Arab Strap

Queens of the Stone Age, “Un-Reborn Again”

This comes from the most recent QotSA album, Villains, where they worked with producer Mark Ronson. The result is a little bit of a different feel to things. It’s a slick, glossy record, full of moves that I would characterize as more glam than anything else. This song is a great example, this is just all shiny, swaggering glam. It’s not an unfamiliar aesthetic in the QotSA catalog, but it’s definitely to the fore on this album. I do appreciate that they’re willing to change things up, so I like it a lot. They don’t have to keep re-making Songs For the Deaf, I can just go listen to that if I want to.

Arab Strap, “Flirt”

Folks, the streak of metal is over!

I wonder what proportion of my music library is various genres. I think just plain “rock” probably dominates, but I’d love to know what percentage is metal, rap, soul, ska, or whatever else. I wish I could trust the genre metadata on things.

Superchunk, “100,000 Fireflies”

This b-side comes to us from the “The Question Is How Fast” single. Superchunk took singles seriously from the beginning, all the way down to releasing actual 7" singles at a time when not many bands were doing that. As a result, their b-sides were always pretty good. Happily, they’ve done a good job of collecting these things together (this one makes it to Incidental Music: 91-95).

Arab Strap, “The Clearing”

Arab Strap was a band from the same music scene that produced Mogwai and Belle & Sebastian, but unlike those two bands, they’ve never done that much for me. This comes from their first album, and it’s kind of unfocused, and there’s nothing that I find really memorable on it.

The Rolling Stones, “Love In Vain”

Huh, never heard of this band.

Lorelle Meets The Obsolete, “Unificado”

Psychedelic rock out of Mexico, this is from the 2019 album De Facto which showed up on some best-of lists that year. I think this is good, but as with a lot of psychedelic rock, it doesn’t tend to stick with me. I’m kind of the same way with Tame Impala - I can tell it’s good and all, and can even see what people hear in it, but it just doesn’t hang with me. I guess it’s Not Memorable To Josh day?

Six songs today!

Amon Tobin, “Precursor”

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?

Arsonists, “Underground Vandal”

Beautiful drum loop on this song.

Negativland, “Fruitcakes, Suka-Brand Coffee, Power Failure, Citizens Band Parakeet etc.”

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.