Friday, November 04, 2005

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.

2 comments:

teflonjedi said...

I missed the whole Kate Bush thing, as I was a hair too young when she was big, I guess. Perhaps it's time for me to do a little more musical exploring...

James Redekop said...

There's a new Kate Bush album out, after something like 13 years, so I'm going to give it a listen and post about it in the next couple of days.