Music: Friday Random Ten

Another round of Friday music. Let's see how much The Residents dominate my life today.

1. Yeti What Are You
   Snakefinger
   Manual of Errors
   
   Not quite another Residents tracks, but close -- Snakefinger collaborated with the Eyeball band quite often. This is one of my favourite of his songs, largely because of the lurching waltz rhythm and the overall dark tone.
   


2. Thermonuclear Explosion
   The Frantics
   Frantic Times
   
   This is supposed to be a random music list, but I can't just skip this track. It's not one of the Frantics' better known skits, but it's a perfect example of their style. Two cops get a call to a "421" -- a thermonulcear explosion.
   
   

   That nuclear blast has really backed up the afternoon traffic. A lot of rubberneckers are slowing down to look at that five-mile crater. Then they get radiation sickness and drop dead at the wheel. Nuclear fallout is reducing visibility on the expressway, and the collector lanes are fused solid. Police advise that the lakeshore route is also slow due to construction and giant lizards that mutated when the radiation from the bomb reached the zoo. Garth Road might be a good alternate. Otherwise, traffic is fleeing well. There's anarchy, panic, and destruction this rush hour. For the good times, drink Harvest Malt Ale.

   
   


3. The Perilous Night No. 4
   John Cage
   The Perilous Night
   
   One of John Cage's works for "prepared piano" -- a piano which has had various objects inserted between the strings to change the timbre of each note. It turns the piano from a melodic instrument into a more purely percussive one.
   


4. Stormtrooper in Drag
   Gary Numan (covered by St. Etienne)
   Random: A Gary Numan Tribute
   
   Another cover from a tribute album. This is one of the best covers on the album, which (like many tribute collections) is pretty average overall. It's pretty un-Numan-esque, with a pop dance-club feel, and I tend to prefer covers that depart a lot from the originals.
   


5. After All
   David Bowie
   The Man Who Sold The World
   
   I'm not a huge Bowie fan -- the Bowie on my iPod is mainly for my SO, so that when I'm DJing one of our drives somewhere, she's got at least some stuff she prefers in the mix. I started listening to Bowie around Black Tie White Noise, so I never had the "his older stuff is better" opinion, since I knew his newer stuff better (Earthling is probably my favourite of his albums). But this is one of my favourite Bowie songs, with its lilting, melancholy feel.
   


6. Spam
   "Weird Al" Yankovic
   UHF
   
   I grew up on classical music and classical music comedy -- Victor Borge, Anna Russell, and Spike Jones is Murdering the Classics. So it was natural that when I started listening to popular music, "Weird Al" would be included. Spam isn't one of his better spoofs, though. My favourites are the ones which play on a band's style without actually mimicking a particular song, like Dog Eat Dog (Talking Heads), Dare to be Stupid (Devo), or Bob (Bob Dylan).
   


7. In the Flat Field
   Bauhaus
   In the Flat Field
   
   A lively little ditty. Bauhaus is always good as a pick-me-up.
   


8. Immature
   Hamasaki Ayumi
   Download
   
   JPop dance music. I downloaded a few Hamasaki tracks from her website a couple of years back when the Molly Star Racer teaser trailer came out with her music. Nothing remarkable, just bright and bouncy.
   


9. Watching You Without Me
   Kate Bush
   Hounds of Love
   
   Hounds of Love has some of my favourite Kate Bush songs on it -- Under Ice, Waking the Witch -- but Watching You Without Me doesn't grab me quite as much. It has some of the same interesting production tricks that I like in those other two, but the overall song doesn't really grab me.
   

Not a bad set -- some favourite tracks in there. One of the problems with having a huge collection of stuff you've listened to for 20 years on your iPod is that a lot of it is so familiar you don't mind skipping over it, and a relatively small fraction of it is actually "favourite" tracks. So it's nice when they turn up as often as they have this time.