Banjo! Harmonica! Yeah, this definitely has the mid-aughts thing going. Fun as hell, though. Take away the horns and add some soaring guitar and this could be a Ted Leo track.
Man, I certainly wasn't expecting this, but I really like it. Maybe it's just the female backing vox and the overall production, but it reminded me a bit of late-period Go Betweens as well as the aforementioned XTC and World Party.
At first I thought that shirt was the cover of In the Court of the Crimson King, which kinda make sense. I was disappointed to see that, no, it was just her face.
However, given Ms. Cyrus' curious musical appetites, I do expect to see her tweet "I repeat myself under stress I repeat myself under stress I repeat myself under stress" at some point in the next year or two.
There's a reason you gave AOTW to Gibson and not Speedy Ortiz: Me Moan is assloads more interesting than Major Arcana. Which is not to say that the latter is a bad album by any stretch, but it also doesn't have any "What the fuck?" moments like Me Moan does.
True story: One morning in eighth grade, while the whole student body was piled into the bleachers before school got going for the day, I got into a fight with a kid over whether Green Day (my band) or Pearl Jam (his band) were better. Along the way, I'm pretty sure I called him white trash because he said his parents were going to vote against an upcoming school property tax hike.
It got busted up pretty quickly, but I got away with just an "indoor recess" because I mentioned the property tax thing to the principal, who liked me anyway because I was a nerd.
Also, I'd still take Dookie over PJ's entire discography.
Hell of a set of pipes. Good track, too.
Anyone else find it odd that she performed with sunglasses on and then whipped them off as soon as the song was over? I realize that they're affectation (yeah, yeah, I know, what isn't affectation?), but man, if you're gonna strike a rock star pose, try to hold it just a little longer before you start brushing your hair back and fidgeting awkwardly.
Good stuff--nicely splits the difference between early Floyd and the first two Yes albums.
I have to say, the period 1969-70 when psych was turning into prog--but was still a long way from the latter's Persian-rugs-and-Shastric-scriptures apotheosis/nadir--is probably one of the most interesting mini-eras in rock history. It's gonna be a long time before that soil's completely depleted, as this track shows.
That Nu Shooz song gets played twice a day on the Clear Channel "old school" pop station (target demo: women ages 35-54) here in the Bay Area. It's kinda terrible and awesome at the same time.
I get the impression that Portland had a really wildly eclectic music scene before it became hipsterville.
It's interesting how moving a style as seemingly banal and played-out as folk-rock can be when it discards traditional lyrical structures. I mean, this sounds like a dude sitting on his porch telling stories of a pretty hardscrabble working-class life (Huntington Park has always been a pretty grungy place), and yet something in it just makes me smile. Well done, Mr. Kozelek, well done.
Dulli: a Great Greek-American. That guilt's Orthodox, not Catholic.
While Gentlemen is a superbly singular statement, I think 1965 is a better record. It actually is influenced by black music (and not just the Boomer stuff--the dude namechecks Nas!), and represents an alternative remarriage of guitar rock with the black musical tradition. Unfortunately, it came out in 1998, which is exactly the year that knuckle-dragging rap-metal conquered the world, and was thus completely overlooked.
Sandman could write some amazing uptempo riffs, but it's the slower stuff that really makes me smile. "Let's Take a Trip Together" is just deathlessly cool.
One thing that makes Morphine's first two records so great is that they sound like they could have been recorded any time between 1965 and the early '90s. In terms of style, they're so out of time that they're essentially timeless.
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