The Skatalites -

Five Songs, 6/25/2018

Posted on June 26, 2018 | Joshua Buergel

Iron & Wine, “Lion’s Mane”

I think it can be easy to dismiss all these neo-folk types as posers, as just boring sensitive white guys with guitars. And yeah, but some of them are clearly playing something pretty inspired as well. Sam Beam, doing business as Iron & Wine, is one of those worth paying attention to. His debut album, The Creek Drank The Cradle, is pretty precious, but it’s just filled with really nice songs. It’s just Beam’s voice and guitar most of the time, with just the occasional touches of slide guitar or banjo, as you can hear on this song. And while obviously, we here at Five Songs go pretty far in to pretty grim and noisy stuff, sometimes you just really need a pretty song, and Iron & Wine delivers.

Five Songs, 12/15/2017

Posted on December 15, 2017 | Joshua Buergel

Maybe the most dangerous of the year-end roundups is Bandcamp’s, which always results in a lot of stuff for me. As for today’s music, well, I really like two of today’s songs an awful lot. The other three are a little…slapdash, let’s say.

The Skatalites, “Wood and Water”

We get a lot of third-wave ska acts around here, and usually, we make fun of them. Or, at least, a good percentage of them. We get enough of them that maybe a quick refresher is worth our time? When we talk about waves of ska bands, we’re referring to:

Five Songs, 5/27/2017

Posted on May 28, 2017 | Joshua Buergel

I’m not sure anybody cares about milestones, but I’ve now been doing this thing for more than a month. And it’s still fun! According to analytics, I’ve had 91 different visitors for the past week, which is actually pretty cool. If anybody out there is reading, feel free to leave a comment! Here’s what you came for!

Foetus, “Take It Outside Godboy”

We last encountered J.G. Thirlwell in one of his side project guises, Wiseblood. Here, we encounter his main project. First, a quick note on band names. For a fair bit of his career, he actually changed the name of the band frequently, although it always had “Foetus” in the name somewhere (“Foetus Interruptus”, “Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel”, etc). At some point, around the release of Flow or so, he knocked it off, acknowledging that everybody just called the band Foetus anyway. Oh, and the “proper” Foetus albums are all four-letter words for the names.