Five Songs, 7/15/2018

Six songs today!

Belle & Sebastian, “Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John”

From Write About Love, a mostly forgettable album, but this is one of the songs that sticks with me from it. There’s not a whole lot to it, musically, but it’s certainly pleasant.

Jr Walker And All Stars, “Cleo’s Mood”

You don’t find that many instrumental soul tracks like this in the Motown catalog, but here we are with a sweet little tune from 1965.

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Five Songs, 5/31/2018

Today!

5ive Style, “Father Time”

Composed of folks from various post-rock bands such as Tortoise and Isotope 217, 5ive Style are themselves very post-rock themselves. They have a looser, groovier kind of vibe compared to their parent bands, however. Overall, their two albums are both pretty fun.

Chemical People, “I Gotta Know”

From their self-titled record. It’s kind of funny to listen to this stuff now. It’s a little hard to see exactly what I saw in this back in the day. This song is just a by-the-numbers tribute to really old rock. It’s fine?

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Five Songs Special, 1/1/2018

Welcome to the new year! I wonder how many times I’ll type 2017 into the post titles around here? Anyway, here at Five Songs Ltd., one of our resolutions this year is to actually resume making progress learning the bass, which will be fun. But rest assured, we’ll keep bringing you this nonsense as well.

Anyway, today we’re doing another special: searching for the word “new” in the library and then randomizing among those tracks. Let’s see what we get? I had 500 hits for this, a suspiciously round number, so this might just be randomized among the first 500 tracks with “new” in the name. Whatever. To the music!

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Five Songs, 10/26/2017

Today’s selections.

J Church, “Sweet and Sour Plums”

WRCT, the campus radio station at Carnegie Mellon, used to get tons of records from just about every label. Primarily, that was because we actually would play stuff from smaller labels, having largely rejected the idea of “college rock” as well as “coherence” and “professionalism”. From that wave of incoming stuff, somebody on the staff would listen to everything and write a little note on an index card to stick to it. You’d suggest which songs might make sense to play on the air, which songs you should avoid unless you were in the “safe harbor” (in other words, which ones had swearing), if a record was hopeless, whatever. If you really liked a record, you’d put it in the booth with the other notable new releases.

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Five Songs, 10/19/2017

I have a new sweatshirt! I’m sort of really excited for it. Also, I come bearing music.

Fishbone, “End The Reign”

Fishbone played a mix of funk, punk, and metal, coming out of the same Los Angeles scene that birthed the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And for a while, until the Chili Peppers became one of the biggest bands on the planet, you really couldn’t mention one band without mentioning the other. I was never really that big into either of them, truthfully, although I gave them both a try. Anyway, this comes from Give A Monkey A Brain And He’ll Swear He’s The Center Of The Universe, an album that skews more towards the metal end of Fishbone’s sound (as you can hear).

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Five Songs, 9/6/2017

Here’s today’s music.

The Four Tops, “If You Don’t Want My Love”

We’re visiting 1967 with this song from the legendary Four Tops, one of the breakout stars of Motown’s roster, becoming staples of radio. I’m not a Four Tops expert or anything though, so we’ll just enjoy this song.

Le Grand Miercoles, “Commin’ Home Baby”

A Bandcamp find via a gaming friend, Le Grand Miercoles play some kind of weirdo combination of surf, ska, and, like Ennio Morricone. So, of course, I love it to death. I know nothing else about the band.

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Five Songs, 8/9/2017

Punk rock, wooo! And, you know, a DJ track.

Dwarves, “Lesbian Nun”

Really, a song title of “Lesbian Nun” probably tells you everything you need to know about what you’re going to hear. Punk rock shock merchants out of Chicago, Dwarves were every bit as sophomoric as you might expect from a band that put blood drenched nude women on the cover of an album. I never actually ended up with any of their actual releases, but this song showed up on a Dope Guns-n-Fucking In The Streets compilation. It appears to be the only one of their songs I have.

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Five Songs, 8/1/2017

As we head into August, I’m probably going to start throwing in the occasional special now. Focus on an artist, random Bandcamp albums, I dunno. We’ll see. Today, though, the usual.

NxWorries, “Intro”

NxWorries is Knxwledge and Anderson Paak, putting out one album so far along with an EP. I think it’s great, and I wish you had a real track to listen to here.

The Beatles, “Birthday”

Well, now we get to discover if I have anything to add to the millions of words already written about the most famous of bands. I have a scattering of memories associated with the Beatles, and I suppose I’ll just dole those out as the Beatles come up.

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Five Songs, 7/21/2017

Another repeat today, this time that same Dr. Octagon track. The more I do this, the more I think Amazon’s randomization thing is pretty wonky. Oh well. Today’s tunes!

The Housemartins, “I’ll Be Your Shelter”

Speak of the devil! Here’s the Housemartins taking on Luther Ingram’s “I’ll Be Your Shelter”. As with most of their covers, it’s thoroughly enjoyable (as is the original). Basically, soul music rules.

This song appears on both London 0, Hull 4 as well as the rarities/singles roundup Now That’s What I Call Quite Good, which are both outstanding.

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Five Songs, 5/11/2017

Just in case anybody is curious, I’ve started using ToVid to upload songs to YouTube. It seems to work with a minimum of hassle, the only drawback being that I sometimes need to convert songs to MP3 before uploading them. For that job, media.io seems to work pretty well. Between the two of them, it means I don’t really need to do very much to get things uploaded. As for today, let’s hope today’s songs are a better bunch than yesterday.

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