CLPPNG, the first full record from clipping., was a record with the band still kind of piecing together what they had. It would be on the next album (Splendor & Misery) that everything would come together perfectly, but there are still times on this album where things still seemed a little awkward. The individual pieces, especially Daveed Diggs, were often spectacular, but the best was yet to come.
[Read More]The second Baroness record, Blue Record, seems to my ears like it’s a more confident album than the first one. Alongside that confidence is a willingness to make things a little prettier. It’s a little more prone to doing stuff that soars just a bit more than the previous album.
Damn, that guitar squeal, so good. And Kendrick coming in on “you wanna see a dead body?” is absolutely incredible.
[Read More]NoMeansNo mostly played super dextrous, complicated hardcore, but they were capable of slowing down the tempo for pounding tunes like this one. It’s the doom metal equivalent of hardcore. Doomcore? A quick search suggests that doomcore is some EDM subgenre. Harddoom doesn’t work either? Eh, fuck it.
Sorry, couldn’t write an entry here, too busy nodding my head the entire time.
[Read More]The first song from the first Gas Huffer full-length, it sets the tone for what they’re trying to do: straight-ahead garage rock with zero pretension. Although they were contemporaneous with grunge and from Seattle, they were doing something more parallel to that stuff, as there’s not really any metal at all in this sound.
More garage rock! This is from Hello Again, a comp that includes an album from Sweet Baby and an album from the successor band, Brent’s TV. It’s pretty good, but one of the virtues of this kind of music is that it gets to the point and gets out of the way. And, well, 40 tracks of it is not getting out of the way.
[Read More]I need to go find some turntable artists operating today. I love this shit.
The bit where the collapse the tune to just the main riff at :40 in, that’s such a pop punk cliche, and it works on me every time. Especially when the drummer leads out of it by opening up the high hat just a little? Some of these things are cliches for good reason.
[Read More]There was probably a time in my life when I would have regarded clipping. askance. I’ve long been OK with noise in my music, having picked up an affection for industrial as a teenager that continued forward with noise rock, various gnarly forms of punk, etc. And, of course, hip hop has been a staple of my listening for even longer. But for a long time, I thought I didn’t like pretension in music. It led me to avoiding things like prog rock, various forms of art rock, all kind of ambitious music for a long time. Or, at least, things that were ambitious in particular ways that set me off.
[Read More]One of the highlights on the best Firewater album, Golden Hour. It’s an album that attempts to answer the question “what if we just made the whole album out of highlights”.
Hot damn, shuffle bringing the fire today! Garden Ruin was the follow-up to my favorite Calexico record, Feast of Wire. With this album, Calexico nudged slightly further away from the mariachi sounds being quite as dominant as prior records, with a little more country and folk creeping in to replace it. There are also no instrumentals on the album, another break with the past. That’s not to say there aren’t any southwestern sounds on the album, just that there is a little less influence. This song is a fine example, this is pretty much just pure country. But lovely!
[Read More]When the Aquabats got rolling, they always had this kind of corny, cracked Saturday morning cartoon vibe. Like they were making songs for a show-within-a-show on some arch adult animation cartoon. And, of course, given the world we’re in, the show eventually showed up. Now, I haven’t actually seen the show, but I have the soundtrack, and…well, just listen to this. This is Very Aquabats.
I’m kind of sitting here thinking about how great it would be to hear somebody rhyming over Kollaps-era Neubauten.
[Read More]Fuck me, listen to that organ. I try and play a decent amount of soul around the kids, because it’s just such amazing music, and with luck, they’ll get the same appreciation of it. I try not to make a big deal about it, but my dad used to do the same thing, and it just kind of seeped into my brain. I’m trying the same approach, as it worked on me!
[Read More]We here at Five Songs often find ourselves apologizing for our content around here. With the random nature of what shuffle coughs up, sometimes it’s not great.
Uh, in other news, here’s today.
The lesson of clipping., beyond any other, is how much space there still remains for rap to continue to stretch out across other types of music and how much there remains to experiment with. We’ve seen noise marry with rap with tremendous success, and that should indicate that there still remains so many frontiers left to conquer.
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