Crank up your electro-digital Victrola Shuffle-trons and describe to us the first five songs that come up.

1. Love And Rockets - B Side, No. 1. In which Love And Rockets do their own Revolution #9. Mercifully, it's less than two minutes long.
2. De La Soul - Bitties In The BK Lounge. One of De La Soul's less-musical numbers. More of a sketch with a bit of soundtrack in the background. This stuff really hurts DLS, IMO.
3. Blue Sky Boys - Katie Dear. A nice, old-timey, double-suicide ballad. Basically, Romeo and Juliet in the Appalachians.
4. Sidney Bechet - Ja-Da. I like it, but if I was looking for a generic pre-war jazz tune, this would be near the top of the list. It has little to distinguish it from the archetype.
5. Stevie Ray Vaughan - Close To You. In my dumb little head, this song will always be associated with The Doors, since their "Absolutely Live" is the first place I ever heard it. SRV kills it, of course; but I can't help but think he's too polished, too slick, compared to The Doors' rough and loose version.

It will make you a better person.

Special taking-a-sick-day edition:

1. Heretix - Mad Donna. Heretix were a band that came through Rochester in 89. Apparently they put on a good show, live, because for about a month after seeing them, my roommate and I loved them. This is the first song on their "A.D." EP. It's a pretty straight-up T-Rex cover - as is their "Season of the Witch" that closes the EP.
2. Oxford Collapse - Cracks In The Causeway. This song completely reminds me of the Feelies. Happy, jerky, jangly guitars, simple and repetitive (but not quite to monotony), with nonsense lyrics. It's not on YouTube, so you'll have to settle for a different OC song.
3. Miles Davis Quintet - Oleo. One of rare tunes where Miles plays long, fast, complex lines himself. He was mostly content to leave the flashy stuff to his sax guys, and just sketch out the themes with that muted, lonesome trumpet sound of his. But on this one he lets it fly and holds his own, even up against a pre-sheet-of-sound John Coltrane.
4. Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians - Leppo & The Jooves (live). A rather long, but still catchy, herky-jerky, Soft Boys song. The live version has just a bit more ooomph than the studio version (linked here).
5. Chris Bell - I Don't Know. I've said it many times: Chris Bell's estate should sue Aerosmith for using this song's chorus as part of the verse in "Janie's Got A Gun". This is a great song, and it conclusively shows that Alex Chilton was only half-way responsible for Big Star's greatness - Bell could write and deliver a great song, too. The shimmering guitars, the gorgeous melodies, enough fiber to keep it chugging along - everything the best Big Star songs have.
   

Shuffle up the five songs, list them and describe them!

After missing a week of iPoddery, thanks to sunny Miami, Start Your iPods returns!

Shuffle-up five songs, describe them to us so that we may learn of their pros and of their cons.

1. Wye Oak - The Alter. From their latest record. This is one of the songs that doesn't sound much like the Wye Oak I love. The up-front keyboards are the biggest change, the absence of her howling guitar is another, and the general mellow vibe sets it apart ever further. But it's still a nice tune, and it's growing on me.
2. Portishead - Silence. A long loud kindof monotonous two minutes followed by a tiny bit of singing, then back to the monotonous stuff again. Doesn't do a lot for me.
3. Pavement - Perfume V. Hard for me to believe that this album is almost twenty years old - and I still don't know the names of all the songs on it. This has always been the "She's got the radio active and it makes me feel OK" song, to me. Love it, though it feels a little lost, out of context.
4. The Antlers - Atrophy. Someone's whispering over a very quiet piano. At two minutes, the piano gets a tiny bit louder. Some faint singing is just barely audible... four minutes to go.... At the four minute mark, it dissolves into something that sounds like a chorus of rattlesnakes. 5:20, now repeating electronic chiming sounds. 1:00 to go.... more singing, just barely audible, completely unintelligible. I give up.
5. Vetiver - Through The Front Door. Kinda retro-folk-rock. This is a fairly typical Vetiver song: mellow, spare, good for nodding along to. I play a lot of Vetiver in my car, but I don't think I could name a song or an album - it all just washes over me, pleasantly.

OK, you go.

1. Shuffle em up.
2. Describe the first five songs that come up, no matter what they are.
3. ???
4. Profit!

1. Sonic Youth - Master Dik. Thurston does a weird quasi-rap over a swarm of wanky guitars and KISS samples. Odd. An strangely un-excellent track from the otherwise great Sister. Ends with the repetition of the word "Ciccone", which is Madonna's real last name and the origin of the name of SY's noise-rap side project, "Ciccone Youth".
2. Green Day - All By Myself. Until I found this video, I did not know Tre' Cool sang this one. I thought it was Billy Joe doing a dumb voice.
3. Beatles - I've Just Seen A Face. A fun little song, but alas, it wins my award for Most-badly-Mixed Guitar Solo.
4. Alison Krauss & U.S. - Lose Again. A sweet song. Sounds like spring. Odd that this isn't anywhere on YouTube.
5. De La Soul - Take It Off. One of the many short, pointless, throwaway tracks that litter DLS's records. This is the kind of thing that makes me not like DLS as much as I think I could. I tend to avoid playing their albums because the good stuff is surrounded my silliness.

OK, now you do it.

1. Shuffle-up five songs.
2. List em
3. Describe em
4. ???
5. Profit!

1. The Cure - 10:15 Saturday Night. Yeah, it's a little silly. But it's very catchy and definitely sets a mood. Been trying to listen to new-er Cure lately, and it just hurts my soul. And not in a dark and black Goth way, either.
2. The Who - Substitute (live). I like the song well enough, but after 45 seconds of listening to Pete talk to the crowd about all The Who's hit records, I skipped this. What a dumb intro.
3. Portishead - All Mine. What a great album. Great band. For some reason, Portishead reminds me of a certain parking lot in Rochester, NY. Nothing big happened there; but I think it's when I decided I liked Portishead.
4. Sonic Youth - Rain On Tin. A decent new-ish SY song - one of my favorite post-Goo songs, actually. Eight minutes, mostly instrumental, which sounds like it could be a bit much. But it's got a nice jammy, organic feel, lots of different sections, and there's some nice Television-ish interlocking guitar bits near the end. Very nice.
5. Horse Flies - Rub Alcohol Blues. The Horse Flies are/were(?) a uniquely semi-psychedelic, semi-electric, folk/bluegrass band from upstate NY. My little circle of semi-hippie friends loved this album. I don't know if I'd be into the whole album, these days, but this one song still felt right.

Go ahead, describe the first five songs that come up on your music shuffling device.

Short ones for me today... I have to go sit at a dumb-ass company-wide meeting instead of getting work done.

1. Oscar Peterson - Jim. Not really familiar with this one. Somehow, this album hasn't spent much time on my iPod. It's a nice track: pleasant, laid back, casual.
2. Blue Sky Boys - Picture From Life's Other Side. An old timey, sappy, hillbilly ballad.
3. Pavement - Flux = Rad. Loud, abrasive, and borderline annoying. Not my favorite Pavement song.
4. Unrest - Isabel. A great Unrest song. I've always loved the tiny little slide the guitar does at the start of each verse.
5. Love And Rockets - An American Dream. Not my favorite L&R song. It's not terrible, and I really like the slower parts. But it's a bit long and the constant repetition of the phrase "American Dream" grinds on me a little.

OK, you go:

Start 'em up!

1. The Who - It's A Boy (live). This is exactly the kind of thing I was thinking about when I wrote that "Wheat - Chaff" post. The original version of The Who's "Live At Leeds" had six songs, and it was great. The latest and greatest version, the double-deluxe super-expanded edition is 4 CDs long and contains, along with a ton of good early stuff, two full performances of "Tommy". Which I hate - especially on shuffle. Maybe Tommy works if you listen start to finish, but most of the songs taken individually are pretty weak.
2. My Morning Jacket - Mahgeeta. Not sure what the live version of this will sound like, but the studio version, as with all MMJ songs, is neck-deep in reverb - it's kindof their trademark sound. And I'm kind of torn on this band and this song. On one hand, they have a unique sound and a loose, jammy feel. On the other hand, the singer kinda bugs me.
3. Neil Young - Walk With Me. This is from his latest record, the "Le Noise" which, unlike My Morning Jacket, has almost no reverb on it (except for the swirling vocals) - everything sounds dry and live and ragged and raw. It sounds like a demo, a sketch of a song. It's a good one, thankfully. But I wonder what it would have sounded like with the full Crazy Horse treatment...
4. REM - The Wrong Child. Haven't heard this album ("Green") in many years - and this song is one of the reasons why. Not my favorite. The "Battle Of Evermore"-esque mandolins are nice, but Stipe's strange counterpoint vocal parts are distracting.
5. Neil Young - Peaceful Valley Boulevard. Another from "Le Noise". This is an acoustic tune, about how the white man killed the native Americans and then went on to ruin the world. Good times!

Talk about the first random five!

1. Start your music machine.
2. Let it shuffle.
3. Describe the first five songs that come up
4. ???
5. Profit!

1. Beck - Tropicalia. In which Beck dabbles in Brazilian pop - with great results. Like all of Beck's best stuff, it's groovy, clever and just a little weird: it's got that tropicalia vibe in the guitar and percussion, but it also has Beck's space-age sound effects and his deadpan vocals. I'm not quite sure what the lyrics are about - something to do with tourists and the decadence of Carnival.
2. Rush - Big Money. iTunes lost its library last week, so I had to re-populate my iPod from a new playlist. I was a little sloppy with the albums I chose. Gack. This is not a great song. Rush really went a little crazy in the mid 80s - the huge synth sounds, the lush 80s chorus on the guitars, electronic drums. Though it's still possible to appreciate Rush as musicians on an over-produced wanna-be hit single like this, I'd really rather hear them do their thing on a good song.
3. Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man - Drake. A low, dark song. Brushed drums, a stand-up bass, some muted guitars, a choir of ghosts. She's barely above a whisper here. It's pretty, on a rainy day like today.
4. Belly - Witch. Tanya Donnely and her guitar. The words are like a small fragment of a grim fairy tale, dreamily delivered as if it was a lullaby. Disarming. It's very short, and on the album, it seems more like an interlude, sitting between the two catchy and exuberant pop songs, "Gepetto" and "Slow Dog". But, on it's own, it shines. There very are few albums (14) I like as much as this one; songs like this are the reason.
5. Liz Phair - Love Song. This is one of her early "girlysounds" songs. A self-recorded demo, really. Compared to Gibbons's sultry witch and Donnely's bewitching sprite, Phair's voice is raw and unpolished. But maybe that's not entirely fair; it is just a demo, after all. And, really, listening to Phair isn't about vocal technique or timbre - her songs do the real work. Though, at six minutes, this one is a bit long for what it does. With a little editing, it probably could've worked on Exile - it has that same mixture of bitter lyrics and unusual and melancholy chords.

OK, Go!

It being Monday
Turn on your i pods
And shuffle the first
Five describe these songs
To us.

1. Cassandra Wilson - Last Train To Clarksville. As with many of her covers, the only trace of the original is in the lyrics. The music from the Monkees' original has been turned inside out. All traces of the Beatles have been blasted away, too: no more jangly guitar, no more harmonies. No more 60's British invasion sound. What's left is bluesy and funky and a bit eerie. Triple A Plus.
2. Sunny Day Real Estate - Song About An Angel. The quintessential SDRE song: pretty and melodic, alternating with heavy. In retrospect, this really wasn't too different from what the far-more-mainstream Smashing Pumpkins were doing around that time (94); but, SDRE used a lot more grunge-y dissonance, some of that emo shouty background vocal thing, and a relatively raw and unfussy approach. Enigk's voice vocals are typically unintelligible here, but they do set the mood simply by tone. He's placid, sleepy in the quietest sections, then works his way up to screaming rage in the loud parts. Which, I guess, is how those things usually go. Interesting song structure here, tho. It's not verse-chorus-verse, rather it's a series of four or five increasingly-loud parts, then a single repeat. Great song, great album.
3. Getz / Gilberto - Pra Machuchar Meu Coracao. To me, all the songs on this album which are not "Girl From Ipanema" are the same song - a laid-back bossa nova beat, Gilberto sings something in Portuguese, then Stan Getz does a lyrical sax solo. Pretty, relaxing, short, sweet.
4. Sidney Bechet - Characteristic Blues. A puzzling one. It's built from sections in a handful of different styles, so I guess it's a suite; but compressed into 2:50, it's more like a sampler. It starts with a swinging clarinet solo over a slow blues groove, then after a minute, a singer shows up and does a couple verses of a blues call-and-response with the band (which sometimes, oddly, does its response in double-time), then a bit of yodeling. Finally, Bechet closes it out with a blazing clarinet solo over a much faster bit of music which seems unrelated to the anything that preceded it; during which, the songs ends in the middle of a bar with just a quick fade - as if they simply ran out of time. I wonder if this was a much longer song that they cut down to fit onto a record, and just couldn't get the timing right.

   The internet tells me that Bechet played this at Buckingham Palace and that King George V. was impressed. It also tell me that Stravinsky's "Three Pieces for Clarinet Solo" was inspired by this tune.

5. Sea And Cake - Aerial It's definitely not classic Sea And Cake, but it's not a terrible song. Has its moments.

Go.

Enshufflize your music replayertrons and describulate the first one, two, three, four, five outputtings:

1. The Kinks - When I See That Girl Of Mine. A quick 2:01 from 1965's "The Kink Kontroversy". I'd never heard this one before a couple of years ago, when I acquired the entire Kinks discography from my brother. Well, I'd never heard the whole song. The bridge, however, I'd known for a long time, because Nod used it as the bridge in their mid-90s song, "G-thing" - which, to me, elevates each song. It elevates the Kinks' song because knowing someone likes something makes you re-consider it (is there a name for this reaction? there should be).

   And Nod... well, Nod fascinates me - they're a unique band, with a unique sound, and I can never tell if they're genius or if I just enjoy their brand of seemingly haphazard chaos. The closest comparison I can think of is Pavement - but a far looser and grittier Pavement. In fact, they make Pavement sound downright slick, but that lo-fi, let-it-all-hang-out, jammin but not like that, aesthetic that Pavement plays with? Nod is saturated with it. In "G-Thing", as in most of their tunes, the guitars and bass seem almost oblivious to each other, most of the time. They just chug through the song structure that the singer and the drummer enforce, doing their own thing, not too concerned about key or melody or what the other guys are doing. The singer and his guitar stay roughly in sync, rhythmically at least. But on the whole it sounds very, umm, free-form. So, to discover that they grafted this chunk of an obscure Kinks song into it - and that it sounds absolutely natural in context - makes me reassess their abilities. Are they craftier than they let on? Is this chaos more organized than it sounds? Probably.

   Though I should probably stop trying to figure out how bands work. Some things are best left mysterious.

2. Led Zeppelin - All Of My Love. I didn't really know anything about Zeppelin when this song came out, and it took me quite a long time to figure out that this was from the band that did Stairway and Dazed & Confused. All that goofy synth. Yipes! Anyway, it's an OK song, but if it wasn't a Zeppelin song I doubt anyone would know about it.
3. Tom Waits - 9^th And Hennepin. A poem that reads like a chapter from a noir novel gruffly grumbled over minimal background music. Actually not bad. I wish I had made an effort to get into Waits when this was still fresh. I probably would've liked it a lot more, back in the 80s.
4. Smaller Animals - Keep Away. This is me, having a lot of fun with some of the absurd modulation effects on my BR600. A holiday family classic, fer sher.
   

5. Norman Blake - Old Grey Mare. Blake's one of the indisputable all-time great flatpickers. There aren't any YouTube links for his "Old Grey Mare", though... philistines.

OK, now you go.