Five Songs, 8/30/2021

They Might Be Giants, “The Mesopotamians”

A lethally catchy song, I’ll be humming this for the next several days. I feel like The Else gets really kind of ignored in the TMBG catalog. By that point, they were really kind of becoming known as a kids’ band, and they just slipped in this really lushly produced thing right in the middle of three kids’ albums.

[looks at “kids’”] That looks wrong. I think it’s right? Ain’t gonna look it up!

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Five Songs, 10/6/2020

Queens of the Stone Age, “If I Had A Tail”

There were six years between the majestic, jagged Era Vulgaris and the return album …Like Clockwork, and that time was apparently spent with Homme thinking about bringing things back to the turn of the millenium. To my ears, this album sounds more like Songs for the Deaf than anything else, which is not a bad thing at all. It took a little bit for the album to grow on me, and while I’m still not sure I’d place it at the top of their pile, it’s a fine album from one of the best rock bands around.

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Five Songs, 12/4/2018

I don’t have a ton to say today.

Game Theory, “Exactly What We Don’t Want To Hear”

You know, you should all thank me that I haven’t yet made a “it’s time for some game theory!” joke! Or “joke”, really. Uh, until now, I suppose.

The Spinanes, “Meridian”

There should be more rock duos, in my opinion. The Spinanes don’t suffer from the spare instrumentation at all. It gives more space to focus on the individual elements of the band, which is totally OK with me! I wonder what Rebecca Gates is up to these days? Probably shouldn’t look. Never learn anything, that’s my motto.

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Five Songs, 9/30/2018

Today!

J Church, “Bomb”

Camels, Spilled Corona, and the Sound of Mariachi Bands is a great name for an album, in this case the first of multiple singles comps that J Church put together. As befits a band as prolific as they were, J Church was constantly putting out songs on 7"s, random comps, splits, and other places. They had the good grace to collect that stuff together periodically, and the comps are really basically on a par with their normal albums.

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Five Songs, 6/13/2017

No intro today, just tunes.

De La Soul, “Jenifa Taught Me (Derwin’s Revenge)”

I remember being pretty baffled by a lot of the slang that De La Soul used on Three Feet High and Rising. This is mainly because I was a sheltered 14-year-old boy living in Spokane, and the internet didn’t exist to sort things out for me (or misinform me, to be fair). I worked out the general gist of a fair bit of it, and it never really bothered me or stopped me from listening to the music, but I was nevertheless baffled. I think it was an album designed to baffle folks.

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