No, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
A thing that’s cool about this song is how restless it is. They’ve gone through multiple ideas in the first minute of the tune, which is nice to see. This is a very fun album.
Kind of a throwback here, off of 2020’s The Day Before Halloween. Those sawtooth synths there are very primitive but nice.
[Read More]A while back, I wrote some code to pull data from Discogs for my collection to see what year albums were released for another project that I was working on. That project might still see the light of day! But I’m wondering if there’s some way I could pull data for genres. Discogs doesn’t have genre tags in their structured data, but I could scrape the band description for specific words, I suppose. It would be neat to see what percentage of my collection is, say, punk.
[Read More]Silence is a Dangerous Sound: A Tribute to Fugazi is a huge comp, featuring a bunch of bands each doing one Fugazi tune. The interpretations range from pretty faithful to pretty decomposed, as is de rigueur for this sort of thing. I think you have to be a pretty big Fugazi dork to enjoy something like this, but I am one of the biggest, so it’s fun. Most of the pleasure is in doing the Leonardo DeCaprio pointing meme at the songs (metaphorically speaking), but whatever, stupid fun is still fun.
[Read More]Uh, yikes.
“Television’s gone / I’m alone with Lucifer / what a drag” is such an outstanding summary of Greg Dulli’s lyrical work with the Whigs. Shame about the slurs, though.
A thing that gets a little lost about Motown is that a lot of it is reduced to just the same handful of the biggest hits these days. And those songs are great, sure, but there’s so much awesome stuff just a tiny bit deeper in their catalog. This was a decent hit back in the day, but has largely disappeared from people’s memory, and it’s a great tune.
[Read More]Panopticon, the band that is actually just Austin Lunn, gained attention with Kentucky, where Lunn merged his love of Appalachian folk music with his love of black metal and produced an amalagam of the two, creating one of the most distinctive and interesting black metal albums ever. A couple albums down the road from his breakthrough, and he was still playing both of his loves. The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness is a double album, and unlike Kentucky, it’s more two halves rather than a melding of the two styles. There’s a midpoint in the double album where it switches from the black metal to the folk. Lunn is an expert at both, so as long as you’re OK with both styles, it’s a great record. This, uh, is from the black metal half.
[Read More]Goddamn, listen to those strings! With Cloud Nine, the Temptations laid down some of the building blocks of funk, as they departed from the traditional Motown sound and pointed the way to the 70s.
Indie pop band The xx kind of exploded out the door and were critical darlings right away with their electronic take on the genre, especially with the dual vocalists. And it’s here where I admit that a) I can never keep straight who The xx are and b) I clearly bought this at some point and I’m not entirely sure I’ve listened to it before. But I know I’ve read about them at various times! I totally didn’t have to look up stuff about them!
[Read More]Took a few days off there. I’d apologize, but did anybody notice? If you Five Songs on a blog and nobody is there to hear it…
Anyway, cue the tunes, Amazon!
We’ve discussed the Melvins getting dropped from their major label after a stellar run artistically, upon the discovery that the Melvins don’t actually sell any records. They found a home on Amphetamine Reptile Records, who apparently encouraged them to do whatever they wanted. So here, we have a little throwaway making fun of their time on their major label. And they called this record Honky. Why not!
[Read More]I was just listening to Wrong today, and was reminded of how awesome it was. Folks, check it out! In the meantime, here’s NoMeansNo kicking off the In The Fishtank project, which was a project where an independant label invited bands to record an album in just two days in the studio. Occasionally a couple bands at the same time! NoMeansNo are pros, so of course it sounds great.
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