Hurl

Mostly rock today.

The Strokes, “When It Started”

Every so often, rock “comes back”, brought back into cultural relevance by some release that critics declare revinvents the genre. Meanwhile, of course, rock never goes anywhere between these “breakthrough” albums, mainly because old boring people never shut up about it.

(cough)

Anyway, most of the time, these albums are often pretty darn good. Is This It, for instance, is a pretty tasty album! It doesn’t break any ground, not really, but it’s energetic and plenty fun.

Today!

Girl Talk, “Ffun Haave To”

Before he became the best mashup artist around with Night Ripper, Greg Gillis was much more into noise. Yeah, you still have bits and pieces of recognizable songs floating in and out, but this stuff has much more in common with experimental artists like Negativland than it does with the kaleidoscope of party music that he would later create. In other words, don’t go back further than Night Ripper and expect to find more stuff like that.

Pretty uninspiring today.

Hurl, “Faceman”

Another fine song from old Pittsburgh band Hurl. There’s an expansiveness, a warmth here that’s really pleasant to listen to.

Negativland, “In The Beginning, So Many Different Kinds Of Gods…”

Yeah, I’m kind of mad at some of the choices that Past Josh made. This is, of all damn things, a live album of a recreation of a radio show.

And, look, I couldn’t get this “song” uploaded. My conversion things keep crashing. So, screw it, we’re going to do an extra today.

Today’s music. Just missed a Naked City track, a shame.

Destroyer, “Poor In Love”

We’ve talked some about A.C. Newman with respect to The New Pornographers, who we just heard from yesterday. But we haven’t really talked much about Dan Bejar, who writes something like a quarter of the songs for the Pornographers, and is the guy behind Destroyer, his main band. For years and years, Bejar has been writing ornate pop songs, moving from influence to influence, but always with interesting results. There’s something inescapably retro about the sound of Destroyer, whether that touchstone is 70s or 80s pop. This is from Kaputt, an album where Bejar went for even prettier than usual tunes, and isn’t a bad place to enter into Destroyer’s catalog.