This song had been going through my head incessantly, so I bought the CD a couple of weeks ago. Now I listen to it at least half a dozen times a day. THIS SONG OWNS MY MIND. I CANNOT GET IT OUT.







The faces all around me they don't smile they just crack Waiting for our ship to come but our ships not coming back We do our time like pennies in a jar What are we saving for [x2] There's a smell of stale fear that's reeking from our skins. The drinking never stops because the drinks absolve our sins We sit and grow our roots into the floor But what are we waiting for? [x2] [chorus:] So give me something to believe Cause I am living just to breathe And I need something more To keep on breathing for So give me something to believe Something's always coming you can hear it in the ground It swells into the air With the rising Rising sound And never comes but shakes the boards and rattles all the doors What are we waiting for [x2] [chorus] I am hiding from some beast But the beast was always here Watching without eyes Because the beast is just my fear That I am just nothing Now its just what I've become What am I waiting for Its already done Oh [chorus]

Their lead singer looks weirdly like a doped-up indy Chevy Chase.

Hey, I finally played Portal! It is a dang great game, which comes as no surprise.

The following is a bit spoiler-y. And DELICIOUS:







( Lyrics... )

No real background this time, just a sampler...

Today John Allison introduced me to Those Dancing Days. Then I started poking around some of the other acts that've been signed by Wichita Recordings and found some other things I like. So, in no particular order...





Those Dancing Days - Home Sweet Home


( More goodness lies beneath... )





.

Every Memorial Day, Live 105 would have a Top 300 Modern Rock Classics Countdown, playing pretty much every song worth remembering as voted on by listeners. Some really great stuff would turn up on it, including a lot of stuff that you would expect, but also some songs and some bands that were awesome but weren't in their usual rotation. Every year my friends and I would go out of our way to listen to it and tape as much as we could, and every single year it would include Nellie the Elephant:









You cannot fail to love that song. That was my introduction to the Toy Dolls:

... an English punk rock band. They formed in 1979, playing their first concert at Millview Social Club, Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, on 20 October 1979.

While much punk rock is political or angry, the Toy Dolls worked within the esthetics of punk to express a sense of irreverent adolescent fun with irreverent lyrics and song titles such as "Yul Brynner Was A Skinhead", "My Girlfriend's Dad's A Vicar" and "James Bond Lives Down Our Street." There is often alliteration in their song titles (e.g. "Peter Practice's Practice Place", "Fisticuffs in Frederick Street", "Neville is a Nerd").Their albums usually include a cover version of a well-known hit song, usually sped up to the usual punk rock tempo. Covers have included "Toccata in Dm", "Sabre Dance", "Livin' La Vida Loca", "Lazy Sunday Afternoon", "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) and "The Final Countdown." They have also recorded parodies of popular songs, such as "The Kids in Tyne and Wear (Kids in America)" and "The Devil Went Down to Scunthorpe (The Devil Went Down to Georgia)". Their albums often start with a short intro with a catchy guitar riff, and end with an outro, which is usually a slightly longer variation of the intro riff. Their lyrics are usually based on singer Olga's experiences and favorite soap operas.

Most of the band members have nicknames and are rarely seen without their cartoonish rectangular sunglasses. Although they appeared bare-eyed on the One More Megabyte album cover, they have usually appeared in sunglasses ever since the group formed.

More...

You cannot fail to love them. If the Toy Dolls can't make you happy, then there's just no hope. I mean, you've got to love a band that makes asthma cool:



( Read more... )



Forty years later, they're still touring, and they're still kicking obscene amounts of ass. They are, of course, huge in Japan. And Olga'll even teach you to play the guitar.

One of the perks of living in the SF Bay Area in the 80's and 90's was Live 105 KITS. KITS was a station that had always totally just sold out, and was always totally better a few years ago (and was always totally inferior to the Quake) but everybody always listened to it, for one reason: it was awesome.





They played a bunch of popular alternative music, but they also played a lot of stuff that wasn't getting much airplay. They played a bunch of classic (and in some cases, obscure) punk and alternative. They played local bands. They put out albums of local bands. They had specialty music shows, like a reggae hour. They had the only morning show I've ever heard that didn't make me want to murder someone with a hammer -- the Alex Bennett show, which, when it wasn't being (repeatedly) cancelled, featured vaguely intelligent conversation, new music, big-name guests, and regular visits from big-name local and national comedians. They had a call-in show for the gay community. They had a medical advice call-in show -- which was, admittedly, painfully boring, but it was still a cool service. They put on massive concerts with huge bands, bands that would eventually become huge, and bands that should have become huge.





Then they were brutally murdered and corpse-fucked in 1998 by Infinity Broadcasting. But I digress.

Anyway, there was a downside to all of this. Their concerts included such acts as the Cure, James, Orbital, Allen Ginsburg (!) and... the Crash Test Dummies. They played Enya.[1] asparagusp claims that he was once subjected to Wild Boys being played 69 times in a row. I don't if that last one's true or not, but it wouldn't surprise me, and it would certainly make Steve Masters eligible for extradition to the Hague.

They did awesome things, they did horrible things, they deliberately did annoying things, but they truly seemed interested in doing the most they could with the platform they had. They were, to me, the very definition of what a commercial radio station was capable of. Much of what little I know about music, I learned from listening to them.













[1] - A confession: I actually like Enya. But that doesn't make it right.

I wanted to talk about new prog, and how awesome it is that there are bands today that are creating truly epic rock, sometimes even going so far as to construct entire mythologies. That's just cool.

But that'd be a lot of work, so screw it. Today, we're just going to talk about Muse:

Muse are an English rock band formed in Teignmouth, Devon in 1994. The band comprises Matthew Bellamy (vocals, guitar and keyboards), Christopher Wolstenholme (bass guitar, keyboards and vocals) and Dominic Howard (drums and percussion). Muse blend alternative, hard rock, progressive rock, classical music and electronica to help form the new sub-genre of new prog. Muse are known best for their energetic and visually dazzling live performances, and frontman Matthew Bellamy's eccentric interests in global conspiracy, extraterrestrial life, paranoia, theology and the apocalypse.

More specifically, we're going to talk about the one song of theirs that you are virtually guaranteed to have already heard, Knights of Cydonia :

The song features vocals from both Bellamy's higher and lower ranges layered and both synthesised and live trumpet parts. The guitar sound in the song was inspired by the 1962 number one hit "Telstar" by The Tornados (George Bellamy, Matt Bellamy's father, was the band's rhythm guitarist).

The titular ‘Cydonia’ refers to the region on Mars where some believe life has existed, and which is the site of the infamous Face on Mars. The cover artwork for Black Holes and Revelations, created by Storm Thorgerson, is set on the surface of Mars and features four men sitting around a table, atop which are miniature horses. According to the band, these men represent the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The horses are miniature in size to emphasise the fact that the horsemen have outgrown them.

Bellamy has stated that on the album in general he tried to create a vision of what is occurring in the song. For example, if you listen closely you can hear a guitar depicting someone riding a horse

... But enough talk. I defy you to watch this without getting your ass completely rocked off:









You can't do it, can you? You must submit to the rock.

Oh, I hear you. You're all like, "sure nation, that song rocked me so hard that I got a hernia in my brain, but the video is all one long semi-ironic reference to, like, fifteen different movies." And I say to you: that only makes it all the more epic.

(Incidentally, there are some more music videos directed by Joseph Kahn over here .)

But why keep talking, when so much more rock awaits?

( Read more... )


.

Desperate for me to add still more youtube videos to your friends page? Then you're in luck, because I'm kicking off the modern music appreciation series, in which I'll pick artists about whom to post videos and background information. A bunch of crap you could easily dig up off of youtube and wikipedia? You bet! But I'm still going to subject you to it. There's a ton of crazy awesome music out there, but a lot of it isn't widely known, and much of the rest of it people just don't know much about. Hell, I don't -- this is as much for me as it is for you.

We're gonna start off on a light note, with the cutting edge of 2007, Flight of the Conchords. Why? Because it's Wednesday, and you know what that means:

Flight of the Conchords is a Grammy Award-winning folk, pop, and comedy band composed of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement. Billing themselves as "Formerly New Zealand's fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo" (having been bumped by a tribute band of themselves, Like of the Conchords), the group uses a combination of witty observation, characterization and acoustic guitars to work the audience. The duo's comedy and music became first the basis of a BBC radio series and then an American television series, which premiered in 2007, also called Flight of the Conchords.

...

The duo stars in a television series for HBO, entitled Flight of the Conchords, which premiered in the United States in June 2007. The series revolves around the pair as they try to achieve success in New York City as a band and try to develop an American fan base. The regular cast includes fellow comedians Rhys Darby as Murray, Arj Barker as Dave, Kristen Schaal as Mel and Eugene Mirman as Eugene. This show also features many other comedians in guest starring roles. Their humorous songs are woven into the plot of each episode. The first season consisted of 12 episodes, with a second season announced to return in 2008. The DVD was released on November 6, 2007.

(Read more...)

( More videos... )


.