I usually post stuff that's come out during the week, but this week I've got nothing, Saturday night has overstayed its welcome and I think I am going to sleep until Monday. So, instead, here is one track from the ten bands my mp3 player says I've played the most this week.
Punish Yourself - Endzeit Banh Bao
Machines of Loving Grace - Butterfly Wings
Sewer Goddess - The Power of Negative Thought Channeled Through Cocaine
Anaal Nathrakh - Until the World Stops Turning
Savage Republic - So It Is Written
Frank the Baptist - Different Degrees of Empty
Sunshine Blind - Francis Pepperland Laid Waste
Good night, Hubski.
Marvin Gaye's first posthumous album Dream of a Lifetime (1985) has a couple interesting career outtakes from him. I really love the early hip hop thing they did to Symphony, a mid-70's outtake that never made its way onto an album (save for a different version on the What's Going On reissues) and Life's Opera, which was sampled in an excellent Cam'ron song, is another great addition. There's a fair amount of raunchy music, as evidenced by Sanctified Lady. It's a good-ass piece of music.
Phoenix - Trying To Be Cool I just saw them live last night, they put on an amazing show.
One of my favorite musicians is William Elliott Whitmore. He does a lot of blues, folk, old style country, and bluegrass, all tinged with punk (he got his start in the LA punk scene, interestingly enough.) He has a song called Lift My Jug (A Song for Hub Cale). Hub Cale is a hobo that Whitmore has known since he was a kid. I really love this song (Seriously, everything by him. I'd try to suggest songs, but there's such a wide array that any one doesn't do him justice. There's something for everyone in his work) and I really loved the idea of songs about hobos, so I went on a binge of other musicians who do that well; Merle Haggard, Harry McClintock, and Woody Guthrie and the likes. Man I love my bluegrass.
Drove from Durham to Asheville and my wife played DJ. She played some Gillian Welch -the link is to "Red Clay Halo, one of my favorites.
I was really digging Told You So, from the Guggenheim Grotto. Just a sweet little song.
I saw the MeFi thread on Jellyfish, an early 90s power-pop band that never really became successful. They are fucking brilliant. Here's a great live performance of their song New Mistake. Their most well-known song is probably Joining A Fan Club, which was later covered by Puffy AmiYumi a Japanese pop rock band. This cover was produced by Andy Sturmer who was the original frontman of Jellyfish. Puffy also recorded the theme tune for Teen Titans and Andy Sturmer wrote the theme tune for Ben 10. Puffy AmiYumi have also done a bunch of Japanese anime theme songs, none of which I have actually heard of. I feel slightly pathetic for just posting something that half of the users on here have probably seen, but I have not been able to get these songs out of my head.
I finally got around to downloading some of the bookmarked albums I had on bandcamp. Lots of kiwi stuff. Home Brew are a NZ hip hop/rap group. Not the sort of genre I usually listen to, but these guys have really good production and their lyrics are always socially/politically relevant, which is a huge tick in my book. I grabbed their older album, Last Week - a 7 track album they made about the week they had. This track, Tuesday, I really liked because it's pretty much my living situation. Jet Jaguar makes some pretty nice downbeat, chill electro things, and his (pretty old, actually) remix album of Phoenix Foundation (a Kiwi psych rock band, pretty big, might have heard of them overseas) is wonderful - especially the Yarra River recording at the end. On that note, I came back to the Phoenix Foundation's 2005 album, Pegasus yesterday, and I still love it just as much. Cheery in parts, mellow in others, the perfect combination of upbeat psych rock and pseudo-ambient psych rock.