That is some Saturday Night Live-ass horn work on this tune.
Oh, this is the first time we’ve had them, huh? The NY Citizens were a pretty early band in the third wave of ska, so this was all before some of the genre boundaries had settled down. As a result, they were much more English Beat than anything else, which wasn’t a popular referent for most of the other bands in the third wave.
[Read More]Doom. Dooooooooooooom. very slow headbang Dooooooooooooooooooooom.
You know, I wasn’t paying attention, and this song started seamlessly enough that I didn’t even notice we switched. That probably says more about me than it does about the bands, but I’m going to willfully choose to believe that it says we’ve got a good playlist cooking today. Yeah, that’s it! I’m not just quarter-assing my way through this thing! I’m a professional!
[Read More]We’re not the most distant from Christmas on the calendar, but I think early spring is spiritually as far as you can get. So, nice timing, Plexasaurus!
Desert-inspired heavy rock, this is from their self-released and self-titled 2016 release, which is full of psychedelic semi-doom. Overall, I kind of wish they were just purely instrumental, as that’s the most interesting part of this whole thing.
[Read More]“About A Girl” might be the song on Bleach that would best fit in on Nevermind, which makes it a little surprising that it didn’t get a single release at the time. It did eventually make it out as a single, but from the Unplugged album.
This is one of the standout songs on We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank, inasmuch as it’s one of the few songs on that record that my brain will occasionally just call up out of nowhere. That’s the real mark of quality, after all.
[Read More]Speaking of night watchmen, we watched Night at the Museum with the kids last night, and I was kind of pleasantly surprised that the effects didn’t look too janky. I mean, sure, the whole premise was ridiculous, but I thought there was a good chance that it was going to look so stupid as to totally jar me out of things. But no, held up just fine as a family movie.
[Read More]Russian Circles usually gets tagged with the post-rock label, which doesn’t really hang together to me. There’s nothing really post- about most of their stuff. To me, this is really just straight up instrumental metal, and it’s faaaantastic at that. They’ve been cranking out fantastic albums for years now, and it seems like it would get tired, but it absolutely does not. This is from the magnificent Guidance, which is as good a place to start as any.
[Read More]I need more art punk in my life. Nation of Ulysses was unafraid to just go for it, with their over-the-top political polemics, the atonal honking of the trumpet, the odd song structures, or whatever other pretensions they were willing to put on. They also carried it off with straight faces, which just helped carry things. As I get older, I’m happier with bands that staked out their own territory. Nobody really sounds like the Nation of Ulysses, and that’s really valuable.
[Read More]Another day of all bands we’ve had before. I think that’s fun! Here are your repeat offenders!
Even though it sounds like it was recorded at the bottom of a murky pond, you can still hear what stunned people about Napalm Death’s debut. It sounds so extreme, so otherworldly, that it’s pretty hard to comprehend at first. Mick Harris’s drums, in particular, sound almost incomprehensibly fast.
Farside here are operating in sort of a mid-tempo alternative rock mode, but I still find it enjoyable despite that. I also enjoy it when bands break the fourth wall like this.
[Read More]I shared the blog at work. I fully expect my readership to…well, probably stay where it is. Welcome, purely hypothetical extra readers! The music is over here!
It’s another track from Alpha Mike Foxtrot, the rarities collection that they put out. Here, we have Wilco basically operating in Uncle Tupelo mode, which is totally OK with me. It occurs to me that when I put up my INDISPUTABLE RANKING of their albums last time, I actually omitted this album. That’s because I usually skip compilations in those sorts of rankings, but I’d put it somewhere in the middle of the pack.
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