Dam-Funk

Eddie Floyd, “Don’t Tell Your Mama (Where You’ve Been)”

We Love Song Titles (With Parentheticals)!

The Books, “Smells Like Content”

Can I engage in some old-fart bloviating? Of course I can, nobody else has the password to this site so nobody can stop me! The labeling of all videos as just “content” is really unfortunate. It signals a commodification of creative work that only serves the massive aggregators that control what we see, and yet people have willingly adopted the nomenclature. And lumping together criticism, reviews, buying guides, how-tos, and everything else together as just a homogonized slurry doesn’t even help viewers find what they want. I hate it!

Dām-Funk, “Floating On Air”

One-man band Dām-Funk does a nice job of collaborating with a wide range of interesting folks, often to fine results. This cut is the first peak on Floating on Air, featuring Flea and somebody called Computer Jay. It wanders around a little bit, but I’m totally fine with that in my electro-funk.

Calexico, “Victor Jara’s Hands”

2008’s Carried To Dust was a return back to the sounds of their best album, Feast of Wire. (As an aside, it was super gratifying when the band themselves agreed with my opinion, proving that Five Songs is never wrong.) It’s actually super admirable that Calexico will try out different styles on their records, but I’m also not sorry to get a second helping of that super lush, dusty beauty either. As always, Calexico kind of sounds like they’re making a soundtrack to a movie that doesn’t exist.

Barely got this done today.

Sharon Jones, “Natural Born Lover”

Look, I don’t think I’m a great writer, or even a good one, when it comes to music. Hell, I probably don’t really rise to “adequate”. My failing is that a lot of these entries are pretty shallow. I’m also unable to really evoke what it’s like to listen to these folks. Also, my comparisons are not great. And…

…hang on, let’s try this again. I’m saying that these mostly suck, but whatever, listen to this fucking song. Goddammit, this is some great shit.

Don’t have a ton to say today!

The Goats, “The Boom”

The Goats were an underground rap act out of Philadelphia, notable for using a live band during their second album, from which this song comes. Musically they would have fit in with the Tommy Boy acts of the time, such as House of Pain. Overall, the first album was pretty charming, and the second one kind of dragged. Honestly, I can’t remember listening to this stuff for probably 20 years.

Reminder! Go to Bandcamp today and buy some tunes to support artists and transgender rights! You can listen to these while you do it!

Shellac, “Steady As She Goes”

Let’s do a quick ranking of Shellac’s albums:

• At Action Park
• Excellent Italian Greyhound
• 1000 Hurts
• Dude Incredible
• Terraform

But really, they’re all good albums. I look forward to another Shellac album in another three years or so.

Duke Ellington, “The Tattooed Bride [Album Version]”

Wow, my rip of this song is hopelessly goofed up. Ugh. I should really re-rip it, but that would require digging it out of the boxes, and ugh, I’m not going to do that either. This is from the collection The Duke: The Columbia Years (1927-1962). Also, as always, I’m not qualified to write about jazz.

The intro to this series has been pushed off the page, so a brief mention might be in order. I’m writing about five random songs from my collection on a daily-ish basis, and giving everybody a link to listen along. Here’s the intro to the series, and here’s the link to today’s songs.

Prefuse 73, “Tel Aviv’s Gravel Toothbrush”

Prefuse 73 is one of the names that Scott Herren records under, mixing up hip-hop influences with electronic music. He’s at his best when you’ve got stuttering bits and pieces of recognizable hip-hop running through, but broken up in strange ways. When he wanders too far from that into pure electronic stuff, he gets less interesting to me. This is a short piece from Extinguished, which is outtakes from his excellent One Word Extinguisher album. On the whole, you can see why he left this material off the main album, so this record is for completists only. Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives and One Word Extinguisher remain the pick of the litter for him.