Blah Blah Blah
1. Intro - "The Promised Land"
2. Les Savy Fav - "Dishonest Don Part 2"
3. Supergrass - "Mansize Rooster"
4. Public Enemy - "Burn Hollywood Burn"
5. Tom Waits - "Gun Street Girl"
6. TV On The Radio - "The Wrong Way"
7. Alkaline Trio - "Love Love Kiss Kiss"
8. mc chris - "Never Give Up"
9. Freezepop - "Here Comes A Special Boy"
10. MXPX - "Middlename"
11. Kemuri - "Rhythm"
12. Soundgarden - "My Wave"
13. Joss Stone - "Super Duper Love (Are You Diggin' On Me?)"
14. Polyphonic Spree - "Reach For The Sun"
15. Oasis - "Cigarettes and Alcohol"
16. Arlo - "Shutterbug"
17. Switchfoot - "Ammunition"
18. Ryan Adams - "Sweet Illusions"
19. Grand National - "Drink To Moving On"
20. Our Lady Peace - "One Man Army"
21. Mates of State - "Fraud In The 80s"
22. Cex - "First For Wounds"
Oh yeah.
Welcome back.
An intro from Harlan Ellison's short-turned-film, "A Boy And His Dog" and we're off.
No, there is nothing wrong with your CD player/MP3 player/iTunes. That's just the stuttery jittery opening of Les Savy Fav's rollicking, Simon & Garfunkle-sampling, dyspeptic rock tune "Dishonest Don Part 2" from the equally frantic album The Cat and The Cobra (dig the awesome album art).
Supergrass have always been the "new-age Rolling Stones" and this is sleazy rock at its best. "Mansize Rooster" (note the subtle dick joke) is featured prominently on their career-spanning album Supergrass is 10.
Ice Cube guest spots on this mid-90s Public Enemy jam, "Burn Hollywood Burn" (kinda ironic now considering Flava Flav's pseudo-celebrity and Ice Cube's kid-movie charm). Still, it's a blast of bombast from the master, Chuck D, from the incendiary album Fear Of A Black Planet.
OK, again, another entry into I Was Wrong. Two words : Tom Waits. The storytelling, the instrumentation, the delivery -- all things that I originally found distasteful, I now can't imagine not listening to. If you don't know, "Gun Street Girl" (and, hell, most of Rain Dogs) ain't a bad place to start.
I thought, "what better way to follow up a Tom Waits song than by putting on his contemporaries?" Turns out he doesn't really have any. But TV On The Radio get close, very close, with albums like Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes and brutal, sweet sing-a-longs like "The Wrong Way." Drum machines spit out bludgeoning bass lines, guitars come and go like fever dreams and saxophones adorn the whole blessed mess.
I was holding off on putting a new Alkaline Trio song from The Agony and The Irony, because a lot of folks don't like it. I think it's a great album, but it takes some time. So here's "Love Love Kiss Kiss" a poppy grinding with a catchy chorus and dark dark lyrics. Just the way I like 'em.
I know that I'm legally bound by the Indie-Snob Union to hate all new MC Chris songs, but screw that. The entirety of MC Chris Is Dead is effing genius. Taking it back to emo-dude rapping, mixed with braggadocio-laden sex-tales (although he complains earlier on the album that he "need[s] OnStar to find the clit"). Here, on "Never Give Up," he both takes aim at haters and gives sad dudes in his audience a few nice words.
If you know me well, you know one of my favorite webcomics in existence is "Achewood" by Chris Onstead. His literary prose, characterisation and storylines are the thing of comics legend and it's a shame he isn't bigger than he is. But! There are songwriters who write songs about his characters. This song, by electro-pop band Freezepop, sounds like it was written by (not just for) eternally-happy, hug-machine Phillipe.
Pop-punk is my middlename. MXPX are old hats at the genre and have been putting out records on a regular basis since about 1992 and are still going. "Middlename" is from the superior Life In General, a great intro to their sound.
Japanese ska band Kemuri are just all kinds of wicked - first, they play a genre that started in Jamaica, they sing in half-English/half-Japanese and they play a kick-ass Americanized punk version of ska. True polyglot genius. "Rhythm" is the opening track to the album eMovitation.
My friend and bass player were discussing the various merits of various Seattle bands from the mid-to-late 90s and, as per usual, the conversation peaks with mentioning not Pearl Jam and Nirvana, as one continues to put out excellent albums and the other is pretty much canonized by now, but rather with Soundgarden. Somehow the move from "Rusty Chain" to "Ty Cobb" is as confusing to him as it is to me. Here is the mid-period track "My Wave" from the eternally popular SuperUnknown.
Pop/Soul ingenue Joss Stone is an enigma to me. I have no idea who she is, where she's from or what she's about. (I know a quick google would do the trick, but I'm lazy when it comes to pop singers.) But I do know this : she's got the vocal chops and the 'tude to really knock 'em dead. Trouble is, the albums tend to fall apart about midway through. Her cover of "Super Duper Love" is fantastic though. If you like it, find yourself a copy of Soul Sessions, which is great as well.
With so many members, I wonder when Polyphonic Spree stops being a band and starts being "performance art." Aside from the heavy body-count, the glorious pop songs are more than enough to keep the astute listener glued to the stereo. "Reach For The Sun" is the shortest song on The Beginning Stages Of...
From pretty to dirty. That's the kind of transition that I like. Here's Oasis, masters of the pub song belting on the woozy "Cigarettes and Alcohol" from their first album Definitely Maybe. Note the lyric "you might as well do the white line."
Epitonic used to be my favorite resource for finding new music, but they've since kinda shut down. Which is a shame, because without them I never would have found the album Up High In The Night, which gave us "Shutterbug" by Arlo, a jangly Pavement-meets-Weezer-circa-1993 band. With better vocal harmonies.
My friend Wes, who himself is doing quite well in the songwriting business, was the first to try to covert me to liking Switchfoot. I resisted at first, but then I found songs like "Ammunition" (from best-seller The Beautiful Letdown). I get it now, they're not 'some Christian band' - they truly rock and they have a message, but it's not about the J-man or any of that, it's just a positively-tuned one.
I'm not one of those people that has to have EVERYTHING Ryan Adams puts out. I'm not as bad as some people I could name. But, certain albums are truly classic. The double-album Cold Roses, where "Sweet Illusions" comes from, is one of those. It's twangy, Neil Young-y and all-around pretty.
It's interesting when you're looking for one thing and find another. My friend Ken had told me about The National, a Joy Division-biting new-wave wannabe group. I was looking for them when I found Grand National, a dance-rock band. "Drink To Moving On" is the first track on Kicking The National Habit, their debut album. Honestly, I like Grand National far better.
It's also interesting going back and listening honestly to music you just outright dismissed years ago. Breaking ourselves of the snobbery habit is hard, especially to one who was so dead-set against bands like Our Lady Peace. Well the album Happiness Is Not A Fish You Can Catch makes me regret not seeing them before they broke up. The lead singer's vocal acrobatics on songs like "One Man Army" originally turned me away from the band, but I've seen the error of my ways now. Chalk another one up to I Was Wrong.
With the creepy album cover and cheesy keyboard sounds, I was originally wary of Mates of State. Was I listening to "Fraud In The 80s" by yet another version of Black Kids or some other blog-made band? Nope. There's more to the songs on Bring It Back than at first blush and the male-female vocal interplay is wonderfully handled. Pop music at it's most cacophonous.
And we leave you with an instrumental from electro-jokester Cex (pronounced Sex). Taken from the second album, titled Oops I Did It Again, this is "First For Wounds" a Squarepusher by way of Swervedriver shot of morphine.
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