Mad Caddies

Mad Caddies, “Nobody Wins at the Laundromat”

When ska-punk just kind of turns into punk with horns, I start some losing interest. Sure, it can still be good, but there are a lot of great straight-up punk bands that they’re going to be competing with. I’m not that desperate for horns.

Calexico, “Cumbia de Donde”

OK I LIED GIVE ME ALL THE HORNS I NEED THEM RIGHT NOW

Edge of the Sun is one of the more, uh, sunny albums from Calexico’s later career. This bouncy tune is the most sunniest of the lot, but it’s by no means alone being charming. If you’re a big fan of Feast of Wire (which you should be), this is a pretty good one to go to next.

Touché Amoré, “To Write Content”

Touché Amoré is a bit of a genre Rorschach test: emo? Hardcore? Post-hardcore? All of them, I guess, and maybe folks will identify in whatever way that fits them into their tastes. Not me! I’ll identify them as whatever genre fits best with whatever through line I’m desperately trying to spot on any given day.

Krallice, “Wastes of Ocean”

Like…uh…maybe I could talk about the distinction between the speed of hardcore versus that of extreme metal, and how to my ears one of the distinctions is that the drumming often becomes almost unmoored from the guitars in extreme metal for long stretches, while hardcore is usually more locked in. Which is all kinda bullshit, but this blog is all just bullshit anyway. Moving on!

Bob Marley, “Keep On Moving”

This comes from the second collection of Bob Marley’s singles collection, The Complete Bob Marley & The Wailers. The second collection is called Soul Revolution, and I think I generally prefer the previous volume on the whole. Of course, it’s all great, and it’s a shame these collections aren’t still in print, they’re excellent.

Explosions In The Sky, “The Birth And Death Of The Day”

I have to say, while I think that Godspeed You! Black Emperor is probably the platonic ideal of post-rock bands, this band/track name combo here is really incredible form. If you give these names to an informed music listener, they’re going to guess post-rock pretty much every time. It sounds exactly like you’d expect.

Merry Christmas! Five Songs got you a playlist. Today, I searched for “holiday” in my collection, and then randomized those songs. And thank you all for reading and listening this year! There’s a few dozen of you checking in here, on and off, and I appreciate that there are even that many of you willing to put up with a self-indulgent project like this. Please stick around with The Worst Music Blog on the Web, we’ve got more planned for next year!

Five Songs today features the most skippable song we’ve had yet! Enjoy!

PDQ Bach, “Classical Rap (S. 1-2-3)”

Oh god, I’m sorry. This is from Oedipus Tex and Other Choral Calamities, the best (?) of the PDQ Bach releases, I think. Oh, this is credited to “Grandmaster Flab and the Hoople Funkharmonic”. He won a Grammy for this thing.

(NB: The video I’ve included here includes the introduction to the piece, which provides some important “context”.)

Today’s set is, frankly, a mess. The hazards of the random number generator.

Andrew Bird, “The Water Jet Cilice”

210 songs in my collection from Andrew Bird, and this stupid thing picked a repeat song. Sure, we get Six Songs today, but come on. I do feel like the number of repeats I’ve seen is higher than I would expect. I also know that humans are TERRIBLE at estimating the randomness of a system and related probabilities. I should work it out for real.