From Write About Love, a mostly forgettable album, but this is one of the songs that sticks with me from it. There’s not a whole lot to it, musically, but it’s certainly pleasant.
You don’t find that many instrumental soul tracks like this in the Motown catalog, but here we are with a sweet little tune from 1965.
[Read More]Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant was Belle & Sebastian’s first real misstep as a band. Stuart Murdoch ceded a lot of songwriting control to the rest of the band, and the results were not super inspiring. There are some highlights on the record, and I still like it, but there are also too many so-so songs on the album. This song, the opener, is one of the highlights though.
[Read More]Pretty happy with today’s set. La Gritona is exactly the kind of band I had hoped to highlight here.
Atmosphere with Doom and Kool Keith guesting? That sounds amazing. Does it live up to it? Well, Doom is great! Solid song, overall.
Been a few months since we’ve heard from melodic punk rockers Samiam. This song comes from their fifth album, You Are Freaking Me Out, the last of what I consider to be their peak albums (along with Billy and Clumsy). This stuff is just musical comfort food to me.
[Read More]Happy Valentine’s Day! We’re going with a Special this day, searching using “love” in the old collection and then randomizing among those songs. It returned 500 songs, which makes me think it’s only the first 500 results. But whatever. Let’s hear what we got!
I kind of feel like, in tribute to the Ramones’ consistency and committment to making the same album over and over, I should just make every Ramones entry the same.
[Read More]This sounds like it could have been from an early 90s band in the Squirrel Bait family. Like, some long-lost Bitch Magnet track or something. There’s nothing wrong with that, for the record!
(NB: this is a different take than the version shuffle pulled up.)
As is often true with songs from 2001, you’re best off just concentrating on the beat here.
[Read More]Today’s music. Just missed a Naked City track, a shame.
We’ve talked some about A.C. Newman with respect to The New Pornographers, who we just heard from yesterday. But we haven’t really talked much about Dan Bejar, who writes something like a quarter of the songs for the Pornographers, and is the guy behind Destroyer, his main band. For years and years, Bejar has been writing ornate pop songs, moving from influence to influence, but always with interesting results. There’s something inescapably retro about the sound of Destroyer, whether that touchstone is 70s or 80s pop. This is from Kaputt, an album where Bejar went for even prettier than usual tunes, and isn’t a bad place to enter into Destroyer’s catalog.
[Read More]Super late night tunes for y’all!
From TMBG’s first album, when they sort of put on different musical styles more like outfits than playing them with any real conviction. The album has some real gems on it, but there are also tracks that come across as just pure goofs. The goofs wouldn’t really go away, but got more sophisticated.
The standard bearer of “nerdcore”, MC Frontalot will give you a good idea of if the idea of people rapping about nerd shit is something you love. I think I own one nerdcore album, this one, which probably tells you what I think.
[Read More]A couple of very influential releases today.
This is a track from Paid in Full, a groundbreaking record where Rakim raised the bar for MCs far beyond where it was before. It’s a record where his rhyming still sounds fresh, a testament to how far he was ahead of the game. The beats haven’t aged quite as well, but the record as a whole is still a great listen, and is one of the crucial records for understanding where hip-hop came from.
[Read More]Prog rock is a bit of a weird category for me. There are times that I really want to listen to it, and then the reality is often disappointing. Songs far too often take a back seat to just demonstrating technical prowess. Still, sometimes you just want something over the top, and prog rock goofballs Coheed & Cambria aren’t a bad choice. They spent more than a decade and seven albums making some big ol’ conceptual rock opera thing that frankly never made any sense to me. This track is from their first album after all of that, The Color Before the Sun, which is honestly more of the same, but not weighed down by as many pretentious trappings. This song is actually a relatively straightforward rocker.
[Read More]As certain part of me wonders what I’m doing with these descriptions. Should I ramble about whatever? Talk about the artists? Historical context? Recommendations? I have no idea. Well, here’s some more dancing about architecture.
We just dodged a super long rap skit, by the way.
Longtime blues guitarist Burnside didn’t really start getting much attention until the early 90s, when his albums first started appearing on Fat Possum Records, despite playing since the 60s. I first noticed him when he worked with Jon Spencer for A Ass Pocket O’ Whiskey, which is where this track comes from. If you like Jon Spencer, then this is an easy buy.
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