin’ force of nature, of course it was huge. Listen to it!
We’re big fans of noisy duos here at Five Songs, so of course Indian Handcrafts is up our alley. They’re more towards the Melvins end of things, putting them in the vicinity of Big Business more than anybody. Big stoner vibes, and huge riffs. It’s impressive that this is just a guitar and drums.
[Read More]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 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.
[Read More]This merger of King’s blues guitar with the Stax horns, with funk folded in, is just delightful. I need to find some more shit like this. You can add blues to the long list of music that I fundamentally know jack squat about. I’m starting to think I’m not qualified to write a music blog at all!
If you’re going to combine ska and punk, you can’t half-ass it. Full tempo punk with horns, hell yeah! Yeah, this shit’s a laughingstock, but I don’t care. It’s fun! Screw y’all!
[Read More]One of my favorite bands showing up here for the first time today.
I’m surprised we haven’t heard from Calexico before now. Calexico is a long-running band out of Arizona that makes an unmistakable mix of spaghetti western soundtracks, surf, jazz, mariachi, and some pop. There’s nobody else that really sounds like them, and they’ve kept up the tremendous quality now for about twenty years. This song comes from their latest, Edge of the Sun, and gives you at least a good idea of one type of song you’ll find on their albums.
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