Queens of the Stone Age

Today!

Queens of the Stone Age, “You Think I Ain’t Worth A Dollar, But I Feel Like A Millionaire”

This is one of those songs where that little opening background riff will just pop into my head and stay there for hours and hours, just looping. It’s not unpleasant! This album just smokes, front to back.

Gorilla Biscuits, “(Untitled Hidden)”

I think I’ve introduced this old-ass straight-edge hardcore band before, so instead, I’ll just mention that they contributed personnel to Quicksand, which we heard from yesterday. As for the track itself, on my copy of Start Today, there is a series of little sub-10 second “songs” which are indistinguishable and unnamed. And, because of stupid tech limitations, I can’t tell which one this is. So, I’ll do another song today.

Today’s list.

Pavement, “Krell Vid-User”

I’ve complained about the total lack of quality control on Pavements non-album material. For every “Texas Never Whispers” or “Unseen Power of the Picket Fence”, there were a dozen songs like this one lurking in the wings. But hey, at least we’ve got basically every studio dropping ever put on tape by the band lovingly preserved in deluxe editions! That way you can listen to that junk once and never again!

Stick with this, it gets good.

Negativland, “The Copyright Law (Part 2)”

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.

Snoop Dogg, “10 Lil’ Crips”

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.

Posting from the road! Are we going to get road trip music? Probably not.

DJ Krush, “Chie No Wa”

I should listen to more Japanese hip-hop. Anyway, DJ Krush is mostly instrumental, but here we have some rhyming. I’ve got a couple of his releases, and they’re pretty entertaining, if not quite the top of the pile for DJ records. Allmusic tells me this album is actually a mixtape of stuff he did with other artists?

Post-rock, rap, stoner rock, whatever the hell the Flaming Lips are…this is a good cross-section of the kind of music I listen to. Check it out!

M83, “Let Men Burn Stars”

Fitting alongside bands like Godspeed You Black Emperor in the “post-rock” bucket, M83 plays mostly instrumental music that always sounds like the soundtrack to something. In some ways, this stuff is kind of shameless emotional manipulation, but if you just ignore that and let yourself be manipulated, it can be fun. This is a bit of a throwaway track, though.

When I started doing this, my only real hope was to find and remember some great music from the dusty corners of my own collection, and maybe help somebody else discover a new favorite. Well, mission accomplished on the second point! Feels pretty good. Here’s today’s stuff, maybe you’ll find a new favorite too?

The Blue Meanies, “Camaro Man”

You know what would make ska punk better? A bar band vibe! At least, that’s the conclusion the Blue Meanies reached before recording this song. Also, note that there’s so very little ska left in this track that coming into it cold, you’d never guess that this is ostensibly a ska punk band. I’m moving on.