Squirtgun

Soundgarden, “Swallow My Pride”

A collision of early grunge elements here! This is from the second Soundgarden EP, Fopp, from 1988. It’s a time when Soundgarden was still figuring out who they were, and their sound was still mostly a melding of hard rock and garage rock and wasn’t yet what would be recognizable as grunge. But it goes further than that! This song is actually a cover of Green River, the proto-grunge band from the mid-80s that would spawn both Mudhoney (Mark Arm and Steve Turner) and Pearl Jam (Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament). The elements that would make up grunge were starting to come in to focus even in 1985, when Green River recorded this song, with Steve Turner’s filthy riffs in particular being a building block of the genre. The music made by these bands wasn’t quite yet divorced enough from hard rock, didn’t have quite enough of the grime or the muscular confidence that would allow them to break into something new. But it was coalescing.

Six songs today! I should probably just automatically skip everything with Jay-Z in it.

The Slackers, “Real War”

I don’t listen to Close My Eyes very much. Primarily because the second song on it, “Old Dog”, really kind of upsets em. It’s a good album, though, and I really should listen to it more often. Here, we catch the Slackers going into dub some, which they do every now and again.