After yesterday, it’s nice to get some noise rock in here to offset that kind of thing. Variety is the spice of life, after all, and around here, loud rock is salt. Uh, or something like that. I’m saying it’s a lot of what we do get around here? So it’s salt, the biggest component of the spice mix? I think analogies work best when they’re laborious and opaque, how about you?
[Read More]If you’re thinking to yourself “this damn thing sounds like it was recorded in a basement”, congratulate yourself on your fine ears. It was recorded in a basement, proudly, using vintage equipment. Plenty of bands are out there trying to recreate Black Sabbath, but few go to quite these same lengths. Do you need to actually listen to this instead of just listening to Sabbath? What’s the point of ce n’est pas Black Sabbath? Man, I dunno, sometimes I just like my noise to be different.
[Read More]Big same, Beatles.
Do I need to hear “Jikan no Hashi” for this song to make sense?
Abstract hip-hop artist DJ Krush’s 1996 MiLiGHT featured a bunch of collaborations, resulting in a bit of an uneven record. But at the heart of it are always his jazzy beats, so it’s still a pleasant listen.
Well, that’s pointless.
[Read More]I’ve now posted almost five hundred playlists on this thing. This is indisputably one of them.
Uh, yup, that’s an intro.
Danny Brown kicks off The Hybrid with a song called “Greatest Rapper Ever”, which is exactly the kind of hubris I like to hear from rappers. The album followed several mixtapes, and put Brown towards the front of Detroit’s rap scene. The album itself is plenty of fun, carried forward by Brown’s relentless energy.
[Read More]Alex Chilton, of Big Star, is one of the leading influences on a ton of later rock bands in the underground. Here, for instance, you can really hear the Replacements. This song was on his solo record Bach’s Bottom, but this actually comes from the excellent Ork Records: New York, New York compilation.
This is what ska-punk should sound like when it’s done well. Lots of speed, lots of energy, it gets in and out without hanging around too long. For your “Operation Ivy substitute”, you really can do so much worse.
[Read More]I was just making fun of the fact that Ministry just released a new record called AmeriKKKant with the Statue of Liberty doing a facepalm on the cover. That’ll teach me! Anyway, as I’ve mentioned in the past, I was big into Ministry in high school. In-your-face attitude! Super fast crunchy guitars! Edgy vocal samples! It pretty much hit 15-year-old Josh square where he lived. The thing is, I grew up. Ministry didn’t. The window in which I loved Ministry was only a few years.
[Read More]Yay for year end roundups! First one I’m looking at is The AV Club’s roundup and their ballots. So far, I’ve already picked up two records, Infinite Wave by Vagabon and The Incessant by Meat Wave. Fun! Today’s music!
Oh my. With the untimely passing of Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes became probably the most important artist at Stax, writing and contributing to innumerable hits. He was also, of course, a tremendous performer in his own right, with songs like this being a great example. This appeared on the album Hot Buttered Soul, which is just tremendous.
[Read More]Posting from the road! Are we going to get road trip music? Probably not.
I should listen to more Japanese hip-hop. Anyway, DJ Krush is mostly instrumental, but here we have some rhyming. I’ve got a couple of his releases, and they’re pretty entertaining, if not quite the top of the pile for DJ records. Allmusic tells me this album is actually a mixtape of stuff he did with other artists?
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