Next to the bass / turn up the radio!
Cat Food is a quickie album that J Church threw together by recording some songs in a day, adding in a couple compilation tracks, and calling it good. But punk never really suffers from being a little slapdash, and the resulting album is pretty entertaining. Basically, Lance Hahn is good enough that most everything he does is worth listening to. This is how the album opens. It’s good! Listen to that solo!
[Read More]IT STOPPED AT THREE DAYS, WHO COULD HAVE GUESSED? Eh, whatever, it’s not like I said I’m going to do these every day or anything. At least, not after I edit this place. NEW STREAK HERE!
Negativland’s No Business is a meditation on copyright, art, and the nature of culture in general. Or, more succinctly, it’s a Negativland album. On the spectrum of experimental noise to something that could be described as music, it falls closer to the musical end, making it one of the easier Negativland albums to absorb. Which isn’t to say it’s easy listening. By the time they made this record, they had decades of experience in assembling these kinds of oddball things, so they had gotten very good at the sound manipulation required.
[Read More]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.
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?
[Read More]Another fine song from old Pittsburgh band Hurl. There’s an expansiveness, a warmth here that’s really pleasant to listen to.
Yeah, I’m kind of mad at some of the choices that Past Josh made. This is, of all damn things, a live album of a recreation of a radio show.
And, look, I couldn’t get this “song” uploaded. My conversion things keep crashing. So, screw it, we’re going to do an extra today.
[Read More]Finally, we get some peak Beautiful South! This is the first song from their debut album, and my god, it’s such a good song. Paul Heaton’s sardonic lyrics are delivered so perfectly, the piano is gorgeous, I just adore it. This was a regular part of my high school rotation, and it just made perfect sense to play this right after the Dead Kennedys.
[Read More]Fundamentally, I just like hearing Jeff Tweedy sing. I think it kind of comes down to that. This isn’t a revolutionary song or anything, but it’s a pleasant, the arrangement is nice, and Tweedy is great. That’s just the bottom line for me.
Like a Wilco song, if half of the players were located in a different room from the mic and the singer was in a different house.
[Read More]This is another track from an Over The Edge compilation, this time Volume 8: Sex Dirt. Still nonsense, of course.
Pinkerton really is their best album, y’all. I still don’t know why I have four of their albums.
Another good song from Broken Social Scene. I guess I have to pay more attention to them, huh? We’re all learning around here! I’m learning I like bands I already own music to, and you’re all learning that Five Songs is run by a dumbass!
[Read More]One of the big trends of rap beats was taking old soul music and speeding it up so that it sounds like the Chipmunks. Here, Amon Tobin sounds like he’s doing kind of the same thing, only with cartoon sound effects. Why not?
Beautiful drum loop on this song.
Negativland hosted a show called Over The Edge on Berkley’s KPFA, providing an outlet for surreal radio strangeness. I actually caught the show once while going to camp in Berkeley, and it was a mess but also entertaining. They also put out a set of (lightly) edited shows on CD, and I have a bunch of those. This is from Volume 6, the Wilsaphone Stupid Show, which was pieced together out of old found audio and family recordings from David “The Weatherman” Wills. What you hear on this, um, song is pretty representative of Over the Edge in general.
[Read More]Yes, we’ve hit a new low here. This live track is mostly Negativland lip-syncing to this song, which of course, we can’t see. Five Songs International apologizes for the inconvenience.
And let’s follow that up with 9+ minutes of psychedelic guitar wankery. The biggest problem the Crystallized Movements always had was that their vocals were mixed weird, often far too high in the mix. Also, this album has some of the worst cover art ever inflicted on the record buying public.
[Read More]Stick with this, it gets good.
The opener to the second disc of the bootleg/semi-official Negativconcertland, and while I think live albums are mostly pointless, a live album of Negativland (which had a big mixed-media audio/visual show) is extra pointless. Feel free to skip this one, y’all.
The Blue Carpet Treatment had multiple moments where Snoop didn’t sound totally sleepy, which means it’s one of the better late career albums for him. And then I looked, and he’s had, like, a billion albums since that one. So, this is now kind of mid-career.
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