The first Smiths album is the one I really don’t listen to very much at all. I tend to want to belt along with the songs in my best Morrissey impression, and for that, I know the last few albums much better than this one. That’s not a judgment on the quality of it or anything, just a recognition that I listened to The Queen Is Dead in high school enough to know the songs perfectly.
[Read More]While I really like their later work, Rising Down is probably the last record I consider a truly great Roots record. It’s hard to say it’s their best, given how much I love Things Fall Apart and Game Theory (and Phrenology), but if it’s not quite there, it’s very, very close. It’s super focused and the band knows exactly what they’re doing. It feels like it didn’t get a ton of attention, but it should have, it’s awesome.
[Read More]I wonder if there was discussion about the correct number of “baby"s in the title, or if they just went with the line from the song and called it good.
I don’t normally list the “featuring” in the title lines here, but it’s important that you all know that this features Oakland legend Too $hort, so of course this rules. I suppose you could have figured that out on your own. Well, whatever!
[Read More]Repeat!
I really need to get to the point where my kid can have visitors again, because I really want to try and mortify them by singing along to the Smiths really loud.
It’s tracks like this one that really demonstrate that Belle and Sebastian were still very much learning how things worked with their first album, Tigermilk, which was literally a university project. Luckily, they didn’t convince themselves that this sort of thing was their future.
[Read More]The opening to the 2015 album from False (called Untitled, the same as their first EP, because fuck you!), featuring their blend of black metal with other elements like thrash. The stretch around 1:30-2, for example, is pretty thrash-y. The middle section of the song is pretty doom-y. These kinds of passages are a nice change of pace from just the crush of black metal.
Hüsker Dü’s 1984 double-album Zen Arcade was a monumental landmark in the rock underground. It’s hard to really call it a hardcore album at this point, it’s really moved far beyond it, but so many bands after this would try and sound this good. Everything is still super loud, but the songwriting has stretched much farther than the first couple records indicated they were capable of.
[Read More]Who is making music with this kind of reverbed out surf guitar these days? Honest question, I have no idea, and I like it a lot. Comment down below! Or don’t! I’m not the boss of you.
This song is actually assembled out of a bunch of micro samples of music from commercials for Jamaican tourism, which is pretty impressive given how coherent it all sounds. This sort of careful, detailed assembling is something that always impresses the hell out of me.
[Read More]It’s our birthday! I posted the first Five Songs one year ago! In that time, assuming I’ve gotten my tagging right, I’ve posted 313 of these things, meaning you all have gotten a minimum of 1,565 different songs (plus a few bonuses along the way). NOT BAD. I’m still thinking about what to do for the second year of Five Songs. I might retire this thing, because it is a fair bit of work for something that is usually looked at by a number of people I can count on one hand. But, at the same time, it’s still fun, usually.
[Read More]Back in the day, when CDs were still fairly novel, some bands felt compelled to goof around with the medium. The best known of these goofs, and one of the most annoying, was the “hidden track”, where bands would put in a long period of silence and then follow with an extra song. Not only was the silence super annoying, but the extra song was seldom any good.
[Read More]John Oswald, a composer, coined the term “plunderphonics” to describe the process of composing a new song using recognizable parts of existing songs. The “recognizable” portion was something he considered key. It involves the composer making using of existing associations in order to raise emotions in the listener that might otherwise not be possible. This can distinguish it from some of the sampling used in hip hop and the like, which might be considered plunderphonics or not, depending on how much the source is widely known.
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