Blah. Stupid shitty Mondays.
Random five. Describe.
- Pogues - Planxty Noel Hill. Not what I want first thing Monday AM. It's the same four bars of frantic fiddling repeated over and over with odd little gaps every few reps. Is it over? No! It was just catching your attention. Here it goes again! Maybe I should hold off on doing this till a better mood finds me...
- Allman Bros - Stand Back. A standard Allman Bros song. Not bad, but they have better songs.
- Wilco - Panthers. An old one, but it's the kind of slow, mellow, ambitionless song that Wilco defaults to, these days.
- Broken Social Scene - Superconnected. Link is to a very nice, mostly-acoustic, live-in-a-record store performance. In the studio version, the guitars seem to slip into a Sea And Cake song ("Parasol"), at the very end. In the live version, it's clear that singer/guitarist Kevin Drew is playing something very close to "Parasol" the whole way through. Nice song, either way. Is that a bass clarinet? Groovy. I also like the Belly song of the same name.
- Colorblind James Experience - Wedding At Cana. Based on the same template as a lot of CBJE's other early songs; a couple of bars of catchy melody, a couple bars of deadpan vocals, repeat. This one is a bit long, and the lyrics to this aren't as awesome as those on some of its peers. But, I like it anyway.
Your turn!
John Coltrane – Jupiter
From Interstellar Space, when Trane had definitely sailed way beyond the stratosphere. The opening lick sounds a lot like part 3 of Love Supreme, except the backing is far less rich. I once had much more of an appetite for free jazz, but now so much of it just sounds to me like aimless goofing off.
Stray Cats – (She’s) Sexy + 17
I really love this shit. The Stray Cats did the rockabilly revival with edge and attitude, yet were totally mainstream accessible with tight musicianship and clean production. (As opposed to, say, the Cramps.)
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – The Curse of Millhaven
I can get into the spirit of most of Murder Ballads, but I really can’t take the lyrical content of this one. I guess I’m okay if you shoot up a bar full of patrons, but once you start killing children and dogs, I hit my limit.
Gipsy Kings – No Vivire
I’ve said it before: the Gipsy Kings are a fantastic flamenco-pop unit, and if you’ve heard one of their tracks, you’ve heard them all.
Shakira – Te Espero Sentada
From her first album (the only one I have), when she was still figuring out what style she wanted to play. This is kind of an amateurish lounge number with amateurish blues choruses. Eh.
Stray Cats
i admit to having a copy of (most of) their ‘best of’ record on my iPod. good stuff.
Bass clarinet, and a cornet. Amazing production, especially considering the location.
Today’s shuffle starts after “Heartbreaker” ends.
1. “Free as a Bird”. Not “Free Bird”. With the thing at the end that always catches me by surprise.
2. “Shannon Stone”. Mark Vidler takes the idea of mash-up to weird new places.
3. “Beautiful Queen”, Robyn Hitchcock. Mossy Liquor is the Robyn Hitchcock outtakes disk that fails to live up to the greatness of Robyn Hitchcock outtake disks. This version has some nice strings on it but is in no way as great a song as the Moss Elixir track.
4. “Godnatt Oslo”, Robyn Hitchcock. From his latest disk Tromsø, Kaptein. I’m not super enthusiastic about this record but recording “Goodnight Oslo” in Norwegian seems like a productive use of time. (By funny coincidence, my favorite track on Mossy Liquor is a German version of “Alright, Yeah”.) The track from Tromsø, Kaptein that you should not miss is Dismal City.
5. “For the Sake of Days Gone By”, Jimmie Rodgers. Boy oh boy is this a nice song. Sort of a perfect follow-on to “Godnatt Oslo” in terms of not being dark and bassy.
Bonus track for when the shuffle is done: Barbara Lamb playing “Twisty Girl”.
“Today’s shuffle starts after “Heartbreaker” ends.”
ain’t that fun?
ditto on your Robyn comments.