Uzeda

Uzeda, “Female”

You know, there’s more than a little similarity between Uzeda and the Dog Faced Hermans. There’s no personnel connection between them, but there’s a shared space of a kind of arty noise rock. Excellent stuff.

Squirrel Bait, “Kick the Cat”

No! Squirrel Bait, I just said nice things about you the other day. Don’t kick the cat!

N.W.A, “Express Yourself”

When I worked at WRCT, there was shelf in the DJ booth with all the new releases that the program manager wanted us all to work into our shows. We were required to play a couple songs from that shelf each hour. You could choose whatever you wanted and there were always plenty of things across genres. To assist us with the task, every new release that came into the station was listened to by a member of the staff and we wrote up some quick notes on an index card to help DJs make good choices. A key thing to note on those cards was which songs were safe to play outside “safe harbor” - in other words, which ones didn’t have profanity.

Son Lux, “Change is Everything”

Ryan Lott’s project Son Lux went from a one-man project to recording as a full band on Bones, and the resulting input of two more people has resulted in a more expansive and interesting album to me than the previous ones. There’s a lot of this that kind of gives off Flaming Lips vibes, honestly.

Uzeda, “What I Meant When I Called Your Name”

Noise rock out of Sicily, Uzeda have been active for 28 years and made only four albums and an EP in that time, a blistering pace that even Shellac have managed to best. Well, whatever, those albums are pretty excellent.

I think it’s been a bit since I’ve mentioned tools, so I’ll bring them up. The key thing I’ve been using to upload music is this MP3 to FLV converter. There are a bunch out there, but the others I’ve tried have been flaky or slow. This one has the tremendous advantage of pulling the cover art from the tags on the MP3, which saves a step of finding separate cover art. It also has the advantage of not being flaky or slow.