That punishing, thick blanket of bass, backed up by the little clicky drums, is such a tasty combination. I just want to roll around in this beat, or spread it on my sandwich.
If you listen to the story on the album, this is supposed to be a cheap beat that Mr. Lif could afford, but Insight absolutely kills it. It’s so funky! Shuffle is ON it today.
[Read More]Big day today! This marks a full year of perfect updating. That’s 1,825 songs, plus a few duplicates (which I don’t say much about). I write a little paragraph for each of these things, most of the time. Sometimes a throwaway, sometimes a bit more, but let’s say that I wrote about 60 words for each song. That’s something on the order of 100,000 words I’ve written about music over the past year. And not a damn bit of it useful! And if you compiled it in one go, it’s a novel’s worth of garbage.
[Read More]From the stone-cold classic Mecca And The Soul Brother, this song is typically excellent. Every song on this record hits hard, it’s incredible.
squinting Yeah, I suppose that this IS an ascending track, isn’t it?
Sometimes, you just want black metal, unadulterated by other genres. We don’t always have to mix it up with everything else! Thantifaxath does that well, and this hits the spot.
[Read More]As is his penchant, Mr. Lif’s 2016 album was a concept record, this one based around the idea of a society that had stamped out culture completely. As with his other concept albums, it connects better on some tracks than others, but I appreciate the ambition. Meanwhile, the collab with L’Orange on the beats is all great, so overall, it’s another great record.
[Read More]Can I talk about some of the strange artifacts that my music collection has accumulated over the years? Oh, that’s right, you can’t stop me! The process of ripping CDs (often with dodgy info databases), matching via iTunes and Amazon Music, storing and then re-downloading from Amazon Music, moving from computer to computer, and a bunch of other things have caused mutations in a lot of this stuff. It’s mostly harmless, but every now and again a tic is interesting or odd. This album has one of those mutations: the album name is recorded as Straightaways (Warner Bros) for some reason, suggesting that someone once input it that way into a database and these tracks picked it up. And you may think, well, did they release this album on multiple labels? Nope, every version in Discogs is from Warner Bros. Somebody apparently just annotated all their album names with labels for some goblin reason, and it got swept up into some aggregated database, and now it’s here perplexing me.
[Read More]Every now and again, a record breaks through into mainstream attention that surprises me. I would not have bet on the ascetic blues rock revivalists the White Stripes being anybody who would get mainstream attention, but somehow they broke through. White Blood Cells still doesn’t sound like a record that should have gotten huge, as it’s still relatively uncompromising in the vision they’re pursuing.
[Read More]I sometimes wonder if I’m going to look back on all the instrumental funk and soul that I listen to these days and think how a lot of it has aged poorly, in the same way that so much of the third wave of ska has aged poorly. But then I remember, none of this shit got popular, so it’s all good! And it allows me to get my horn fix without feeling like a dope! (I still love ska, though.)
[Read More]Mo’ Mega features a bunch of tracks produced by El-P, so you know I’m down with this record. This, of course, is one of them, which you could probably guess by listening to it. It has all of the sci-fi feel you expect from his beats. As Mr. Lif is also always good, this album is worth checking out.
(NB: this song starts at 28:19)
[Read More]Almost like a Special in here today!
I feel like I haven’t bought a new concept record in a while. I suppose some of the unintelligable garbled metal I listen to could be concept records, I’d have no real way of knowing. You could tell me basically anything about the lyrics or themes or whatever of some of those slabs and I’d probably believe you. At any rate, many of my favorite concept records are rap records, and I Phantom is one of the very best.
[Read More]A repeat! But still a good song.
I don’t think Simon & Garfunkel need an introduction, do they? Anyway, my copy of Bridge Over Troubled Water has a couple of demos whacked onto the end. They’re kind of pointless.
OK, we’re doing quieter today, apparently. Cool, cool.
Mark Eitzel was the main force behind American Music Club, and he embarked on a long a solo career as well. I always preferred American Music Club, but he’s a good songwriter, so his solo work usually has something to recommend it. This album, Music For Courage & Confidence, a mid-career record that is uneven. Another pretty quiet song!
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