McKinley Dixon

Louis Armstrong & His Orchestra, “When The Saints Go Marching In”

It’s been a while, so a quick reminder of one of our ground rules around here: I am not qualified to talk about jazz.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Purple Haze”

Geez, got some real warhorses here today!

Michel Anoia, “Nigredo”

We’ve got another Total Dissonance Worship record here, and another banger. This is black metal, but it’s unmistakably French. And not just from song titles or whatever, there’s something about the guitar tone here that strikes me as particularly French. I’m not entirely sure why, perhaps it reminds me of Deathspell Omega? Anyway, fun stuff. Can I call this fun?

The Miracles, “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me”

1962, baby!

McKinley Dixon, “Chain Sooo Heavy”

I really enjoy the sax blowing while he’s rhyming, it really sets things off, and makes my ears kind of ping back and forth between what sounds like competing leads. That tension really provides a lot interest in the tune.

The Dead Milkmen, “Big Lizard (Live)”

Chaos Rules: Live at the Trocadero is sort of a live career retrospective by the Dead Milkmen, but I gotta say, it’s hard to recommend it. The live renditions don’t add a ton, and the sound quality isn’t great. Uh, as you can hear.

Swingin’ Utters, “Here We Are Nowhere”

A while back, I wrote some code to pull data from Discogs for my collection to see what year albums were released for another project that I was working on. That project might still see the light of day! But I’m wondering if there’s some way I could pull data for genres. Discogs doesn’t have genre tags in their structured data, but I could scrape the band description for specific words, I suppose. It would be neat to see what percentage of my collection is, say, punk.

Gojira, “The Shooting Star”

Technical death band Gojira took a little bit different approach on 2016’s Magma, where they actually slowed it down a little sometimes and have things approaching melody at times. It’s easily their most accessible album, but they’re good enough that simplifying their sound a little doesn’t spoil the proceedings. That’s not to say it’s not a very loud album, but it’s not the same kind of insanity as some of their earlier stuff.