J Church

TWO DAYS IN A ROW

The Roots, “Proceed”

While it wasn’t really their debut album, Do You Want More?!!!??! feels like it SHOULD be their debut album. Organix feels more like a practice run or a demo, a band trying to find its voice, and several of its songs appear on the next album in re-worked forms. Anyway, this is the first full song on Do You Want More, and it really sets the template for the album and indeed their first couple albums, with the jazzy groove of the band revolving around Scott Storch’s keyboards and ?uestlove’s drums. I think Black Thought is better on the subsequent albums, but he’s certainly good on this record. Basically, this is where to start with the Roots in exploring their early career.

Today’s tunes!

J Church, “Lines”

One of the great things that punk is able to do when it’s on is produce a short song that nevertheless is complete and satisfying. This thing clocks in at 1:40 and you’d hardly notice that it’s not the usual three minute pop song. Lance Hahn was able to pull this off time after time, in way that should shame so many people out there writing rock songs.

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.

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.

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?

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!

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.

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).

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.

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.