Do you detect a little echo of “Wounded Kite” there in the aborted first bit of song on this track? No? Just me?
No, we’re leaving the “Days Since Last Listless, Anonymous Third Wave Song” sign alone on this one. There’s nothing listless about this! The Suicide Machines are very much a chip off the Operation Ivy block, and the energy here carries them plenty far.
[Read More]Entertainment!, from 1979, is one of the keystones of post-punk, a wiry, edgy blast that countless followers would attempt to mimic. The sort of vaguely dance-y rhythms, the bursts of guitar, the monotone singing, these would become hallmarks of bands even down to today. As a consequence, it’s an album that still sounds pretty fresh.
Gang of Four would keep coming and going, with hiatuses of various lengths, but I’ve never really listened to anything beyond the first two albums.
[Read More]Waxahatchee (Katie Crutchfield’s band that started as a solo project) appeared on a bunch of best-of lists for 2015 for Ivy Tripp. To my ears, it sounds very much like many of the underground pop/rock bands of the 90s, with lots of echo and jangle all over the place. This, of course, is totally OK with me, I loved the 90s underground! I haven’t had a chance to listen to her most recent album, Out In The Storm yet, but people seemed to really like it also.
[Read More]Mostly, ska bands are really fun live. Dancing is fun! But, you know, live albums are mostly pretty lame. This one is no exception. It took me a depressing number of years to finally figure out that I don’t really like live albums.
(NB: The song in question is at 21:12 in the linked track.)
From Carried Away, a typically solid album from the act. Gotta love this kind of party rap. The lyrics in a typical PUTS song don’t amount to much, but it doesn’t really matter.
[Read More]Another year-end roundup, this time from NPR. Meanwhile, another good set today. I feel like shuffle has been doing well for a little while.
I’m surprised we haven’t seen Bim Skala Bim yet. One of the earliest bands of the third wave, arguably early enough to not be part of the third wave at all. They certainly reached their peak of fame during the third wave, though. With a stable lineup and an approach much like the 2 Tone second wave acts, they produced a solid series of records throughout the late 80s and 90s. This comes from Tuba City, their second album, which somehow got miscategorized in my collection with this album art:
[Read More]Sorry about the second song in the playlist. You’ll see when you get there.
From Stepfather, an album that featured some pretty experimental songs, distinguishing itself from its more straightforward predecessors. “You” is built around a nice, conventional funk sample, though.
To the extent Front 242 ever had a “hit”, it was this song, briefly a staple of a certain sort of dance club. And just in case you wanted to hear that industrial dance beat more clearly, they helpfully provided an instrumental remix on the inevitable 12" single of the song, along with six more versions of it. Say what you want about the purveyors of industrial dance, but they got their money’s worth out of any song that got traction.
[Read More]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.
[Read More]John Oswald, a composer, coined the term “plunderphonics” to describe the process of composing a new song using recognizable parts of existing songs. The “recognizable” portion was something he considered key. It involves the composer making using of existing associations in order to raise emotions in the listener that might otherwise not be possible. This can distinguish it from some of the sampling used in hip hop and the like, which might be considered plunderphonics or not, depending on how much the source is widely known.
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