Clinic

The Range, “1804”

The Range makes electonic pop, mostly, but the interesting bit is that the vocals are sampled off tracks from YouTube. It gives the entire album a little bit of a strange feel, but one that is welcome to offset all the shiny, shimmering music.

Ruder Than You, “Skahall Connection”

So, yeah, this is from an album called Horny for Ska. The management would like to apologize.

Clinic, “Welcome”

A cut from Clinic’s second album, it retains the same chilly, distant tone that the first record had, while kind of cleaning things up a little bit. It’s still a strange, off-kilter record. Especially the use of those vintage keyboards, which always lends an otherworldly feel to their songs.

Clinic, “Voodoo Wop”

Imagine having the confidence to open an album this way. A distant, chilly vibe, acutal ocean noises, a complete change a minute in in both mood and sound, no vocals until the last five seconds. Just bonkers. It was a true declaration of intent, though, as the whole album basically fulfilled the promise of this opening track.

Cursive, “Driftwood: A Fairy Tale”

One of the fun things about The Ugly Organ, if “fun” is the right word, is that they made great use of the cello in order to really fill out the sounds on the record. Tim Kasher’s songs are very good, as always, and the album is one of my favorites of theirs.

All over the map today!

Wu-Tang Clan, “Maria”

There were more of this sort of filthy song on Wu-Tang Forever than there were on their debut album. And, honestly, this song falls a little flat. It seems to think it can skate by on the explicit lyrics, but everybody’s rhymes here are really kind of by-the-books. Wu-Tang is always at its best when you have some contrast in styles. What’s the point of having this many MCs otherwise!

Kind of distant and/or futuristic there for a while, until we hit the last song.

Sigur Rós, “Untitled 8”

Icelandic post-rock group Sigur Rós make long, abstract songs that pretty much all sound like the soundtrack to something. Despite this theoretically being something I should be very into, this album (( )) did nothing for me, and I haven’t picked up any of the rest of their stuff. I’m not sure why.