Playlist #2

When Nat and I decided to bring back this blog as somewhat of a method of forcing ourselves to actually write instead of dicking around on Gchat and talking big about how we're gonna start some sort of awesome blog and THEN start writing, we decided that it would contain a few main things:

• Terrible run-on sentences, apparently.
• Wanky art history major-style prose (that's him, not me. I'm actually quite engaging).
• Playlists of what we're listening to recently.

Well that means that it's my turn to write a playlist...EVEN THOUGH I THOUGHT WE WOULD BE WRITING THEM TOGETHER YOU HEARTLESS BASTARD. I also thought that we'd be doing individual songs instead of albums, but communication has never really been one of my strong suits (seriously, just ask my girlfriend! Heyoooo!). Anyway, here's a list of what I've been listening to lately. At some point in the future we'll probably do some sort of thing where we make actual playlists and put them on mediafire or whatever for people to download, but that's, like, hard.

The Olivia Tremor Control - The Sylvan Screen

Yea, I've been getting back into a lot of the Elephant 6 stuff that I was so obsessed with in High School and ditched so unceremoniously a few years later for grinding electronic noise. I guess The Olivia Tremor Control had kind of an effect on my future music tastes, what with their penchant for dense found sound/noise sculptures and complex instrumentation. In fact, whenever I'm asked to describe them, I say "they sound like The Beatles, if they were less talented and Yoko Ono was actually talented." I keep expecting people to laugh at that, because I think it's funny, but no one ever does. Anyway, I've put this song on every time I've gotten in my car for the past, like, three weeks. It starts off slow with some, umm, nature sounds, but it soon changes into one of their ballsiest tracks, with crunchy guitar riffs punctuated by sparse banjo picking and beautifully harmonized vocals. Good stuff, pitch-perfect pop with enough complexity to bear up under repeated listens.

Drink Pairing: Tecate, outside on a fall night with people you don't hate.

Madness - House of Fun

Another band that I'm revisiting after a long hiatus. When I was real young, my dad basically had four bands which he played on a rotating basis on every car trip: Madness, Squeeze, The Clash and Led Zeppelin. Madness is probably the one that stuck with me the most, especially this song, with it's rollicking, carnivalesque chorus and non-stop catchy energy. I was stuck a few towns over on a rainy day last week waiting for my car to be repaired, and ducked into a small record shop. While there, I found an old Madness compilation album in the used bin, bought it, and have been bumping this shit nonstop ever since.

Drink Pairing: Bitter, with several soccer fans with shaved heads and boots who are being kind of casually racist, but it's ok because no one seems to mind and they're doing goofy dances.

Nirvana - Oh The Guilt

Seriously, I'm a fucking nostalgia fiend these days. I used to be one of those creepy Nirvana (let's be honest...Kurt) obsessives, but kinda outgrew it around the time my acne began to clear up. But I still hold a soft spot in my heart for them, and after having a fairly intense argument with a loved one about their merits, spent a few hours listening to a few of my favorites, this being chief among them. I mean, seriously, for a b-side this is a ball-crushingly awesome song. With its intense-as-all-hell guitar riff and abstract, gritty vocals, its kind of surprising that this got buried in the archives instead of blowing up the charts. 

Drink Pairing: The tears of everyone who made fun of you in middle school.

Venetian Snares - The Identification Circles Levitate

New Snares EP. Abstract reggae-based glitch. Nuff said. 

Drink Pairing: Lots and lots of weed, with a whiskey chaser for anger.

Toecutter - Come on Barbie

Toecutter has always ridden that knife edge between being too cutesy and lo-fi and being too ADHD and complex. Honestly, probably like 99% of breakcore artists either carve themselves a comfortable niche on either side or fall pathetically off this edge and slice themselves up the taint and into the vitals. He's one of the few who can walk this line, with crusty pastiches of cheesy pop standards holding their own against bare noise and mind-numbing chopped breaks, making his pop culture-addled deconstructions something more than the sum of their parts. Mix that with the awesome video for this song, and you have something which I can totally watch every day.

Drink Pairing: An overpriced vodka cocktail.

Well, there you go. Yea I made a playlist which is only, like, five songs long. What, do I have unlimited time to write a bunch of stuff that no one is gonna read anyway? Shit.