Well, it’s been an interesting seven months, I guess. I stopped updating Five Random Songs because I was doing another blog (Game & Tonic) and that was taking up my time. And then, uh, a global pandemic hit (you may have heard about it!), and my creativity just went to shit.
So, yeah. Without any fanfare, I’m back. I wanted to listen to more of my music, simple as that.
[Read More]While I always prefer the more upbeat stuff from Parliament, their ballads were also often great, certainly during their peak period. This comes from the last great Parliament record (Motor Booty Affair), but not the last great record from the Parliament/Funkadelic collective.
Before the Black Eyed Peas became massive pop music successes, before they were cranking out deeply irritating hits, before they entered the collective consciousness as THE BLACK EYED PEAS, they were an underground hip-hop act that put out a couple of decent albums. There’s a little Black Star here, which is of course welcome. So, what happened? Well, one major thing you’ll notice about those first two records is that one familiar member of the band isn’t there. Fergie joined on the third record, and, well, only the first two albums are worth anything.
[Read More]Somehow, 23 years before their first record, Prince laid a pretty savage burn on LCD Soundsystem.
Jawbox put together a comp, My Scrapbook Of Fatal Accidents, which gathered together most of their non-album releases in one place. There’s some solid stuff on it, and I recommend it for Jawbox fans. What we have here is one of the real oddities, a cover of the Cure’s “Meathook”, which serves best as a companion piece to their cover of Tori Amos’s “Cornflake Girl”.
[Read More]Seems like it’s been a long time since we’ve had any Stax stuff up in here. So, it’s a delight to get some Sam & Dave, which I just tried to write Save & Dam. Which is a solid name, and is officially my Sam & Dave cover band.
I remember buying this record, and I can remember repeatedly sorting it into the correct place in the old CD collection, and I can even recall pulling it out on multiple occasions and listening to it. And I have no recollection of what it sounds like. My stupid brain keeps thinking that it’s like The Hold Steady, and it’s not really.
[Read More]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]Joe Lally was, of course, bassist for the incomparable Fugazi, and one of the biggest reasons why the bass is one of the instruments I choose to butcher. All of the members of Fugazi have pursued various projects in the wake of Fugazi’s break (I choose to pretend that it’s just a really long pause), with one of the first being Lally making a solo record, There to Here. This is how that album opens, and it sets the tone for what you might hear. It’s fairly experimental in feel, with a lot of differences between songs, and a musical approach that varies from sparse to lush. While there are other post-Fugazi projects I like more (the Evens, the Messthetics), this is still an interesting album.
[Read More]Emerald City Comic Con today! I’ve been going every year, since the oldest was around four, because it’s nice to just kind of check out what’s going on in comics. It’s not really ever been my hobby, I’ve only dabbled in it. But it’s an adjacent hobby to my biggest, tabletop gaming, and it’s just fun being in that atmosphere. Being crammed into the convention center with all those people is less than awesome, but it’s still one of my favorite annual rituals.
[Read More]I was all set to make fun of Goldfinger here as a bunch of flash-in-the-pan trend chasers, as their 1996 debut (which has this song) hit in 1996 right around the commercial peak of the third wave, and this album was even on a major label. But you know what? Unknown to me, these guys made seven albums! That certainly demonstrates a certain dedication that really takes the air out of my planned jokes. So I take it back, take it back, take it back.
[Read More]This is the intro to Scar Sighted, Leviathan’s 2015 album, a fearsome black metal album. Leviathan is the solo band of Jef Whitehead, who is also notable for starting one of the premier metal labels around, Profound Lore. This track is really just a build up to the start of the of the record, so I guess we’ll tackle it properly next time it comes up, along with maybe the controversy surrounding him.
[Read More]This merger of King’s blues guitar with the Stax horns, with funk folded in, is just delightful. I need to find some more shit like this. You can add blues to the long list of music that I fundamentally know jack squat about. I’m starting to think I’m not qualified to write a music blog at all!
If you’re going to combine ska and punk, you can’t half-ass it. Full tempo punk with horns, hell yeah! Yeah, this shit’s a laughingstock, but I don’t care. It’s fun! Screw y’all!
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