One of the singles off of Costello’s debut album, this song is probably one of the more famous tunes simply because Linda Ronstadt covered it, a cover that really bares the soft-rock heart of the ballad. Anyway, it’s a great tune, one of the standouts in his catalog. I’m old enough to admit that soft rock is fine.
Hm, “Getting Friendly With Music” isn’t a bad name for a blog.
[Read More]You know, I think the zone is actually bathypelagic, not bathyalpelagic. Come on The Ocean, get your shit together!
Jon Wahl really has one of the unique voices in rock, and certainly in underground rock. He sounds like he was transported out of a cartoon or something to front a blues-flecked rock band. Very strange! This was Claw Hammer’s third album, but the immediate prior one was a full-album cover of Devo’s debut record, and nobody heard the first one. Well, I certainly haven’t, and I’ve listened to a lot of this band. At any rate, coming off that cover record, this showed that they could really light it up with originals.
[Read More]I will look up little biographical details on acts when I’m doing this, to make sure I’ve got years right, or to spell names correctly, or whatever. And in the process, I’ll see some of what others have written about bands sometimes. When I did that for the Wisdom of Harry to check when this album came out (2000, which was earlier than I remembered), I noticed that the writer there compared this band to Mogwai, My Bloody Valentine, and Catherine Wheel. Uh.
[Read More]Another track from the bootleg Maximum Rocknroll, which wasn’t authorized by the band and contains a bunch of pretty poor quality stuff. Not great!
This is such a good song, goddamn. Claw Hammer really nails it, too. Uh, not a lot else to say here, really.
I’ve meditated on pretension here before, so I’ll spare you all that guff again. But just for a moment, please admire the hubris involved in naming your album Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic. It’s a really good album, though, so whatever.
[Read More]A slow start today, but it picks up.
Yes, it’s a reading of the Lewis Carroll poem, complete with pitch shifting.
Another track from Lese Majesty, although this is kind of a throwaway. Not a great start to today.
Our second visit from my favorite band. Here we find a track from Steady Diet of Nothing, their second full album (13 Songs was originally released as two EPs). On Steady Diet, they took yet another big step away from the hardcore of Minor Threat, and a further step towards the angular art-rock that would define the post-hardcore sound. The songs on Steady Diet are slower and more deliberate than those on Repeater, and the album is just less direct overall. That makes this a little bit of a transitional album, with Fugazi learning some new tools, tools they’d master with In On The Kill Taker. That album would find them synthesizing the fury of Repeater with the more elliptical sound of Steady Diet.
[Read More]Today starts out as slow as it gets, but don’t worry, that part doesn’t last long.
Yes, it’s another 15 seconds of silence. TV On The Radio is, thus far, by far the clubhouse leader in “Most Annoying Contributions to Five Songs”.
(NB: I searched for “fifteen seconds of silence” and put that in the playlist instead of, you know, TV On The Radio’s fifteen seconds of silence. Think of it as a cover version.)
[Read More]Hooray, I made it the whole month without missing a day! Another meaningless milestone! Music!
This is a pretty jaunty piece that still manages to sound really otherworldly, thanks to the alien nature of the playing. In some ways, Nancarrow presaged electronic composition, of using a tool to create music that otherwise couldn’t exist if it had to be created by human hands.
This was from a blind grab bag from Hydra Head records, and I’ll be honest, I think this is the first time I’m hearing this. Well, snap impression: in some ways, it goes pretty well with the Nancarrow piece above. Maybe I’ll listen to the rest after these five songs are over.
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