Five Songs, 12/6/2020

BADBADNOTGOOD & Ghostface Killah, “Stark’s Reality”

This tune is very like David Axelrod, especially in the engineering of the recording and the strings. I would have loved to hear Ghostface actually rhyme on top of it.

Oranssi Pazuzu, “Uraanisula”

Looks like the first time we’ve had Oranssi Pazuzu around here - they’re a Finnish black metal band that plays around a lot more with psychedelic stuff than a lot of other bands. They can sometimes feel pretty spacey as a consequence, which can be fun, or maybe a little proggy. I guess you can just listen to this! There are many variations of people howling over guitars out there, folks.

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Five Songs, 10/5/2020

The Gotobeds, “Calquer the Hound”

Indie rock out of Pittsburgh, the Gotobeds’ third album, Debt Begins At 30, sounds fanastic. There’s a real kind of Discord-y/post-hardcore thing going on here, which as you all know goes over well here at Five Songs HQ. This is actually the first album I listened to from them, and kind of forgot to go backwards, and I should really fix that.

Nine Inch Nails, “Came Back Haunted”

After his burst of productivity in the mid/late 2000s, with three albums in four years (four if you count Ghosts, which you should not), Trent Reznor did his usual thing and went away for five years between NiN albums. Unlike previous pauses, he was still making music. He was doing film scores and releasing music as How To Destroy Angels. But he came back to NiN and released Hesitation Marks in 2013, featuring a whole bunch of guest artists and a sound that is probably as close to Pretty Hate Machine as any other record he’s done. Much more sophisticated, of course, but fairly upbeat (as these things go) and kind of bouncy. It’s a fun record, which is not something you can say about most NiN records.

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