Category Archives: Uncategorized

Listening

  • Cold War Kids - Loyalty To Loyalty. Love it. Minimal, and bare-bones, but intense and surprisingly melodic. They've got the raw retro R&B sound of a darker Black Keys but with a wider dynamic range and more depth in the lyrics. In addition, they use the same lo-treble, high-reverb guitar sound that The Walkmen use, which is cool thing to have. I wish that one song didn't remind me of "Taking Care Of Business", though. Still, great stuff. Thank you, RobC for the tip.
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  • Os Mutantes - Everything is Possible. It's impossible to know where to start with a band that's been around as long as these guys have, so I got a best-of collection. Most of the words are in Portuguese (I assume, since they're from Brazil), so I don't know what the songs are about, but the music is great fun. It runs all over the place, stylistically; some are light jazzy things, some are psychedelia, there is straight-up Latin dance music, ballads, and things I don't know how to classify - but it's all fun. So far, my favorite song is "Cantor De Mambo" (the mambo singer), which I believe is a tribute to Brazilian jazz legend Sergio Mendes, but sounds sometimes like a golden-era Santana song and finishes off with a sizzling Robert Fripp-style guitar solo. Wild stuff.
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  • Middle Distance Runner - Plane In Flames. I really liked their single, The Unbeliever, so I went looking for the album. But (as of yet!) there is no album - it's just a single. They did have this earlier album, though, so I bought it. There are a few fairly fine songs on there from the same vein as The Unbeliever; but then there a bunch of things that sound like U2RadioheadColdplay... which don't do much for me. Overall, a good disk, though. It's been stuck in my car CD player for weeks.
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  • Ozzy Osbourne - Blizzard Of Ozz. I had some credit at a used book store, so I grabbed this - only $3. Heh. Memories. To think how this freaked-out parents all over the world when it came out - oy. If you couldn't tell he was play-acting, then, as most jr. high kids could, it's impossible to miss, now. OK, there are a couple of solid songs here and Randy Rhoades was surely a brilliant guitarist, but Ozzy's lyrics seem so cartoonish (even for Ozzy!) that it makes the parental freak-out look even more hilarious in hindsight than it did at the time.
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