335_songs_part_three raze [continued from] — 335_songs — — 335_songs_part_two — 133. thom yorke // black swan from the album "the_eraser" (2006) "what_will_grow_crooked, you can't make straight," begins what i've always thought was the strongest song on thom yorke's lone solo album (not that there's anything wrong with the rest of it). it's a narrower, more skeletal set of songs and sounds, at least compared to what people had grown used to hearing from radiohead, and the reviews were mixed. i've never found it quite as engaging as the likes of "ok computer", "amnesiac", or "hail to the thief", but there's a chilly emotional distance there that stands apart from a lot of what thom's done with radiohead, and it appeals to me on some weird level. technically this is a bit of a cheat; there's already a radiohead song way back at #5, and one of my goals here is to avoid repetition as much as possible. but i pulled this one out today after not hearing it for ages, and i'd forgotten how much i like it. the song was used to good effect over the end_credits of richard linklater's powerful rotoscoped film adaptation of philip k. dick's "a scanner darkly" — but not, as far as i know, in darren aronofsky's "black swan". missed opportunity? or would that have been too obvious? listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJhmKF4npMs 130612 ... raze 134. oliver schroer // the tears of mary from the album "camino" (2006) i didn't even know about oliver schroer until he was already gone. i lucked into catching a documentary about him on television one night. his music struck some chords in me that hadn't been sounded in a long time. see the blathe "camino" for a bit about this album. better yet, listen to oliver himself talk about this beautiful thing he made and play one of its songs, in an excerpt from the film "silence at the heart of things". watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-_sjz6Iazo 130613 ... raze 135. the avalanches // frontier psychiatrist from the album "since i left you" (2000) years ago, i met the brother of a girl i went to high school with at a house party, and we talked a bit about music. his whole face lit up when he learned i'd seen this music video and enjoyed its weirdness as much as he did. "if i could have one wish," he told me, "it would be to carry that music video around with me in my pocket, so i could pull it out and show it to people at random." what a great idea, i thought. a collapsible video you could take with you anywhere, capable of projecting itself. a self-sufficient, self-generating hologram. you see what i see, and i see what you see. this one's more about the video than the song for a change, though the music is interesting in its own right, with samples drawn from sources as disparate as wayne and shuster comedy records, a john waters film, golf instructional recordings, "reading for the blind" tapes, and a mariachi band. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS3AZ12xf6s 130614 ... raze 136. harry nilsson // lifeline from the album "the point" (1971) today is harry nilsson's birthday. he would be 72. harry recorded 18 albums between 1966 and 1980, if you count a few movie soundtracks he composed that were made up of original material. yet most people who know harry, if they know him at all, remember him either for the two biggest hits he had, which he didn't write himself — "without you" (a badfinger song) and "everybody's talkin" (written by fred neil) — or for the songs he wrote that were hits in someone else's hands (three dog night scored with "one", the monkees had hits with "cuddly toy" and "daddy's song", and on and on). for a songwriter with the voice and talent harry had, there's a brutal irony to the fact that the most success he ever experienced was with songs that weren't his own, and the songs of his that were monster hits only made it big after some of the weird edges were sanded down and the words he wrote were sung by someone else. i could write a novella about his strange, fascinating career and life. i kind of did that once already, a few years ago, when i was sick with an industrial-strength sinus infection and had harry on the brain. regurgitating all of that here would probably make for some pretty ponderous reading, though, so i'll try to keep this brief. as is often the case, harry has experienced something of a resurgence in the years since his death in 1994. he isn't quite a household name, but his songs seem to show up in movies pretty regularly now. a few years ago, someone even came up with the corpse-molesting idea of incorporating "coconut" into a coke commercial in the most asinine way possible. i think the main reason he wasn't a larger star during his lifetime, and the reason he's still somewhat under-appreciated today, is because harry couldn't sit still creatively. you could grab two random albums from his oeuvre, and there's an excellent chance they won't sound much like they were made by the same person. while i think of that restlessness as a good thing, and something i actively seek out, it doesn't often translate to album sales or remaining popular with the masses. but for anyone who's open-minded and musically curious, there aren't many discographies as interesting, surprising, enthralling, maddening, or sprawling as harry's. if i had to choose one song to play for someone as an ice-breaker or introduction, it wouldn't be any of the obvious hits. it might be "all i think about is you", one of the best love songs (or lovelorn songs) anyone's ever written. maybe one of his transformative versions of randy newman's songs on "nilsson sings newman". maybe "pretty soon there'll be nothing left for everybody", which must be the catchiest song in existence about the end of the world. or maybe this song right here. the catalyst for "the point" was a moment of drug-induced revelation. "i was on acid," harry explained, "and i looked at the trees, and i realized that they all came to points. and the little branches came to points. and the houses came to points. i thought, 'oh! everything has a point. and if it doesn't, there's a point to it!" thus was born a cycle of songs and an animated film about a round-headed boy named oblio who has to wear a hat to hide his "pointlessness" from the other people in his town, who all have pointy heads. eventually oblio is cast out into the pointless forest, where he and his dog arrow learn all things have a point, no matter how elusive it may be. though it originally appeared on that album and in that film, i think the gravity of this performance makes it clear that this song was much more personal to harry than it might have seemed on the surface. his astonishing voice is in full flight. and the jarring moment in the middle of the song when he breaks the spell just for a second with the way he sings the word "blues" on the line "blues are all around me" (you'll know it when you hear it)...i'm not sure there's a more perfect moment anywhere to encapsulate just what a twisted genius he was. happy birthday, harry. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YGBDpcz86Q 130615 ... raze (by "movie soundtracks he composed that were made up of original material", what i mean to say is, none of the songs on those soundtracks are melodic ideas recycled from past albums, as is often the case when a pop/rock artist works on a movie soundtrack. rather, the material is unique to those soundtracks and doesn't appear elsewhere. yes. that is what i mean to say.) 130615 ... raze 137. two ton boa // comin' up from behind from the "two ton boa" EP (2000) two ton boa is bassist/multi-instrumentalist sherry fraser's baby. she writes and sings the songs, built around a twin electric bass assault (there's rarely any guitar to be heard in her music), and exactingly arranges all the parts for the other musicians to play, so what you're hearing on record is almost a direct line to the sounds she hears in her head. her music is dark as all hell. there's little humour or light to be found in it. when you're in the mood for that sort of thing, it can hit just the right spot. when you're not, it can be a little overwhelming. i don't think it would work well as background music. maybe the best way to describe it is to take what sherry herself said about the internet, and apply it to her work instead: it's "beautiful in an ugly way, and huge but dangerous." she has a touch of the theatrical about her, both vocally and in the melodies she writes, which are at once gothic and carnivalesque. for someone with a voice capable of such range and beauty, she isn't afraid to make it sound ugly or frightening when a song calls for it. she doesn't consider herself a gloomy person, but in an interview to coincide with the release of her 2006 album "parasiticide" she explained that the music has given her a place for those darker thoughts and feelings to go, calling it a "survival tactic" as opposed to therapy. i prefer her first EP to the full-length album. while the production isn't quite as rich, it feels like there's twice as much going on in half the space. and then there are her lyrics, which should come off as melodrama, but the intensity of her delivery gives them some serious weight. "my will is broken and my tongue has lost her feet." "she's got an avalanche packed in a snowball." "who could tell? you can't smell poison in a perfumed well." "your gold-digging bird will stoop to swallow more worms than you, as her priceless hole spits out the last of you." here's the second track from that debut EP. it's got a nice snarling cabaret-ish lilt to it, i think. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQu8jtW-EXE 130616 ... raze 138. boards of canada // pete standing alone from the album "music has the right to children" (1998) boards of canada are scottish brothers marcus eoin and michael sandison. for many people, their music (and this album in particular) evokes childhood memories and general feelings of nostalgia. it's never quite done that for me. i'm not sure why. i hear something a little eerier at work here. not that i mind; i like eerie where art is concerned. and i like that eerier is actually a word. you go, eerier. you be your badass rarely-employed-comparative-form-of-eerie self. as idm goes, this stuff doesn't get my brain and bloody bits buzzing in the same way the best aphex twin and prefuse 73 songs do, but it does make for strange and fascinating listening when i'm just on the verge of falling asleep and not quite able to drop off, as it did just now. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Nhgaj6kNhU 130617 ... raze 139. annie // heartbeat from the album "anniemal" (2004) i bought this album nine years ago for this specific track. it's a pop song that's just off-kilter enough to appeal to me, with its over-saturated sledgehammer beat, annie's odd pronunciation of the word "drumming" (she sings it "drooming" and comes down hard on the d), and an unshakable feeling of melancholy for a song that is, on the surface, about inhibitions sloughing off on the dance floor and a good memory being made. annie's voice has been described as "thin" and reminiscent of kylie minogue. while she might not be capable of vocal pyrotechnics, she knows exactly what she's doing with what she's got, and i don't think she's ever done it any better than she did right here. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CObvp32Q4Eo 130618 ... raze 140. count basie orchestra // one o'clock jump from the album "the complete decca recordings" (1937-1939) the count basie orchestra's theme song, and one of my favourite count basie tunes in general. here's proof that the twelve-bar blues structure can yield happy songs as well as the weary and downcast. this performance, which is either live or well-mimed, is taken from the 1943 film "reveille with beverly". watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08jyOwx96Ig 130619 ... raze 141. the rolling stones // rocks off from the album "exile on main st." (1972) these days the rolling stones exist as little more than a depressingly stale (albeit well-oiled) oldies act. the last wall-to-wall great album they made was "some girls" in 1978. the b-side of "tattoo you" is probably the last time they managed to be great for at least a whole *side* of a vinyl LP (the second half of that record might be as underrated as "black and blue"). everything since then ranges from "decent" to "jesus, what were they thinking?", and when a music critic writes a review of a new album hailing it as "their best since 'some girls'", it ain't saying much. when the stones were good, they were very good. and if i could only take one of their albums with me to a deserted island, it would be "exile". no waffling about it. i bought this album when i was fourteen years old, popped it in the car on the ride home, and my jaw dropped when the opening track segued into a smeared, inverted sonic world during the bridge section. i'd never heard mick and keith sound anything like that before. there are other great stones albums, sure, but none of them have the same sprawling, ragged brilliance of this one. one of my proudest moments remains getting my stepfather to play this song for company, to show off his new stereo system, completely oblivious to the r-rated references to sex and drug use in the lyrics. subversive fun for the whole family. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lNP-x94-SE 130620 ... raze 142. joshua jesty // speak to me from the album "girl" (2009) a song from someone i know! josh is a good friend of mine. we've been exchanging music and emails for years, and right now i owe him an e-novel or two. we managed to meet face to face at one point, which was a little surreal. it was kind of like seeing a film adaptation of a book you know inside_out, and finding that the guy they got to play the protagonist looks and sounds pretty much exactly the way you imagined them in your head...but someone's drugged your popcorn, and the next thing you know, you're a main character in the film too. we've been talking for a while about someday making some sort of collaborative album, and i'm curious to hear what might happen there. josh is maybe a little more of a proper craftsman, while i tend to try and subvert things like song structure wherever i can, but i think that could make for an interesting contrast. i'll let his own little website bio blurb tell you a bit more about him: "joshua jesty is a professional starving artist based out of cleveland, ohio. he has been making music that people have been writing nice things about since 1998's 'more songs about the reproductive cycle'. nowadays he dances salsa, kicks doctors, and makes tons of pop and un-pop music. he lives with no regrets and his rabbit hazel in a physical house." i think 2009's "girl" is the best album he's made so far. when i first heard it, it was as if everything i'd been hearing in black_and_white suddenly exploded into the aural equivalent of a huge widescreen vista. we both like to make a lot of music and work quickly, but he put a lot of time, thought, work, sweat, and love into this album, and you can hear it in the grooves. the original title was "finally, joshua jesty is making a record with a short title, and the title of the record is 'girl'". you see why we get along. i can't really pick highlights here, but this song's shoegazey strut has always been a standout moment for me. i highly recommend listening to some of the other tracks on bandcamp, and if you like what you hear, downloading the whole album and tossing a few bucks josh's way (it's "pay what you want"). listen: http://joshuajesty.bandcamp.com/track/speak-to-me 130621 ... raze 143. rickie lee jones // living it up from the album "pirates" (1981) if you only ever own one rickie lee jones album, make it this one. it's one of the only things i've heard that deserves comparison with laura nyro's "new york tendaberry", in the way the songs are all built around rickie's voice and piano, and how the arrangements and dynamics shift on a dime from one song to the next. it's also very much rickie's own idiosyncratic thing, and something of a breakup album, recorded following the dissolution of her relationship with tom_waits. if you like "pirates", pick up "girl at her volcano" and "flying cowboys" too. and if you like all of that stuff as much as i do, well...marry me. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI9nr2KYMJg 130622 ... raze 144. john martyn // may you never from the album "solid air" (1973) john martyn had a big bear hug of a voice, and he took his music a lot of different places over the years, blurring the lines between folk, rock, jazz, ambient, blues, and anything else that appealed to him at any given time. as good as some of his studio albums are, something special would happen in a live setting when it was just him and an acoustic guitar (with or without his foil danny thompson on double bass), whether he was running his axe through effects boxes to create a swirling psychedelic sound, or leaving it dry and unplugged. this song is one i always come back to — specifically this live performance on "the old grey whistle test". listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOi_wxypeGc 130623 ... raze 145. the walkmen // the rat from the album "bows + arrows" (2004) it's possible that this song's pseudo-popularity was, as stylus magazine would tell you, "the worst thing to ever happen to the walkmen". but hey, a good tune is a good tune. i first heard this one at a bar, back in my friday night drinking days, and the tightly coiled rage in hamilton leithauser's voice hit me like a cold kick to the face. that's right. i totally just combined the clothes of two overused metaphors to make a new outfit no one's ever worn before. look at me go! anyway. a few lines in the bridge section really struck me at the time. "when i used to go out i'd know everyone i saw now i go out alone if i go out at all" this was like the theme song that had just missed me by a year or so, because by then i did have something of a social life, albeit one that had risen from the ashes of the last social life i'd killed. some things stop being true for a while so they can become true again later, in deeper ways. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSpWu1CMGsg 130624 ... raze 146. sam cooke // good times from the album "ain't that good news" (1964) if there's a sam cooke song that makes me feel like crying, it's this one, not "a change is gonna come". i don't know why. it's a happy song. maybe it's that voice, rough and smooth in all the right places. there's never been another quite like it. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo8j2ameTS0 130625 ... raze 147. frédéric chopin // berceuse Op. 57 in D-flat major (composed 1843-1844) "berceuse" means "cradle song" or "lullaby" in french, and that's apparently what this piece was intended to be. i first heard it in the movie "still breathing", which must be one of the best things brendan fraser has ever acted in — a fairy tale of sorts, but one that doesn't leave a cynic like me feeling a stronge urge to empty my stomach of its contents in a fruitless display of contempt...unless i ate fruit at some point during the day. then it wouldn't be an altogether fruitless display. i know what you're thinking. "very_punny." i also first wrote about my stomach's "contest" instead of its "contents". one for the freudian_typos, maybe? when will you learn, stomach, that vomiting is not a competition? anyway. the music grabbed me in much the same way the brahms piece i heard in "three sisters from moon lake" (#34 over on 335_songs_part_two) would later on, but with less of a melancholy feeling attached to it, and something a little more wistful in its place. still does. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om41h60Afyo 130626 ... raze 148. siouxsie and the banshees // cities in dust from the album "tinderbox" (1986) when i was fourteen or fifteen, living in a house with my dad, my almost-stepmother, and my almost-stepsister ("almost" because the getting-married part never quite happened), i heard this song come blaring out of almost-stepsister's bedroom a few times in between garbage and the clash, and i wondered who it was by. took me a while to figure it out. it remains probably my favourite siouxsie and the banshees song. if it wasn't used in some atmospheric pseudo-post-apocalyptic 80s film, it should have been. you think siouxsie sioux's singing influenced sinead o'connor a little? i'd never thought of that before, but i think i kind of hear it here. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hMagNuhLkk 130627 ... raze 149. santo & johnny // sleepwalk from the album "santo & johnny" (1959) this song has haunted me ever since i was a kid. it's all about that ghostly pedal steel guitar. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrO9ovdJ5WA 130628 ... raze 150. airman theme from the nintendo game "mega man 2" (1988) "mega man 2" is one of my favourite old school NES games of all time. one of the reasons for that: the music is ridiculously good throughout. you know what else is ridiculously good? this dude's version of the music from the "airman" stage, performed on acoustic piano. watch / listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guszz2k8Qww 130629 ... raze (the song was composed by manami matsumae. didn't have quite enough time to dig up that information when i was about sixty seconds away from blather's next-day turnover, but there it be.) 130630 ... raze 151. david bowie // sweet thing; candidate; sweet thing (reprise) from the album "diamond dogs" (1974) there are several great david bowie albums, but i've always had a special fondness for "diamond dogs". it's the only album in bowie's catalogue that featuress him as the lead guitarist — the only guitarist, in fact — almost all the way through, and he creates a great racket that makes me wish he'd taken on that role more often over the years. there's also a unique kind of spooky depravity to the music that isn't easily found elsewhere in his discography. the only real reference points i can think of are "a small plot of land" and "the motel" from the underrated "outside" album, and the title track from "aladdin sane". one thing all those songs share with this one (which is more of a suite than a single song, though it's clearly meant to be taken in one piece) is the wonderfully expansive, underrated piano-playing of mike garson. i'd somehow gone years listening to the album without hearing or really noticing this chunk of music, but when it finally hit me, it got me good. tempted as i was to go for "the motel", this one just edges it out at the moment as the quintessential david bowie song for me. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBezS7ElQJU 130630 ... raze you'd think that was a typo up there and i missed it in a race to once again beat the turnover time by a minute or so, but no! i decree "featuress" a word. a redundant word, but a word nonetheless. see "scary_dictionary" for details. 130701 ... raze 152. grizzly bear // all we ask from the album "veckatimest" (2009) everyone and their pet ferret seems to like the most recent grizzly bear album "shields" quite a bit. i just can't get into it. aside from one or two tracks, i find the whole thing kind of...well...boring. maybe that'll change at some point, but it ain't happened yet. "veckatimest" is a different story. "two weeks" was the song that got me to pick up the album, but this is one of the tracks i keep coming back for. i think it might be the single best thing daniel rossen has ever written. it does a neat job of encapsulating all the little dynamic and structural shifty things his songs tend to do. and that bit at the end, when he sings "i can't get out of what i'm into with you" over and over again, with the "to" in "into" so hard to catch...yes. so much yes. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeImOrp2bFI 130701 ... raze 153. the flamingos // i only have eyes for you (7" single; 1959) shoo-bop, shoo-bop. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeImOrp2bFI 130702 ... raze 154. michael hedges // aerial boundaries from the album "aerial boundaries" (1984) michael hedges did things with just an acoustic guitar and his two hands that will probably continue to blow my mind for as long as i have a mind to be blown. this is the first song of his i ever heard, a little over a decade ago. i think some derelict part of my jaw is still resting on the floor of the house i was living in at the time. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P9mmZyGb4s 130703 ... raze 155. kutiman // i'm new from the album "thruYOU: kutiman mixes youtube" (2009) speaking of minds being blown... kutiman is ophir kutiel, a jerusalem-born musician / composer / producer / animator. in 2009, he released "thruYOU", which theawesomer.com described as "an interesting seven-track album using potentially the largest sample library in the world: youtube". "at first i took some drummers," kutiman explained in a 2009 interview with radiowroclove.com. "before i had the idea about 'thruYOU', i took some drummers from youtube and i played on top of them — just for fun, you know. and then one day, just before i plugged [in] my guitar to play on top of the drummer from youtube, i thought to myself, you know...maybe i can find a bass and guitar and other players on youtube to play with this drummer. [...] it took me two months, but it was really intense. i barely ate, i just worked on a computer and went to sleep...day and night, and night and day...didn't see any friends, no family...not even the sun." when he was finished, he shared what he'd done with twenty of his friends, only to watch his two-month project become an internet sensation. within two weeks, there were ten million youtube views. in spite of the massive amount of attention and buzz "thruYOU" generated, it hasn't been commercialized in any way. i'd happily pay for a CD/DVD set of this stuff, and i'm sure a lot of other people would too, but it's not for sale, and i doubt it ever will be. all of the music remains free to anyone who wants to hear it, with links to the source material and each musician credited for their role, no matter how small it may be. four years later, i think about this guy surfing youtube, collecting random amateur videos people uploaded of themselves playing an instrument or singing, editing all the pieces together to make these brain-melting sonic tapestries, and it still bakes my noodle. while the whole thing is worth hearing, this song has always been a standout for me. imagine putting a video on youtube of yourself noodling on a piano or jamming out behind the drums, and then having someone ask if he can incorporate it into a project he's working on...and seeing this at the end. i think i would urinate all over a radish. 'cause that's what happens when i'm surprised beyond words. the unexpected detour this song takes just past the four and-a-half minute mark is one of my favourite things i've heard anywhere — a gorgeous musique concrète classical/r&b mashup that defies description. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsBfj6khrG4 the album can also be heard and seen in its entirety over here: http://thru-you.com/#/intro/ 130704 ... raze 156. the temptations // papa was a rollin' stone from the album "all directions" (1972) i liked "my girl" and "ain't too proud to beg" just fine, but this song's alien soundscape mesmerized me when i was a kid. when i was nine or ten, i ordered a double-CD temptations anthology from one of those mail-order music clubs that were everywhere back in the 1990s, only to learn the second disc skipped...on this song, and nowhere else. talk about a stiff kick in the junk. it's just as well, because i now know the version included on that compilation was the seven-minute single edit, with congas added to bolster the rhythm. fuck that shit, man. you need the full twelve-minute version, with all the extended, moody instrumental passages intact, and no congas. this has to be one of the best grooves ever put to tape, with that brilliant unchanging dead-stringed staccato bass line the glue binding it all together. it's not quite soul music, or blues, or disco...there are elements of all of those things, but they've been gutted and reassembled as something that lives someplace where genre no longer applies. producer norman whitfield, the story goes, badgered dennis edwards into recording his vocal parts dozens of times even though every take was technically perfect, intentionally frustrating and wearing him down until edwards' anger and fatigue quelled his normally energetic singing style, leaving a bitter, resigned moan in its place. maybe that was a bit excessive, but it's tough to criticize when you hear the performance he was able to get. otis williams, the lone surviving founding member of the temptations, considers this the last classic song the group recorded. i'd say he's right. but what a note to end a run of great music on, huh? listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C0-VB8jMxA 130705 ... raze 157. the beach boys // our prayer from the album "the smile sessions" (2011) i was never a huge beach boys fan. i always liked "good vibrations" (i have no memory of this — odd, since there isn't much information my brain has ever treated as disposable — but my friend peter tells me i was a very vocal proponent of the song's greatness around the time we were in the fourth or fifth grade), and a few other songs, but most of their music didn't move me. dennis wilson's solo work was another story...but i'll get to him on another day. the one beach boys album that fascinated me more than any other was the one i could never hear: "smile", brian wilson's ill-fated magnum opus. i read about the ambitious recording sessions, tried to separate fact from fiction, and wondered what this lost masterpiece might sound like, confident i would never get the chance to find out. wikipedia is as decent a one-stop-shop for the skeleton of the back-story as any other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smile_(The_Beach_Boys_album) brian finally "finished" the album in 2004, but what he released was a collection of newly recorded versions of songs intended for "smile", without the involvement of any of the other beach boys. in spite of the universal praise that album received, i didn't buy it. i was disappointed it even existed, in a way. it wasn't the original, mythic thing i'd wondered about for so long. it was a facsimile. i didn't want to listen to that. and i didn't want to hear some anonymous singer hitting the high notes where brian's aged vocal cords couldn't cut it anymore. i wanted to hear his voice singing those songs, back when it was still a remarkable, elastic instrument capable of astonishing flight. salvation came in 2011, when "the smile sessions" was released — a reconstruction of the original recordings, 45 years after the album's intended release date. i bought that thing, held my breath, and wouldn't you know...it lived up to the hype. it's pretty astonishing stuff all the way through, and it doesn't sound even a little bit dated today. brian wasn't just ahead of his time. he was in a place where time ceased to be a factor. he didn't stay there long, but the music he managed to make while he was in that place is something else. i do wonder if brian's life and career might have played out a little differently if he'd managed to drag "smile" across the finish line way back when. would it have been hailed as his masterpiece, the way it is now, or would it have sailed over the heads of people who wanted more songs about surfing and cars? would he have been able to avoid his collapse into drugs and self-doubt, and all those years spent in the proverbial wilderness? what other music might he have gone on to make if he hadn't been essentially sidelined from his own band for a decade? we'll never know. i guess the important thing is, at least we can hear this music now, as close as we're ever going to get to the way it was meant to sound. it stands apart from the rest of the beach boys catalogue, from the very first song — a wordless a capella piece that's practically classical music. think about dropping the needle on a new beach boys album in 1966 and this being the first thing you would have heard. one thought filled my brain the first time i heard it: "holy hell, those guys could sing." listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqXibjCZy5Y 130707 ... raze 158. eurythmics // love is a stranger from the album "sweet dreams [are made of this]" (1983) 80s guilty pleasure moment #4. some eurythmics songs are pretty weird for how popular they were. take this one, for example. there's an eerie emptiness to the synthesizer arrangement, and annie lennox's emotive singing is juxtaposed against dave stewart's recurring rhythmic grunts, which make it sound a little like he's having the most dispassionate sex in the world and he wants you to know how very bored he is. the music videos these two made in the 80s are equally weird, and fascinating to watch even now, not least because of what a charismatic chameleon annie was. "sweet dreams (are made of this)" was the second eurythmics album, and their commercial breakthrough, thanks in large part to the title track. it was recorded in an 8-track home studio funded not by record label support, but a loan secured from dave stewart's bank manager. the first time i heard this song was in the apartment of a girl i had a bit of a crush on, a little less than ten years ago. she generally preferred douchier company, but seemed to enjoy my attraction to her all the same. she used to be a friday-night regular at the same bar i was a friday-night regular at. i have no idea where she is or what she's doing now. sometimes i wonder. like when i hear this song. watch / listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyqww0RScMs 130707 ... raze 159. frank sinatra // i've got you under my skin from the album "songs for swingin' lovers!" (1956) "having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, i have an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as elation. whatever else has been said about me is unimportant. when i sing, i believe." frank sinatra said that. for a long time, i wasn't interested in sinatra or any of the other crooners. from what little i heard on oldies stations growing up, it all seemed kind of corny to me. i was tempted to investigate a few times, but i never really saw the point. torch songs and big band numbers just weren't cool to me. then i heard "i've got you under my skin" used as a musical cue in that life-altering romantic comedy starring mel gibson and helen hunt...you know, the one called "what women want (he may be anti-semitic and kind of crazy, but you'll find him endearing when he reaches out to britney spears years from now, so hold your tongue)". and i thought to myself, "that's kind of catchy. maybe it would be worth my while to pick up a CD after all." as luck would have it, the emporium of musical depravity at the mall (also known as HMV) had "songs for swingin' lovers!" in stock, along with some compilations. so i grabbed the album that wasn't a compilation, with frank smiling on the cover, hat in place. what seemed corny to me as a kid wasn't so corny anymore. before long, i'd become an unabashed sinatra fan. frank was an interesting guy. complicated. flawed. probably misogynistic. possibly affiliated with the mafia. but no matter what his personal failings were, he had a hell of a voice, and he knew how to use it to wring every last drop of pathos or nuance from whatever words he was singing. every time i've heard someone else try to sing a sinatra song (because even though he didn't write them, they became frank sinatra songs once he recorded them), it just sounds wrong. cheap, one-dimensional mimicry. when all else fails, return to the source. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2yEijia9qE 130708 ... raze 160. ryan adams // wonderwall from the album "love is hell" (2004) i was never much of an oasis fan. i think it mostly came down to a healthy dislike for the violent arrogance of the gallagher brothers. as amusing as their interviews could be, they almost always ended with a strong desire on my end to punch one or both of them. there was also the shameless beatles-aping, which started to sound stale and uninventive pretty quickly. ryan adams' reinvention of the old standby "wonderwall" was a revelatory moment, allowing me to hear what i thought was a pretty overplayed song with new ears. for the first time, it felt like it really meant something. even noel gallagher was momentarily humbled, which was almost the music world equivalent of the grinch's heart growing a few sizes on christmas day. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzZhtrsbJzs 130709 ... raze 161. the specials // a message to you, rudy from the album "the specials" (1979) is the self-titled debut album by the specials the best ska-punk album of all time? i don't know. but it's good stuff either way. this tune always gets the head bobbing. watch / listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cntvEDbagAw 130710 ... raze 162. john lee hooker // harry's philosophy from the album "the hot spot [original motion picture soundtrack]" (1990) 163. st. germain // sure thing from the album "tourist" (2000) two songs today, since i missed yesterday. i thought it might be a good opportunity to group two things together. first is a moody john lee hooker solo blues piece from a soundtrack album featuring a lot of music that wasn't actually used in the film it was written for. from eugene chadbourne's review on the allmusic website: "all one really needs to know about the film itself, other than the fact that it was directed by dennis hopper, is that it is awful, even by bad film standards. that it was the impetus for this marvelous music to be made is something listeners should be thankful for, particularly fans of either miles_davis or john lee hooker. anyone who grew up with the former artist during his electric transfusions of the '60s and '70s probably wondered why he wasn't playing with john lee hooker the whole time, since they both seemed headed in the same direction. in fact, one wonders why it took this crummy film and the personal appeal of its director to bring these two musical giants together. that they didn't seek to do something like this on their own can be looked at as a character flaw, one that can only be forgiven after listening to how wonderfully they interact here. an important aspect of the magic is their individual genius in the art of playing blues music in such utterly personal ways. there is no mistaking the sound of either hooker or davis for anyone else, with layer upon layer of detail backing that up — the actual sound of their instruments is distinctive, their choices of notes and timing completely unusual and impossible to imitate, and they both have a knack for casually making even the most basic sort of band track sound as if it is a style of music that has never been played before." the second track is a good example of how a creative electronic artist can take a sample from an existing song and use it as a building block on their way to something new, instead of relying on it to do all the heavy lifting for them. since the sample here is drawn from the john lee hooker track, why not treat the two songs as companion pieces? john lee hooker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJqk3xtkYfI st. germain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMM044eL56c (if that second link doesn't work in the US, try this one:) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx2IVSu8Htw&list=PL7B7DFE9FD015A952 130712 ... raze 164. erykah badu // otherside of the game from the album "baduizm" (1997) in his book "fear of music", gary mullholland describes erykah badu's debut album as "[the] missing link between '70s street funk, basement jazz, bohemian hip-hop and the blues reinventions of portishead". without being able to quantify it in those terms, i always felt she was one of the more interesting voices and personalities to come out of the neo-soul movement of the 90s. still do. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qpyDUfMq-8 130713 ... raze 165. chad vangaalen // flower gardens from the album "skelliconnection" (2006) chad vangaalen is a multi-instrumentalist / singer / songwriter / artist from calgary, alberta. he records his music himself at home, creates his own album cover art, and even animates his own music videos. trippy goodness. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKYeCWfXSro 130714 ... raze 166. taylor swift (f. the civil wars) // safe & sound from the soundtrack album "the hunger games: songs from district 12 and beyond" (2012) i am not a passionate fan of taylor swift, or the civil wars for that matter. they all seem like pretty genuine, down to earth people from what i can tell. the music is pretty and inoffensive enough. if i was a passenger in someone else's car and they were listening to it, i wouldn't ask them to turn it off. beats listening to nickelback any day of the week. but i have the same general complaint i do with most modern country and pop music: there's no fire. no grit. no dirt beneath the fingernails. no spit caked on the microphone grille. no sense of danger or mystery. i'll admit taylor swift's "trouble" got stuck in my head a few times, but that's behind me now. and...uh...oh shit. there it goes again. damn you! GET OUT OF MY HEAD! TROUBLE, TROUBLE, TROUBLE! anyway. about a year and-a-half ago, i was without television for a few weeks. i didn't miss it much. i don't watch a lot of television these days. but when the cable got turned back on, one of the first things i saw was the music video for this song, and i did a mental double-take. i liked it. a lot. all this time later, long after the initial shock has worn off, i still like it. a lot. suffice to say if taylor recorded a whole album of songs like this, in collaboration with the civil wars, and with t-bone burnett producing, i would run out and buy it in a second, and then i would listen to it until my ears fell off from overuse. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzhAS_GnJIc 130715 ... raze 167. pulp // this is hardcore from the album "this is hardcore" (1998) an epic slab of cinematic, depraved, warped sonic film noir, with a suitably twisted music video — this has always been, and will probably always be, the definitive pulp moment for me. as jarvis cocker himself asks near the song's end: "what exactly do you do for an encore?" watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXbLyi5wgeg 130716 ... raze 168. adriano celentano // prisencolinensinainciusol from the album "nostalrock" (1973) you've probably seen this video crop up on facebook at some point over the last few years, with the title "what american english sounds like to non-english speakers". it became something of a meme for a while there. i don't keep up with that stuff much, but i think this one's both funny and surprisingly infectious. the rhythm is just off-kilter enough that my brain starts to lose its place when the horns seem to appear in a slightly different place than they did before and the singing starts kicking in a little ahead of the beat, creating the impression that i should flip things and start the mental time-keeping according to what the kick drum is doing instead of using the kick/snare unison hits as a guide. i kind of like being thrown off like that. i also like how, just a little before the one-minute mark, it sounds a little like adriano says, "sustain your ninja!" oll raigth! watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZXcRqFmFa8 130717 ... raze 169. jim henson (as ernie) // i don't want to live on the moon from the album "the people in your neighborhood" (1980) we were lucky to grow up with some great children's shows on television, weren't we? i grew up watching "sesame street", "reading rainbow", "polka dot door", "fred penner's place", and "mr. dressup". what is there now that compares, aside from "sesame street" still existing? anything? this song moved something deep within me when i was a young'un. it still holds up today. if anything, i can appreciate the message even more now than i did back when my idea of "home" was much simpler. the theme song from "reading rainbow" is still pretty awesome too. i don't care what anyone says. that percolating synthesizer intro all on its own stirs up all kinds of nostalgic bliss. thanks be to youtube. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeNO56xNlZo 130718 ... raze 170. nickodemus (with quantic; featuring tempo & the candela allstars) // mi swing es tropical from the album "endangered species" (2006) about six years ago, this ipod commercial started showing up on television every so often: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwq12bL_GPQ after the shock of seeing a commercial that wasn't a pathetic warmed-over piece of braindead, capitalist, sexist, misogynistic, condescending, pandering shit wore off, i realized i dug the song, and eventually i was able to figure out what it was. then i forgot all about it for a long time, until i was trawling through a list of things i meant to buy on amazon.ca but never did, and the nickodemus album this tune hails from popped up. if this isn't good summer music, i don't know what is. it's all about that wicked bass line and fender rhodes groove. and those horns. and...well, the whole thing makes me feel like dancing. shall we? listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy78fuodP6k 130719 ... raze 171. phantogram // mouthful of diamonds from the album "eyelid movies" (2010) i've been meaning to grab this album for three years now, just for this one song. watch / listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvSgLHWR16o 130720 ... raze 172. grateful dead // mississippi half-step uptown toodeloo from the album "wake of the flood" (1973) my point of entry to the music of the grateful dead was the absolute last place anyone will ever tell you to start. in the eighth grade i bought "shakedown street" without having heard a lick of anything the dead had done. i have no idea why i chose that album. it was just the one i grabbed while waffling at the record store. the thing is, i liked it, even if it isn't the dead near their best (or even their most grateful dead-like). somewhere a girl named lisa stagno probably still has a cassette tape she recorded of me playing a cover of this album's version of "good lovin'" in grade eight french class, doing my best bob weir impression. i have to admit i did a pretty solid weir for a thirteen-year-old. the sad thing is, if i'd bought "american beauty" instead of "shakedown street", i probably wouldn't have appreciated it at all back then. a great song like "ripple" would have been completely lost on me and my AOR, corporate rock sensibilities. but maybe my ability to get into what some have called "disco dead" is one of the reasons i can still enjoy some of the more maligned material from keith godchaux's stint as the band's keyboardist. there's some particularly fine music on the albums "wake of the flood" and "terrapin station" (the latter featuring maybe the funkiest song ever recorded in 7/4 time in the shape of "estimated prophet"). keyboardists in the dead were cursed. almost every single one of them died in horrible ways, either while they were still with the band or shortly after leaving. i think my favourite doomed man behind the keys might have been brent mydland, but keith was no slouch. i like the jazzy things he does on this tune. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64pU8w2F6MY 130721 ... raze 173. phil lynott // old town from "the phil lynott album" (1982) 80s guilty pleasure moment #5. there was a lot more to phil lynott than "the boys are back in town". he had the misfortune of being successful enough that commercial considerations put a damper on a lot of his creative ambitions...but there are some really interesting things squirreled away in the deeper crevices of his discography, if you're willing to dig a little. take a listen to "still in love with you" from "live and dangerous", "he fell like a soldier" (a 1984 demo recorded with junior giscombe), "sarah" from "shades of a blue orphanage", and "little bit of water" from "the phil lynott album", and you'll hear a surprising amount of range. years ago i caught the end of a thin lizzy-themed episode of "behind the music". they played about ten seconds of the music video for a song that haunted the back of my brain for a long time after. sure, it was manipulative to show phil looking into the camera, singing about breaking down and cracking up, while his family and band mates were talking about his drug problems and death. but it worked. and it was a far cry from what i was used to hearing from lizzy. i probably spent eight or nine years wondering what that song was. i could never find it on any thin lizzy album. one day it occurred to me to investigate phil's solo work instead, and boom. there it was. "old town". it's very much an 80s pop song, but i think it cuts a little deeper than most, knowing what a troubled guy phil was. i enjoy the perfect math of the chord progression, the (possibly sped-up) piano solo halfway through, and the mournful bridge section in the pub. most important of all, the music video has taught me an invaluable lesson: the best way to make a pretty lady in a business suit smile is to gesture to her that you're preparing to play an invisible flugelhorn solo from somewhere across town, and then cause said invisible flugelhorn to become a real one with the power of your mind. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2OcIqwmSaY 130722 ... raze 174. the mountain_goats // tallahassee from the album "tallahassee" (2002) the first mountain_goats song i heard was "no children". it was almost violent in its bitterness and hopelessness, and i loved the macabre poetry of it. there's a different kind of poetry to a song like this. quieter, but no less powerful. it doesn't scream itself at you; it whispers from a distance, forcing you to creep closer to hear what it has to say. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT6TqxRCE0w 130723 ... raze 175. broadcast // echo's answer from the album "the noise made by people" (2000) there's a definite feeling of kinship with stereolab in the music of broadcast, but trish keenan's singing is wholly its own thing. there's an innocence and a purity to her voice that projects a strange power, especially when cutting through claustrophobic and dissonant soundscapes. i don't think she once came anywhere near screaming or shouting in any of the songs she recorded. she didn't need to. sadly she passed away in 2011 after contracting the H1N1 flu while on tour. i've always thought there was an eerie beauty to this song. if you're into this sort of thing, the albums "the noise made by people" and "haha sound" come highly recommended, along with the compilations "work and non work" and "the future crayon", both of which collect non-album tracks from EPs and singles (much of it the equal of anything to appear on a proper studio album). listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZV9OqdFFyk 130724 ... raze 176. jack ladder & the dreamlanders // cold feet from the album "hurtsville" (2012) my friend adam told me about this australian band when i sent him one of steven's tracks (the dude whose album i'm recording/playing some stuff on), noting a similarity in vocal registers and tones. this track jumped out at me immediately. it sounds to me like the intersection of "unforgettable fire" era U2 and nick cave at his most sedate, or a lost track from television's "marquee moon" slowed down and moaning through a dreamy barbiturate haze. the black_and_white music video is moody and effective, but it accompanies an edited version of the song that snips out the atmospheric coda. because i'm all about the ambient guitar sounds, here's the full, unedited version. i especially like this bit: "and like a sand crab in the glass pit my world has changed and the things i needed yesterday i don't need in the same way" listen: http://jackladder.bandcamp.com/track/cold-feet-2 130725 ... raze 177. nick drake // place to be from the album "pink moon" (1972) i don't think there's a bad nick drake album out there, but "pink moon" is probably always going to be my favourite. it was the first one i heard, and it's all nick, all the way through. no arrangements or other musicians. i was lucky enough to come to nick's music on my own, before the 1999 volkswagen commercial that made him something much closer to a household name than he ever was in his lifetime. listening to this album in bed on headphones as a 14-year-old, i assumed he was playing two separate guitar tracks, one overdubbed on top of the other. when i learned all the songs were recorded live in the studio, with the only overdub a brief piano part on the title track, my brain melted. the songs may sound simple, until you try playing them on guitar and singing them at the same time. they're not so simple at all. nick never got to be an old man (he was 26 when he died, and 24 when this album was recorded), but there's a depth to his songs that belies his youth. this was always a song i didn't pay much attention to. i think i had to get a little older and live a little more before i understood what it meant. when it finally got me, it got me good. on a purely aesthetic note, this album features one of my favourite acoustic guitar sounds of all time, care of engineer john wood. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IUqN9ozmhw 130726 ... raze 178. hole // doll parts from the album "live through this" (1994) courtney love is someone i've always been both fascinated with and repelled by. the fascination has started to wane in recent years as her public life has become something of a sad circus of meltdowns, punctuated by occasional periods of relative sobriety and sanity. it's easy to forget that once upon a time she actually wrote some good songs. and there is — or *was*, at least — something undeniably powerful in her wounded, imperfect voice. she was about six million times more attractive back when she looked like a real person, too, before any of the plastic surgery. i've always liked this song's stuttering moan of a chorus, which doesn't finally explode until the very end. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD9xK9smth4 130727 ... raze 179. peter scherer // planetful of mirrors from the album "very neon pet" (1995) the bio page of peter scherer's website describes him as "a composer, producer, keyboard and guitar player based in zürich, switzerland, with a multifaceted career encompassing music for film and dance, producing, arranging and playing with other artists from across the spectrum of contemporary music". jackie introduced me to this stuff. i like moody, wall-of-sound type things you can get lost in during headphone listening, and this definitely fits the bill. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jjnDSm0cXg 130728 ... raze 180. jason collett // fire from the album "idols of exile" (2005) i know you just wanna be on fire. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjEASggPUfQ 130729 ... raze 181. susumu yokota // i am flying from the album "laputa" (2003) susumu yokota is a japanese composer and electronic musician who has lived something of a musical double life. in japan he's best known for his house music. everywhere else, he's better known for his idm and ambient music, which doesn't even sound like it was made by the same person. his most highly regarded albums are "sakura" and "grinning cat". as good as they both are, 2003's "laputa" is a lot stranger and (i think) even better. it's a difficult album to summarize. the best description i've come across is in liam singer's pitchfork review, where he writes, "against various droney and spacious backdrops, yokota presents independently floating and interacting bits of sound that suggest geometric patterns and shapes." each song is more of a sonic collage than anything, and some of them get pretty abstract, but there's always something melodic to hold onto, even if you have to squint your ears to find it. it took me years before i noticed a few recurring organic sounds — occasional bursts of great bluesy hammond organ and clean electric guitar mingling with all the sounds not so easily described. it's probably worth noting that "laputa" is an imagined place from jonathan swift's "gulliver's travels" — a flying rock of an island "where impractical projects [are] pursued and practical projects neglected". i don't think that association is an accident. the song i wanted to include here is called "lost ring". it's a dense, fascinating piece, with fractured shards of melody flitting in and out and the closest thing to percussion a sampled female voice saying what sounds like "the prime minister" over and over again, fragmented by the tremolo circuit of a guitar amplifier. alas, that track isn't up on youtube. almost nothing from "laputa" is. so you get this one instead. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzPVf6ggSd8 130730 ... raze 182. rod stewart // mandolin wind from the album "every picture tells a story" (1971) remember when rod stewart still wrote some of his own songs, and they were actually good? you know, before he sold his soul to something that most certainly was not rock and roll? it was a real thing that happened! really! rod's early solo albums — "an old rain coat won't ever let you down", "gasoline alley", "every picture tells a story", and "never a dull moment" — are shockingly good fusions of folk, rock, soul, and country blues, a world away from treacle like "if we fall in love tonight" and "do ya think i'm sexy?". i'm not sure how it all went so wrong from there, but greil marcus might have said it best when he wrote: "rarely has a singer had as full and unique a talent as rod stewart; rarely has anyone betrayed his talent so completely. once the most compassionate presence in music, he has become a bilious self-parody — and sells more records than ever." once upon a time, he wasn't just a great voice singing middling songs without much passion or depth. here's proof. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZdqweSxnt4 130731 ... raze 183. al green // jesus is waiting from the album "call me" (1973) "call me" is one of the greatest soul albums of all time. it ain't up for debate. and though i'm not a religious person, when al green starts to sing about jesus waiting, i want to testify. i'm not sure if i prefer the majestic production of the original studio recording, or the ferocious energy of the live "soul train" version. depends on the day and the mood. today i'm thinking majesty wins. i've always loved the ultra-close-mic'd bluesy little acoustic guitar lick that comes in just before the two-minute mark (played by al himself). let me say it again... listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGQYWPFSG9U 130801 ... raze 184. eels // cancer for the cure from the album "electro-shock blues" (1998) nothing i've heard since 2000's "daisies from the galaxy" has really done it for me, but those first few eels albums still hit some nice spots. especially this one. there's something about emotional pain funneled into catchy tunes that never gets old. step right up! enjoy a stranger's agony! watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kDzEcCF5cI 130802 ... the evil angel on my shoulder i think you meant "daisies *of* the galaxy". man, what is with you lately? there's been a depressing lack of typos in this installment. i'm beginning to feel obsolete. 130802 ... raze 185. caroline // sunrise from the album "murmurs" (2006) so pretty. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5spChEdr1q8 130803 ... raze 186. koji kondo // overworld theme music from the nintendo game "the legend of zelda" (1986) "the legend of zelda" was one of those games that made me want to hurl my nintendo system out a window when i was a kid. i could never figure out how to make any progress. thankfully i was able to get some enjoyment out of playing it later in life when i discovered the magic of internet walkthroughs. knowing where to find and how to use different important objects made all the difference. there are only two main musical themes throughout the game (one for the overworld, and another for the dungeons), but they're catchy enough that it doesn't get too maddening listening to the same thing for long stretches of time. this arrangement of the game's main theme for classical guitar (arranged and played by a guy with a youtube name as ridiculous as he is talented, and whose actual name i haven't been able to unearth) is absurdly good. i used to have the very same stereo microphone he uses to record his guitar. it's a good mic. i only got rid of it because i needed a little extra money at the time, and other, more versatile mics in my arsenal had taken its place. at least it went to a good home. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbAQ0kNJ4i0 130804 ... raze 187. my bloody valentine // honey power from the "tremolo" EP (1991) for years there was talk of the my bloody valentine catalogue (or at least the most salient bits) getting the remastering treatment. as with the mythical "new album" mentioned in interviews every few years, it took so long before anything happened, the whole thing became a huge running joke. so it was a bit of a shock when a slew of remasters appeared in 2012, followed by a new full-length album in 2013, more than twenty years after the last one had seen the light of day. i haven't got around to picking up that new album yet. but from what i've heard, it sounds like everything an mbv fan could hope for after such a long wait for new material. the remasters are another story. "isn't anything" was always the album i thought would benefit most from being remastered, and there's a nice added bit of clarity to the sound now. but all four of bilinda butcher's lyric-writing credits have been inexplicably removed, and those are four of the best songs on the album. what kind of bullshit is that? an attempt at rewriting history and minimizing her contributions, or just a stupid mistake? as for "loveless", there are two different remastered versions. apparently they were mislabeled, causing a lot of confusion, and one version features an ugly digital glitch that was never corrected. then there's "EPs 1988-1991", a two-disc compilation. it's nice that a lot of non-album material has finally been cobbled together in one convenient place, but i've read complaints that the new mastering job crushes all the life and dynamics out of the music. it almost seems fitting, in a way, that after making fans wait for this stuff for eons because he wanted to make sure it was done right, kevin shields would botch the whole thing. i bought the remastered version of "isn't anything" and left the rest alone. i'll stick with my "quiet" original CD and vinyl issues of "loveless", and the original "quiet" versions of the EPs, thankyaverymuch. i'm not going to spend eighty bucks for a bunch of music i already have just so i can get a headache because there are still people in the music business who seem to have forgotten there's a simple way to make something louder without compromising the quality of the sound, and it's something everyone who owns a device that plays music has access to. it's this little thing called a volume control. but speaking of those EPs..."tremolo" is like a secret additional arm growing out of the rib cage of "loveless", which is probably still the crowning achievement in the mbv discography. one song from "loveless" is repeated, but it gets a very different, arguably superior instrumental coda that sounds like it dropped in from another planet. the songs-between-songs are half the reason to own the EP. they're fantastic. in a 1991 interview, shields admitted the segues were an attempt at squeezing more songs than the label wanted onto an EP. so there are really seven songs there, not four. it's just that three of them don't have names. the one at the end of "honey power" may be the best, and i'd go so far as to call it one of my favourite mbv songs, even if it's barely a song at all. i wish those final eighty seconds went on for eight hundred more. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qC35UJSXlI 130806 ... raze 188. john mayall // california from the album "the turning point" (1969) my pa heard this song on the radio one day eight or nine years ago and bought the album on a whim. i'm glad he did; it remains my favourite thing john mayall's ever done. it was an experiment in making what mayall called "low volume music", dispensing with drums and distorted electric guitar in favour of acoustic guitar, bass, woodwinds, harmonica, clean electric guitar, and occasional subdued tambourine/mouth percussion. "the turning point" was recorded live at the fillmore east after the four musicians that made up this particular band had only been playing together for a month. i'd say they acquitted themselves pretty well for being a new group... listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqcqZlFMUYQ 130806 ... raze 189. michael j. sheehy // twisted little man from the album "no longer my concern" (2002) kick off your high heels careful where you stand kick off your high heels careful where you stand don't you move too close i'm a twisted little man heaven help me i know what i am heaven help me i know what i am won't you lend a hand to this twisted little man? the sweetest song simple and plain the sweetest song simple and plain brought me to my knees in fear and shame a song of forgiveness for those who believe a song of forgiveness for those who believe sweet salvation i have been deceived i know that this feeling is too good to last i know that this feeling is too good to last the music fades and the moment's passed so kick off your high heels careful where you stand kick off your high heels and careful where you stand don't you move too close i'm a twisted little man don't you move too close i'm a twisted little man listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzx44jDcjtU 130807 ... raze 190. joni mitchell // edith and the kingpin from the album "the hissing of summer lawns" (1975) it's been a long time since joni mitchell has done anything i've liked much, but when she's "on", she's really something. "the hissing of summer lawns" may be the most effective distillation of her jazzier sensibilities, outside of "hejira" (which has the peerless bass-playing of jaco pastorius to recommend it, among other things). the album was kind of savaged in rolling stone magazine at the time of its release, only to be recognized in later years as one of joni's greatest artistic achievements. take that, rolling stone. you're 80% advertisements now anyway. does anyone even read you anymore? listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7FP4FEDWrA 130808 ... raze 191. cornbread red // too bad from the album "pickin' on nickelback [the bluegrass tribute]" (2005) who knew there was a way to render a nickelback song almost...listenable? not i. and yet here we are. at the very least, this one might make you laugh. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6bY0Fo1w0s 130809 ... raze 192. dan hill // never thought (that i could love) from the album "dan hill" (1987) in honour of the wedding i didn't get to attend today, here's my mother and stepfather's wedding song. this album and single had only been out for a year or two when they got married, so it was actually kind of contemporary at the time. now it's hilariously cheesy and overwrought. and i s'pose it always was. but it's dan hill, damnit! he scored the third manny pacquiao-juan manuel marquez fight online! he saw it as a clear victory for marquez! seriously. he did. that has to earn him at least a few cool points. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBbehTumQcA 130810 ... raze 193. bruce springsteen // state trooper from the album "nebraska" (1982) i am not a springsteen apologist; i'm an unashamed fan of the boss, and have been since i was about eleven years old. i'd give my spleen to have been born early enough to catch one of his legendary never-ending live shows from the late 1970s or early 1980s. alas, my spleen remains. my loyalties have shifted over the years, and my favourite albums of his are now the darker, deeper ones that were a little over my head when i was younger — things like "darkness on the edge of town" and "nebraska". "the wild, the innocent & the e street shuffle" is up there too, for different reasons (the epic "new york city serenade" is one of them). "nebraska" is unique in bruce's discography. it's the bleakest, most haunting set of songs he's ever scraped together, and the one true solo album he's made, without another musician in sight. it wasn't planned that way. as he explained in a 1984 rolling stone interview: "i was just doing songs for the next rock album, and i decided that what always took me so long in the studio was the writing. i would get in there, and i just wouldn't have the material written, or it wasn't written well enough, and so i'd record for a month, get a couple of things, go home, write some more, record for another month — it wasn't very efficient. so this time, i got a little teac four-track cassette machine, and i said, i'm gonna record these songs, and if they sound good with just me doin' 'em, then i'll teach 'em to the band. i could sing and play the guitar, and then i had two tracks to do somethin' else, like overdub a guitar or add a harmony. it was just gonna be a demo. then i had a little echoplex that i mixed through, and that was it. and that was the tape that became the record. it's amazing that it got there, 'cause i was carryin' that cassette around with me in my pocket without a case for a couple of weeks, just draggin' it around. finally, we realized, "uh-oh, that's the album." technically, it was difficult to get it on a disc. the stuff was recorded so strangely, the needle would read a lot of distortion and wouldn't track in the wax. we almost had to release it as a cassette." somewhere there exists a full-band version of this album, recorded in a professional studio. it doesn't look like we'll ever get to hear it. everyone involved agreed and still agrees that the songs lost something fundamental the second they were brought into the studio. curiosity aside, i think the right choice was made. the demo tape *is* the album. there's an earthy, haunted quality to the music, and while the songwriting is part of it, so too is the way the songs sound. a hollow reverberating background vocal here, an ancient-sounding harmonica there, a bit of glockenspiel or synthesizer stitched into a few moments of a song now and then. it's a grainy black_and_white album if there ever was one, recorded in a decade when there weren't so many of those. this track has always been a favourite of mine, due in no small part to the unhinged vocal performance, which vacillates between a flat, emotionless delivery and bloodcurdling howling. bruce's cover version of "dream baby dream" aside, it's the most explicit example on record of his long-running affection for suicide (the influential and unclassifiable electronic-punk duo, not the end-of-life choice). the strange way of achieving power through near-mind-numbing repetition, the echo cranked to eleven, the unnerving and unexpected screams...it's all straight out of alan vega and martin rev's playbook. "hungry heart" it ain't. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU5MyNuBdhg 130811 ... raze 194. yma sumac // taita inty from the album "voice of the xtabay" (1950) depending on who you talk to, yma sumac was either an incan princess descended directly from the last incan emperor, or a brooklyn housewife named amy camus who was living a double (and backwards) life. all i know is, i've never heard anything else like her voice. her vocal range was astonishing, moving from low rumbling tones to theremin-like warbles. some people call this stuff "lounge music". if that's true, it must be the weirdest, most otherworldly lounge music there is. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVi8t8qBkLs 130812 ... raze 195. atlanta rhythm section // imaginary lover from the album "champagne jam" (1978) suddenly this seems absurdly appropriate. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG_YQN6-zrk 130813 ... raze 196. regina spektor // ode to divorce from the album "soviet kitsch" (2004) this is my favourite regina spektor album by some distance. out of all the albums of hers i've heard, it sounds the most like *her*, and it's full of songs like this one that are beautiful, and quirky, and beautifully quirky. i remember reading a pitchfork review of "soviet kitsch". i think it was the same day "antics", the second interpol album, was reviewed. "antics" was praised for being a near-facsimile of "turn on the bright lights", with no palpable creative forward movement of any kind short of a different sheen to the production, while regina was essentially criticized for having a personality and indulging her more whimsical impulses. the criticism made me want to hear the music, so i went out and bought the album. while i did (and still do) like "turn on the bright lights", "antics", aside from a few songs, has always been pretty boring to me. i haven't been moved to pull it out for a listen in years. "soviet kitsch", meanwhile, appealed to me (and still appeals to me) for the very reasons the pitchfork writer didn't much care for it. different strokes for different cowpokes, as i like to say. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni7EmeBb-Nw 130814 ... raze 197. boz scaggs // lowdown from the album "silk degrees" (1976) this must be my favourite disco song of all time, bar none, if disco is what it is. "turn on that ol' love light and turn a maybe to a yes same old schoolboy game got you into this mess" that's the long and short of it. every song that seems like a ball of cheese on the surface might as well be singing directly to me right now. hell, i'll take it. sing on, boz. sing on. also, dig jeff porcaro's badass double-tracked drumming, with subtle differences detectable in each stereo channel while listening on headphones. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQK_QAUa8Dw 130815 ... raze 198. four tet // hands from the album "rounds" (2003) evocative stop-motion animation for your brain-ears. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk7n6FGAkDE 130817 ... raze 199. the cardigans // iron man from the album "first band on the moon" (1996) this was the soundtrack for the meltdown phase of one of the stranger drug experiences of my life, a little over eleven years ago, in a converted garage functioning as a friend's bedroom. i'm not sure if it's my favourite black sabbath cover of all time in spite of the strange memories wrapped up in it, or because of them. whatever the case, i've always thought it was a pretty wicked re-imagining of the song. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzgZJEpLuw0 130817 ... raze 200. oren lavie // her morning elegance from the album "the opposite side of the sea" (2007) this one's more for the music video than anything. i like the song too...i just think the video is super cool. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_HXUhShhmY 130818 ... raze 201. madrid // out to sea from the album "original message" (2011) i forgot how much i liked this, because i forgot about it altogether for a while. but then i remembered! oh, what fun remembering is. note to self: always choose the dark-haired girl over the ski instructor who promises he can shape me into a champion, regardless of how cynical my feelings about romance become. even if the ski instructor has a mustache. especially if he has a mustache. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja_4ki_-EGY 130819 ... raze 202. the replacements // sadly beautiful from the album "all shook down" (1990) paul westerberg has always had that john lennon sort of duality about him — he can belt out a lung-scorching rock song one minute, and the next he's breaking your heart with a gorgeous ballad. he's written a lot of great songs over the years ("can't hardly wait", "unsatisfied", "within your reach", and "answering machine", to name a few), but i think this is one of the very best. it's a simple, perfect little song that's exactly what the title says it is. there are songwriters who would kill to have written a line like "baby needs a brand new pair of eyes / 'cause the ones you got now see only goodbyes". present company included. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ml1WKiIGqf4 130820 ... raze 203. ev'rybody wants to be a cat music from the disney film "the aristocats" (1970) a good memory that came out of a toxic, short-lived relationship two and-a-half years ago was watching this movie after i hadn't seen it in a good twenty years. i loved this song way back when, and i love it still. we'll just pretend the offensive ethnic stereotype moment with paul winchell (the voice of tigger in "winnie the pooh") as a chinese cat isn't in there... watch / listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGzjvzy65Nc 130821 ... raze 204. sibylle baier // the end from the album "colour green" (recorded 1970-1973; released 2006) in the early 1970s, sibylle baier acted in a wim wenders film and recorded some songs she wrote on her own, with just her voice and guitar for accompaniment. then she abandoned any aspirations of a career in music or film and decided to devote her life and energy to raising a family. her son robby writes in the liner notes to the album of her music released more than thirty years after it was recorded: "in a particularly dark and moody period of sibylle's young life, her friend claudine dragged her out from under the bed and took her on a road trip to strasbourg, ending up across the alps in genoa. upon the return from this trip sibylle felt her spirits renewed and she set out to write the song 'remember the day', grateful for being alive. it was the first song she ever wrote. my mother's music is simply amazing in its intimacy and closeness. recorded in the early 70s in her home on a reel to reel recording device, the songs on 'colour green' are intimate portraits of life's sad and fragile beauty." though she never thought to share her music with anyone outside of friends and family and its eventual commercial release was almost an accident, i think this puts a lot of current alt-folk/singer-songwriter stuff to shame. it doesn't sound dated or affected in any way. sibylle sounds a little like a darker vashti bunyan, but different. she's herself. this is music as an extension of the artist, with no commercial considerations at all. it's really pretty, too. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-r1b2H9FKs 130822 ... raze 205. simple minds // speed your love to me [extended mix] from the "speed your love to me" 12" single (1984) 80s guilty pleasure moment #6. in 1997, when i was first going into high school, the more 80s-sounding and bombastic something was, the more i loved it, and for a while the selective simple minds greatest hits album "glittering prize" was in pretty heavy rotation on my discman. i did not enter high school with any cool music in my collection. at all. lucky for me, redemption and re-education were right around the corner, and i would soon find myself throwing pretty much every CD i owned in the proverbial basement. that's a whole 'nother story, though. having said that, the odd simple minds song still does something for me, even now. there's some cool stuff on some of the early albums. the 'minds were an entirely different band before they morphed into just another 80s stadium rock monster. "the american", for instance, is a pretty cool new wave/post-punk pop song, equally weird and catchy. it almost sounds like a jerky marriage between early INXS (before there was any INXS at all) and mid-late-period japan (before japan had reached their mid-late-period). "sparkle in the rain" (the album from which "speed your love to me" hails) has one foot sinking into the stadium rock sound the band would soon mine for all it was worth, but there are enough atmospheric touches and moments of weirdness to keep things from getting too generic, and the music manages an interesting balancing act between creative ambition and the desire for greater commercial success. here the bombast feels like it still kind of means something. to be sure, jim kerr's lyrics for "waterfront" might not mean much of anything, but it's hard not to get swept up in the hypnotic thrum of it all. and while the production is very much of its time, with BIG DRUMS, BIG GATES, and BIG REVERB all over the place, it doesn't sound half as dated as some other 80s albums do, maybe because steve lillywhite was in the producer's seat. in a decade of cocaine and big hair, he had a way of keeping things in your face at the same time they were burrowing deep into your ears. i picked up the "speed your love to me" vinyl single on a lark a few years ago, because it was cheap, and because "speed your love to me" is one of those simple minds songs (unlike "don't you forget about me") i still genuinely enjoy listening to. could be because i didn't hear it a million times on the radio. matter of fact, i don't remember ever hearing it on the radio at all. on the b-side is the single edit of the song, which was all i'd ever heard up to that point, and an instrumental track. on the a-side is the 7-minute extended mix of "speed your love to me". most extended mixes i've heard from this era are pretty limp — nothing like the remixes you hear today, where occasionally someone creative will rework a song from the ground up and completely alter its meaning. this one is different. it doesn't alter the meaning of the song so much as it makes it all a hell of a lot more interesting. a great guitar riff that was either buried in the mix or absent altogether on the album version is very upfront here, and there's a lot more going on, including a surprise backwards-sounding ambient instrumental coda. i now have two vinyl copies of this extended single. you know, just to be safe, in case i'm ever cursed with record-hungry termites. and i've decided "speed your love to me" is the best song U2 never wrote. there. take that, bono. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZwfbnDvwFQ 130823 ... raze 206. scene five [actual title unknown] music from the nintendo game "teenage mutant ninja turtles III: the manhattan project" (1992) how i loved those ninja turtles when i was a kid. i used to play the hell out of the original TMNT video game at a nearby arcade. i was ecstatic when i finally beat that thing. the third TMNT nintendo game is a pretty impressive rendering of something not too far removed from that video game. there's some catchy music in it, too. how anyone ever drew this out of the limited technology of the NES system is beyond me. i have no idea who composed this song. there are three composers listed on the game's wikipedia page: yuichi sakakura, tomoya tomita, and kouzou nakamura. maybe they all wrote and programmed it together. who knows? listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqtGqIuP8ZE 130825 ... raze 207. dexter gordon // body and soul recorded live in belgium (1964) maybe the best version of "body and soul" i've ever heard. while duke ellington's piano trio adaptation is perfectly fine, this is on a different plain. sure, it's jazz, but i think music like this (and a lot of what john_coltrane did, too) can easily be called soul music. if dex's saxophone ain't the sound of the man's soul, what is? dexter wasn't just a great musician. he was also a natural actor. he may essentially be playing himself in the great "'round midnight", but he had a deep, interesting self to play. and he adds some nice texture to "awakenings" (as a piano-playing patient) without speaking a single word. soul. watch / listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKPFIDoB7D0 130826 ... raze 208. aimee mann // red vines from the album "bachelor no. 2 [or, the last remains of the dodo] (2000) who writes catchy songs with big brains? aimee mann does! i was tempted to choose this album's closing track, "you do", because it's really pretty and it's the only song i've ever heard with the word "caveats" in it. "red vines" wins instead, because of wurlitzer electric piano, the great three-part vocal harmony that only comes in during the chorus on the words "with my hands tied", and other exciting reasons. i've always really liked aimee's vibrato. now there's a different idea for a pickup line. "hey, singer — i love your vibrato. wanna sing a duet?" listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bD0gtvfqoM 130826 ... raze 209. devendra banhart // poughkeepsie from the album "rejoicing in the hands" (2004) have you felt it? have you? i've felt it too. and so have you. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogdyafB4jmc 130827 ... raze 210. david shire // main theme from "the conversation" from the film "the conversation" (1974) "the conversation" is one of the finest films francis ford coppola has ever made, featuring a fantastically moody soundtrack and one of gene hackman's most fascinating performances, among other things (like great cinematography and a story that provides much to chew on for both the heart-teeth and the brain-teeth). coppola asked composer david shire to write solo piano pieces to accompany scenes that weren't in the script and don't appear in the final film, as a method of drawing certain emotions out of the music. as matt barry notes in his review of the soundtrack album on the soundtrack.net website: "as harry caul [gene hackman's character] is a stoic, taciturn character, coppola understood that much of [the expression of] his underlying repression and sadness fell into the hands of the music. what the film ends up with ... is a central character who refuses to say much of anything about his own personal life, but a score that tells you everything anyway." i haven't seen many films with soundtracks made up entirely, or even in large part, of solo performances on a specific instrument. "the firm" comes to mind, with its rollicking piano soundtrack, but that film is vastly inferior to this one, though it does, oddly enough, have another good gene hackman performance to recommend it. there's the famous, eerily effective zither music that drifts through "the third man". there are the gorgeous, gut-punching dobro pieces by ry cooder used to perfect effect in "paris, texas". and then there's this. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUsEIdHxBPk 130828 ... raze 211. heatbox // i need a jack and coke from the album "system" (2009) in remembrance of all jack & cokes that have passed, and in recognition of those that have yet to be consumed. watch / listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEr7AZyO29I 130829 ... raze 212. neko case // deep red bells from the album "blacklisted" (2002) i bought this album a few months after it came out, my faculties a little muffled by wisdom teeth removal drugs. the guy behind the HMV counter expressed his approval, back when the people who worked at the HMV in this city knew a thing or two about music outside of the rigidity to top 40 radio and weren't just nice-looking robots. "have you heard any of it yet?" he asked me about the CD i had in my hand. "no...i just read about it and thought it sounded interesting." "you'll like it. it's really good. a lot darker than her earlier stuff." he was right. i liked the whole thing, but her spooky cover of "look for me (i'll be around)" and the self-penned "deep red bells" have always been twin highlights for me. "deep red bells" in particular has a certain beautiful haunting something about it — even more so now, after i've learned it was written for the victims of the green river killer in an effort to give them back some of the humanity and dignity that had been stripped from then in death. neko sings to one of the women: "where does this mean world cast its cold eye? who's left to suffer long about you? does your soul cast about like an old paper bag past empty lots and early graves? those like you who lost their way murdered on the interstate while the red bells rang like thunder deep red bells deep as i've been done" listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScT9eo5cljk 130830 ... the evil angel on my shoulder i think you meant to type "the rigidity OF top 40 radio", not "to". for shame! 130830 ... raze yeah. and there's a "then" in there that's supposed to be a "them". i hang my head. i hang it low. 130830 ... raze 213. nick cave & the bad seeds // into my arms from the album "the boatman's call" (1997) i think i've come to prefer nick cave not when he's screaming in a murderous rage, but when he's weeping over the keys of a piano. find me a better love song than this one and i will move a mountain with my mind. nick has called it one of his "gloomy, violent, dark-eyed children". he makes beautiful dark-eyed babies. don't you think? listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEUgORVsECs 130831 ... raze 214. strongbad f. the cheat // everybody to the limit if you've never visited homestarrunner.com, go forth and laugh yourself silly. even though there's been no new content in two and-a-half years now, there are ample riches to be mined within (including the origins of trogdor_the_burninator). in the meantime, here's strongbad singing one of his greatest hits, with the rousing refrain of "come on, fhqwhgads". watch / listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-WTbGupxbk 130901 ... raze 215. the velvet underground // sister ray [incomplete] recorded live at the matrix, san francisco (1969) in "rock: the rough guide" (a profoundly important book to the fourteen-year-old me), al spicer has this to say about the velvet underground album "white light / white heat": "in case you'd been misled by the cheery banana motif on the first album cover, the new cover was all black on one side and had a glum group photo in stark, unsmiling monochrome on the other. not a psychedelic album. not so much LSD and marijuana as the sound of methedrine and heavy opiates." it was, he wrote, "the world's most telling drug album. for full effect, listen to it in a dark room, alone, when the rest of the world is asleep." he was wrong about the album cover. while there are some that are all-black, the original vinyl issues (and most CD releases) show an arm with a skull tattoo on it. it's just that the image of the arm is black, printed on an almost imperceptibly lighter black background. you can only make the image out if the light hits it just right. but never mind all that. i'm always going to prefer the john cale VU era. the music was stranger and more interesting then, and i'm a huge john cale fan. "white light / white heat" is the most abrasive, grimiest, most unsettling album from that era. it's one of the worst-recorded "classic albums" ever made, too, though i don't think any other sound would have better served the material. having said that, i think the band really found their feet as a live act after doug yule took john cale's place. whatever the studio albums lost, it came back in spades when lou reed and the gang stepped on-stage. here's an example. what was the most punishing, unforgiving track on "white light / white heat" has many more dimensions in this live take, beginning as something much more casual and melodic than anything its studio counterpart touched on, before growing more frenetic. peter abrams, owner of the matrix club, has in his possession four hours of this stuff on half-inch four-track tape. that's more than forty songs from the velvets at their live peak. after the awful sound quality of most of the live material that's been made available over the years, this stuff is a revelation. it sounds phenomenal — even better than most of the studio albums. unfortunately, only a half hour's worth of the music has leaked out into the world so far, with the songs edited down to mere fragments of their fuller selves. the full performance of "sister ray" is probably somewhere between fifteen minutes and half an hour long, but all we get is seven minutes. i can only hope mr. abrams there is waiting for a record company to express an interest in putting together a box set collecting these recordings, and not holding onto them until he finds a rich collector who will pay him an obscene amount of money for the tapes. if the stuff ever does get a proper, full release, expect it to get a perfect score on pitchfork. and expect the review to be full of talk of "the rudimentary perfection of maureen tucker's pulse-guided drumming" and "lou reed's whiplash guitar explorations, which reveal to us the sonic architecture of a broken city". listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsB25ReZp4c 130902 ... raze 216. marla hansen // shuffle your feet from the "wedding day" EP (2007) marla hansen has played viola (and occasional violin) and/or provided backup vocals for the likes of sufjan_stevens, kanye west, duncan sheik, my brightest diamond, jens lekman, the new pornographers, the national, and others. but the best thing she's been involved in may be her own music. it's a shame she's only released one six-song EP. i keep holding out hope there will be a full-length album someday, or at least another EP. one of my favourite things about her songs is the way she tends to pluck the viola instead of bowing it, almost as if it were a guitar. something comforting lives inside that sound. this song is beautiful. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cVZsrfw93o 130903 ... raze 217. junior wells // hoodoo man blues from the album "hoodoo man blues" (1965) sweet jesus. now that's how you play and sing some blues. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47djAb6jVJk 130904 ... raze 218. ginger lee // hold me close from the album "songs fired in the forge" (2006) ginger lee is caroline weeks. once a member of bat_for_lashes, she stopped calling herself ginger lee after getting a lot of web traffic that had to do with the adult film star of the same name. this album had an incredibly limited release of 100 copies. i tried like hell to get my hands on one of them, even emailing caroline directly, but it wasn't to be. i guess i could always try again now. maybe i will. in the meantime, i'm glad there's still a way to hear this tiny song. proof that sometimes you only need fifty nine seconds to say what needs to be said. listen: https://myspace.com/gingerleemusic/music/song/hold-me-close-edit-22919549-22720734 130905 ... raze 219. emerson lake & palmer // from the beginning from the album "trilogy" (1972) as much as i've always loved keith emerson's insane proggy keyboard workouts, this is a great little moody song right here that inhabits a completely different space. my dad introduced me to this one when i was a kid. i have a very clear memory of my mother singing along to the moog solo while i was listening to the song over at that house. and i mean she sang the *whole* solo, note for note, all the way through. it was one of those weird moments when she revealed she really did have a sense of humour, as well-concealed as it was most of the time. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKI0d6TMlhM 130906 ... raze 220. king harvest // dancing in the moonlight from the album "dancing in the moonlight" (1973) i think we can safely append one-hit wonders to the long list of "things they don't make like they used to". this is the only king harvest song most people will ever hear, but what a glorious song it is. it's such a fine and natural sight...for the eyes inside your ears. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5JqPxmYhlo 130908 ... raze 221. carpenters // superstar from the album "carpenters" (1971) say what you will about the carpenters...a lot of the songs and arrangements are undeniably cheesy, but karen carpenter's voice cuts straight through all the bullshit. there's never been another voice like it. whoever made the decision to force karen out from behind the drums to sing in the spotlight is at least partially responsible for the eating disorder that killed her. she was comfortable behind those drums, and she could play the hell out of them. no less a musician than buddy rich said she was one of his favourite drummers. maybe, just maybe, if she'd been allowed to carve out an identity as a drummer who sang instead of a singer who sometimes played the drums, she would have felt more secure about her body image and she'd still be here. it's a big "if", but it's something to think about. odd as the todd haynes film "superstar: the karen carpenter story" is on the surface, if you can get past the novelty of the entire cast being made up of barbie dolls, i think it probably captures more of what karen's life was really like than any biography or tv movie ever has. i made the mistake of watching it for the first time a few years ago just before i went to bed, and i had a difficult time getting to sleep. yeah...a film with barbie dolls in place of people got under my skin and almost gave me nightmares as an adult. make of that what you will. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJmmaIGiGBg 130908 ... raze 222. david crosby // laughing from the album "if i could only remember my name" (1971) i like lester bangs, but man, did he ever miss the boat on this one. this album is the equal of anything david crosby did with stills and nash (with or without young). actually, in my opinion, it outstrips even the best CS(&)N(&Y) albums for end-to-end goodness. on this song you've got jerry garcia playing ethereal pedal steel and joni mitchell sprinkling some of her magic dust over the whole thing at the end. those vocal harmonies are something else. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzvylMnCe3k 130909 ... raze 223. glenn gould // the goldberg variations [BWV 988] (recorded 1955) not a song this time, but an entire album, because i think the variations deserve to be heard together, in one sitting. glenn gould recorded two versions of this work of bach's — one in 1955 when he was 22 years old, the other in 1981 shortly before his death. they offer a fascinating study in how the same material can be given two strikingly different treatments by the same body and mind. the 1955 recording is the work of a young man in love with his abilities. the re-recording is much more deliberate, haunting, and introspective. you can hear the older man thinking, where the young man is blinded by passion and a kind of joyous arrogance. there's a lot of beauty and jaw-dropping musicianship in both recordings. as for which is best, well...for me, it depends on the mood. today, it's 1955. the playing may clobber the listener over the head with its brilliance, but i think the stars you get to see are worth the swelling. the second variation in particular is one of my favourite things i've ever heard anyone do with a piano, regardless of genre or era. (note: the goldberg variations end at 38:34, after which a completely unrelated piece of music is thrown in as a veritable "bonus track", for reasons understood only by the person who posted it all on youtube) listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XwojDoY3yQ 130910 ... raze 224. blind melon // hello goodbye; galaxie from the album "soup" (1995) eleven and-a-half years ago, after a wild house show/party involving loud music, pills, beer, and a stolen guitar, i found myself in the living room with my then-best friend. everyone else had left or passed out. we came down while the sun was coming up, he threw on the blind melon pseudo-documentary "letters from a porcupine", and i became a fan of a band i never knew existed beyond "no rain". this album lived inside my brain during a pretty dark time. it was a while before it wanted to leave. it was good company, though. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQRmXwSj0PI 130911 ... raze 225. abigail washburn // a fuller wine from the album "abigail washburn & the sparrow quartet" (2008) everywhere i go, i look for you do you look for me where you go too? watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQW5nFiShI4 130912 ... raze 226. classics IV // spooky from the album "spooky" (1967) it's friday the 13th, 2013. i think that calls for something spooky...literally. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZJo5nu2wso 130913 ... raze 227. thelonious monk // brilliant corners from the album "brilliant corners" (1957) my introduction to thelonious monk was the 1957 carnegie hall concert with john coltrane, a recording unearthed and released almost fifty years after the fact. that's a great album. but i didn't completely "get" monk until i picked up his two solo piano albums on riverside records and the full-band album "brilliant corners". with the solo recordings, i felt like i finally gained an understanding of (and appreciation for) the way his musical mind worked. where before i thought he was a bit of a sloppy piano-player, now i understood he was exactly as sloppy as he wanted to be. he had a uniquely fractured idea of the way melody should be treated in jazz. and more than most musicians, i think he played exactly what he felt and thought whenever he sat down at the piano, however idiosyncratic the results might be. sometimes what came out was jagged and off-kilter. sometimes it was shot through with a great amount of lyricism. with his best music, both of those things would often happen at the same time. as for "brilliant corners", it's just a brilliant jazz album, full stop. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TLEPQZIVOg 130915 ... raze 228. the buggles // video killed the radio star from the album "the age of plastic" (1980) 80s guilty pleasure moment #7. i always liked this song, but it took on a whole new resonance after i saw sarah polley's "take this waltz", a film that twisted it into something somehow deeper and more bittersweet. maybe it's just the face of michelle_williams that did it, but now i can never hear the song without thinking of her alone at the end of the film on a toronto amusement park ride called the scrambler, looking sad but a little bit hopeful too. and that retro music video never gets old, does it? watch / listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8h5OEivJdA 130915 ... raze 229. the smiths // how soon is now? from the album "hatful of hollow" (1984) has there ever been a more powerful tremelo'd electric guitar sound, or a song more deliciously depressing than this one? when he's at his best, as he was here on a song that was initially — and inexplicably — demoted to a single's b-side, morrissey is in a class of his own, shoving the world away while the miniature arms of his black heart are wide open. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEq8DBxm0J4 130916 ... raze 230. the smashing_pumpkins // to sheila from the album "adore" (1998) one of the prettiest things billy corgan has ever written, from an underrated album. there's even some banjo in there. in a smashing_pumpkins song! listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ6g7exWuwM 130917 ... raze 231. chelsea wolfe // pale on pale from the album "apokalypsis" (2011) sludgy goodness with ghostly female vocals? sign me up. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1KBjgF3J90 130918 ... raze 232. wilco // art of almost from the album "the whole love" (2011) i've been a wilco fan since i was a clean-shaven high school student, but at first i didn't much care for the album most consider their masterpiece ("yankee hotel foxtrot"). after all the talk i heard of it being the best album ever made in the universe, i thought it was kind of underwhelming. it took a while for it to grow on me, away from all the hype. eventually i decided i liked it quite a lot. i still, however, like "a_ghost_is_born" better. i'm not sure why. maybe i've got a thing for very long songs and jeff tweedy's spastic electric guitar solos. "sky blue sky" and "wilco (the album)" are never going to grow on me. i can't listen to either of those albums without my brain trying to hop a flight to venezuela. i miss the weirdness and sense of adventure. some unimpressed critics branded the new direction heard on those two albums "dad rock". i don't know if i would go that far, but it was a huge relief when the restlessness of old returned on 2011's "the whole love". i think it might be growing into my favourite wilco album. at worst, it's a three-way tie between this one, "summerteeth", and "a_ghost_is_born". i like it when jeff gets all free-association-like with the lyrics, like he does here. "i never know when i might ambulance," he sings. neither do i. do any of us ever truly know? listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgWJwxl-wG4 130919 ... raze 233. johnny cash // the man comes around from the album "american IV: the man comes around" (2002) it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks, is it not? listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L33OWl2eUQ 130920 ... raze 234. death cab for cutie // i will follow you into the dark from the album "plans" (2005) i never really got into death cab for cutie. the music just didn't grab me. but i heard a snippet of this song in the movie "friends with benefits" and was moved to listen to the whole thing, and i'm glad i did. i gotta say, whoever the music supervisor was for the film, they apparently don't care much about lyrics matching the context of a scene. or maybe they thought a dude singing about being reunited with his love in death was the perfect accompaniment to a scene in which a woman dares a man to hop a fence and break the law, and they're so cute and in love, only they can't admit it, until later on when they can. i mean, who the hell knows with hollywood anymore? as for the movie itself, it's not high art by any means, but just try not to fall in love with mila kunis' character. i tried. i failed. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfNVfiqKBeM 130921 ... raze 235. leo kottke // enderlin music from the film "days of heaven" (1978) "days of heaven" is a film inhabited by two different soundtracks at the same time. there are the dreamy, haunting orchestral pieces by ennio morricone. and then there's this recurring percussive solo acoustic twelve-string guitar performance by leo kottke, who was asked to score the entire film but declined. it shouldn't work, with how disparate morricone and kottke's work is. but it really does. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50fqRvIIiPU 130922 ... raze 236. dark dark dark // how it went down from the album "who needs who" (2012) dark dark dark are a minneapolis band whose songs blur the lines between folk, jazz, blues, and indie-pop. this one is made up of just three chords, but sometimes three is the perfect number. nona marie invie has some kind of magic voice, bending upward like something grown out of the earth and craning its neck to see the sun. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpK3oha4uEY 130923 ... raze 237. cocteau twins // cherry coloured funk from the album "heaven or las vegas" (1990) i once read a review of a cocteau twins album that said something to the effect of, "if you don't hear music like this on your way to heaven, you're headed for the wrong place." i think that's about right. i always thought elizabeth fraser sounded a bit like kate_bush as an angel singing beautiful gibberish, especially when she dipped into the upper reaches of her vocal range. liz's lyrics in most of the cocteau's songs are either made up of neologisms and old scots vocabulary, or english that's so well-disguised by her diction it might as well be a foreign language. i only know i have no idea what she's saying 90% of the time, and when the odd recognizable phrase pops out (in this song i can make out "everything else" and what sounds like "good news"), it's a little startling. it doesn't matter, though. i feel what she's singing even if i can't sing along. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WybSSagVvoU 130924 ... raze 238. the slits // instant hit from the album "cut" (1979) he is too good to be true. set to self-destruct. in 5/4 time, no less. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgXnkXhnGvc 130925 ... raze 239. humble pie // i walk on gilded splinters from the album "performance: rockin' the fillmore"(1971) this is the epic centerpiece of one of the greatest of all live rock albums, featuring one of the greatest and most soulful of all rock singers in the form of steve marriott. kind of makes "frampton comes alive!" sound like michael bolton by comparison (and peter frampton was in *this* band too). listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agV6tpknnnI 130926 ... raze 240. baths // worsening from the album "obsidian" (2013) will wiesenfeld is making some of my favourite vocal idm right now, under the "baths" moniker. some of his songs remind me a bit of prefuse 73. a few sound like a sinister bizarro world inversion of the postal_service fronted by prince. but most of them don't sound like anything or anyone else. as good as "cerulean" was, i think his latest album "obsidian" is even better. it's also a lot darker; the songs were written after a difficult period of illness, during which will was more or less bedridden. there's a lot of anger and acid and apathy, and a lot of pretty melodies to go along with it. at first i thought he used a lot of vocal samples. then i realized he was layering his own voice. that's some kinda voice you got, will. the wordless chorus in this song is what anthony burgess would call "gorgeousness and gorgeousity". listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez8eKTzQXEI 130927 ... raze 241. lindi ortega // angels from the album "little red boots" (2011) like i be sayin' about first aid kit back over on 335_songs (part one) — if more modern country music sounded like this, i'd be hopping on that train as fast as my hopping shoes would allow. sing it, lindi. sing that sweet music. watch / listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dNY1VGpvsI 130928 ... raze 242. lee morgan // these are soulful days from the album leeway (1960) lee morgan was a ridiculously talented musician who, before he was shot by his common-law wife and bled to death at the age of 33 because paramedics were wary of driving to the jazz club he had been performing at in new york's east village, was something of a victim of his own success. after making some great music with art blakey's jazz messengers, he had a solo hit with 1963's "the sidewinder"; the album's title track was a crossover pop hit and even served as the soundtrack for a car commercial. lee was encouraged to replicate the success of that album and song, and to some extent it stunted his artistic growth, though there were occasional glimpses of what he might have done if commercial considerations could have been left out in the rain to develop pneumonia and hack themselves into terminal sleep. this song (written by calvin massey, also doomed in his own way) comes from one of lee's earlier albums as a leader. "soulful" is the word. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWZZrPWiBoU 130929 ... raze 243. nirvana // paper cuts from the album "bleach" (1989) when we were fresh out of high school and in a band together, i used to call my friend gord after work before we got together, and i'd leave all kinds of silly messages on his answering_machine. sometimes i would talk in a made-up voice and improvise a twisted monologue. other times i would sing a bit of something. he always knew it was me. once, i called and sang the entire pre-chorus hook and first chorus of this nirvana song. the next time i saw gord's mother, she told me, "i really enjoy the messages you leave on our answering machine, about masturbation and things." it had never occurred to me that his parents would probably hear most of the messages i left before he did. i was equal parts embarrassed and amused. i don't think my messages were ever quite so twisted after that. it was a good run while it lasted, anyway. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMDGO8RjJEg 130930 ... raze 244. picastro // hortur from the album "whore luck" (2007) i have no_reason to thank for introducing me to picastro many suns and moons ago. frontwoman liz hysen has always sounded to me something like a sad, beautiful ghost, and with time her haunting only grows more resonant. she also has a way of writing brutally honest (or brutally honest-seeming) lyrics. the opening lines here are: "i'm left because i'm never leaving and i don't want the things i have" choosing a favourite picastro album is difficult. i like them all, really. but i do enjoy the way "whore luck" feels like it's split into two distinct halves, starting out in pretty-but-dark territory and then making a sharp turn into some sort of corrosive, delicious sonic and emotional hell. listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-VIatJRpk8 131001 ... raze 245. free // fire_and_water from the album "fire_and_water" (1970) i liked paul rodgers a lot better before he tried stepping into freddie mercury's shoes. that...was not a good idea. bad company gets all the love, but at their best i think free was an even better blues-rock band. paul kossoff was the man. the rest of those guys weren't too shabby either. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S34C_b3Ufrg 131002 ... raze 246. tom_waits // gun street girl from the album "rain dogs" (1985) i caught the music video for the tom_waits song "downtown train" on television when i was twelve or thirteen years old and did a mental double-take. that was the guy's voice? he sang like THAT? it sounded like he'd spent a few years swallowing broken glass, washing the shards down with gasoline for good measure. i thought it was just about the worst thing i'd ever heard. there was nothing nice about it. nothing i would ever want to listen to. about a year later, something compelled me to give tom another chance. i bought "heartattack and vine" and braced myself for the worst. to my amazement, i found myself enjoying it. the voice grew on me in a serious way. within a few months, i went from hating what little i'd heard of his music, to owning every album he'd ever made and loving all of them. it got to the point where i would walk around at lunchtime most days singing "somewhere" from "west side story" in my best tom_waits impression. it was a pretty dead-on impersonation, too, for a tenth grader. sadly, it was also a terrible irritation to my vocal cords. i found myself coughing all the time, and i couldn't figure out why. it wasn't like i got a lot of colds or anything. finally, my on-again, off-again-until-he-decided-to-stop-acknowledging-i-existed piano teacher dustin said to me, "i think you're coughing so much because you're spending too much time singing like your hero." he was right. i stopped singing like tom_waits, and my cough went away. the hilarious thing is, to this day i can't listen to the first few tom_waits albums. the songs are great, but his voice is too "normal" and smooth on those records. the gravel isn't there yet. it doesn't feel right. figuring out what song i want to put here isn't easy. tom's got beautiful ballads, weird spoken-word pieces, insane rockers, jazzy comedy numbers, and songs that inhabit all kinds of esoteric crevices in-between. he also has this stripped-down gutbucket blues thing he does sometimes that i love. so i think i'll go for that right now. the great thing about his 80s albums is that not only are they all brilliant, but none of them will ever sound dated. i don't think there's a single "80s sound" or recognizable period production touch on anything he did. i mean, this song was recorded in 1985. it sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday. one last little anecdote. about fourteen years ago, i was sitting in the back of a car with my sisters. the older of the two was about nine, and the younger would have been around six. i was listening to "16 shells from a thirty-ought six" on "swordfishtrombones". the two of them wanted to know what was playing on my headphones. they had no idea who tom_waits was (neither did i at six or nine), and the older one wanted to give a little listen. i handed her the headphones. she listened for about ten seconds, made a face, and handed them back. not her thing, as expected. "i want to hear too," said the younger one. i passed the headphones over to her. she slipped them on. she listened. she got a big smile on her face. "he's scary," she said. "i like him." me too, sister. me too. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz28AD7qYe8 131003 ... raze 247. joan armatrading // show some emotion from the album "show some emotion" (1977) light up if you're feelin' happy, but if it's bad then let those tears roll down. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyEt8C3KBmo 131004 ... raze 248. in-flight safety // somebody's watching you from the "vacation land" EP (2004) in-flight safety is canada's answer to coldplay, albeit with nowhere near the same level of commercial success, no brian eno, and no movie star girlfriends who've given birth to fruit. but they did have emm gryner in their corner for a while, and she was in that music video where some dude reattached her angel wings, so that must count for something. this is the first song of theirs i ever heard, and it's still the one i like best by quite some distance. take your pick — moody black_and_white music video, but the sound is in mono: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQuWQ3dmQ38 stereo sound, but no video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KIRzvdzlU4 131005 ... raze 249. mahavishnu orchestra // you know you know from the album "the inner mounting flame" (1971) dynamics. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mdGCqZTres 131006 ... raze 250. big star // blue_moon from the album "third / sister lovers" (recorded 1974; first released 1978; reissued in several different forms thereafter) it's always sad (and a little sobering) when your heroes die. so far, a good deal of the artists whose work has deeply affected me are still alive and kicking, or else they died before i was born, or before i had delved into their music enough to feel like i'd lost something tangible once they were gone. i think the passing of alex chilton was the first time the death of a musician actually hurt me. i love elliott_smith, but when he died, i was aware of who he was without being a fan. i didn't really start getting into his music until a few years after he was gone. so there was a weird sort of backwards muffled mourning process there. with alex, it stung. i'd been a fan for a long time, and his music had served as a pretty big part of the soundtrack to my life, particularly during some of the darker moments. alex was a fascinating, elusive character, tricky to pin down 'til the end. he was a "difficult" artist if ever there was one. his discography is as inconsistent as it is unpredictable, but when alex was good, he was frighteningly good, whether he was singing gorgeous love and not-love songs, making a six-string electric guitar sound like a chiming twelve-string, or slinging psychotic deconstructed rock music like mud in the faces of his followers. there's a sort of similar career arc to harry nilsson's, except alex never had the kind of commercial success harry did to begin with. the box tops did have some hits, but alex had no creative control over that music and was little more than a pawn in the hands of the record company, with the money from his success lining the pockets of other people, leaving him a bitter veteran of the music industry when he was still a teenager. that bitterness gradually got funneled into his next band, big star, who produced some of the most gorgeous "pop" music you'll ever hear. they also made some of the weirdest music to come out of the 70s and get lumped into the pop/rock record store section. once people caught on to the greatness of what big star had done, more than a decade after the fact, alex seemed to get off on never giving his audience what they wanted, releasing strange cover albums and straying as far from the glorious pop of the first two big star albums as he could get. and the man had range, from the pre-joe cocker pseudo-soul gravel of the box tops, to the beatles-meets-kinks-meets-something-else of those first two big star albums, to the barbiturate-drenched self-sabotage of the third big star album, to the mess of solo work that jumped from punk/psychobilly/broken-down blues, to funk-and-soul-influenced, laid-back rock that was equal parts polish and laziness, and back again. he sounded more like an old man as a teenager in the box tops, and more like a teenager as a middle-aged man singing old r&b songs. in the 90s alex took to playing live on a semi-regular basis with a reformed big star, two of the posies subbing for absent original members chris bell (more on him some other day) and andy hummel. it felt like little more than a belated nostalgia act. you could sense his heart was never really in it, even if the chops were still there. he was giving people what they wanted, at last, but he was wearing a bunch of old psychic clothes that didn't fit so well anymore while he was doing it. it's telling that he rarely performed anything off of "third / sister lovers", and stuck to the more uptempo, upbeat stuff. i was first intrigued by the mystery of big star around 1998 or ’99, when i read a bit about the band in "rock: the rough guide", the book that was so instrumental in introducing the teenage me to a ton of great music i'd never heard before and might not have found otherwise, before i had regular internet access or a computer at home. i found the first two big star albums at the mall of all places, conveniently thrown together on one inexpensive cd. "radio city" is still a desert island album for me. the same is true of "third", but it's a very different beast. where "radio city" is packed with brilliant hooks and tight band performances, "third" is the sound of alex realizing his dreams of stardom are toast through no fault of his own and, already cynical and jaded beyond his twenty three years, taking a lot of drugs to numb the pain of commercial failure, drinking a lot of hard liquor, and pissing it all over the potential pop appeal of his songs, capturing in audio form all the darkness coursing through his head and heart and guts. it doesn't sound like anything else that came out of the 1970s. while alex would later dismiss it as "half-baked", i think that was a way of distancing himself from how painful "third" was. it's closer to a solo record than a big star album, and it might stand as the single deepest, most complicated, best thing he did. it's been hugely influential on too many other bands and artists to list. i still think alex did it better the first time, though. it didn't even get a proper release when it was finished; no label would put it out. people found the music disturbing. it took a few years before "third" started to sneak out, as bootlegs were circulated and semi-official releases came out on small independent labels. and as many times as it's been reissued since then, the album never got one official title or a single accepted track list. no one knows exactly what it was supposed to be, even now, and alex was never very interested in explaining even when he was still around. the best version is probably the 1992 rykodisc release that just dumps all nineteen master takes in one place and tries to make some sense out of them. there are mistakes all over the place that alex kept because he liked the way they threw things off-balance. beautiful moments and messy, ugly ones co-exist, sometimes sitting next to one another in the same song. "third" is also something of a breakup album, though that element is mostly hidden in the grooves. alex's girlfriend lesa aldridge was a large part of the soul of the album, and you can hear her singing phonetic french backup vocals on the sleepy cover of "femme fatale"...but there was a lot more of her in there, before alex started sneaking into the studio and erasing her parts to spite her. their relationship was volatile and troubled. and yet he wrote a beautiful, perfect little song called "blue moon" for her while she slept, and left it cued up on a tape recorder for her to listen to when she woke up. it's that messy, contradictory stuff of life, and love, and hate. that's what's embedded in the music, and what makes it so powerful, i think. the solo stuff is a bit spotty, but "like flies on sherbert" is some sort of masterpiece of sloppy lo-fi punky rock. some of it is hilarious; the take on "girl after girl" sounds like it belongs in an especially depraved david lynch movie, a 1950s throwback that's at once reverent and contemptuous, with a grotesque-but-effective vocal performance from alex. as much as i love alan vega and suicide, i think this is what the "elvis in hell" description should have been coined to describe. and alex's take on "no more the moon shines on lorena" has to be one of the weirdest cover versions ever recorded by anyone. parts of the album are downright scary — in a different way from anything on "third". the demented cover of "waltz across texas" comes off like a psychotic break set to music, and the title track sounds like one of phil spector's most horrifying acid-fried nightmares, complete with the sound of a synthesizer being tortured, the tape speed slowing down mid-song, and a bit of screamed german. on the other hand, "hey! little child" is ridiculously catchy, with one of the best electric guitar riffs i've ever heard. if there was any justice in the world it would be recognized for the great rock & roll song it is, instead of staying tucked away on an album few people have heard or taken the time to figure out because none of it is even within waving distance of big star. this music is very much its own thing. it's deeply "southern" (one of the strange joys of those big star albums is hearing alex try so hard to suppress his drawl and sound british, when he was as british as my right foot), and i think it's been unjustly maligned by critics unwilling or unable to take it for what it is — the sound of a man falling apart and keeping it together at the same time. for me, pretty much everything alex did during this "lost" period is kind of essential in one way or another, as rough as some of it is. what can i say? i'm a sucker for the raw, not-giving-a-shit, emotionally honest stuff. i think his cover of the seeds song "can't seem to make you mine" surpasses the original, and its insane longing was a good companion for me during one of the more romantically frustrating times of my life, not long after i first found blather in 2001. "live in london" also comes from alex's time in the wilderness, and is another album that few people have anything good to say about. while the band was under-rehearsed and it isn't all brilliant, i think the live version of "bangkok" wipes the floor with the (admittedly great) original studio recording. it sounds like it's charged with electricity, the electric guitars imitating the machine gun sound effects from the studio take. when alex's vocal mic feeds back, you can almost see him making a face that says he doesn't really care. nothing after that does it for me in quite the same way. but that's alright. i think alex earned the right to do whatever he wanted, even if what he wanted was to make sure he never made great or meaningful music again, just to spite those who decided they cared when he no longer desired their attention, and hadn't been there when it mattered. i could put twenty different songs here for twenty different reasons. but i made a deal to limit myself to one song per artist. so here's "blue moon". for years i almost thought of it as filler, and wouldn't pay much attention to it when i listened to the album. now i can barely get through it, because it's one of the purest love songs i've ever heard, i GET it now, and alex's singing is so human and vulnerable and open-hearted, on an album where he often sounds weary, angry, and devoid of hope. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLoZw21Utzo 131007 ... raze 251. cowboy junkies // a common disaster from the album "lay it down" (1996) i was a little bit in love with margo timmins when i was thirteen years old. this is one of the reasons why. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsS_W5jN-vU 131008 ... raze 252. marie queenie lyons // see and don't see from the album "soul fever" (1970) marie queenie lyons is a mystery. she was born in louisiana, raised in ohio, worked with king curtis, jackie wilson, and james brown, recorded a few singles and an album, and then apparently vanished. no one seems to know what happened to her. one thing's certain: she could sing the living hell out of a soul song. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwcEFnwbVuo 131009 ... raze 253. todd rundgren // i went to the mirror from the album "something / anything?" (1972) todd rundgren managed the neat trick of achieving the peak of both his commercial and artistic success at exactly the same time. "something / anything?" is the best-selling album in his catalogue. it's also a staggering creative achievement, and one of the great double albums of the 70s. the first three vinyl sides are entirely self-performed and self-produced, while the fourth side was recorded live in the studio with a full band and a tongue-in-cheek narrative connecting the songs. todd's liner notes would almost be worth the price of admission all on their own. in the blurb that accompanies this song, he says the listener is meant to stare at themselves in a mirror while listening. i've never tried that. maybe i should. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPanMdTTDc0 131010 ... raze 254. richard laviolette // thesaurus from the album "a little less like a rock, a little more like home" (2006) do all the words that leave my mouth disappear soon after? has anything i've ever said stayed around to mean it? do sentences that i make up make up their meaning? do all the people i talk to use the same thesaurus? if no one in the world can share thoughts of how they're feeling then what on earth are we to do? what is there to live for? listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4AuoVf-s58 131011 ... raze 255. dirty radio // all nighter from the "lick 1.0" EP (2013) i'm a little surprised by how much i enjoy this. it's usually a pretty safe bet that anything i see or hear on muchmusic will leave me with a strong desire to toss my television from the nearest window. not so here. i don't know if i'd like any of this self-described canadian indie-electro-RNB trio's other songs, but i like this one. part of the appeal is the austerity of the arrangement, and the way all the sonic puzzle pieces don't come together until the very end. if the song is about ecstasy, the video makes the drug angle even more explicit. i think it captures the truth of a not-entirely-pleasant rolling experience better than any MDMA-inused film i've seen, without quite celebrating or demonizing empathogens. on an incidental note, i like how i keep hearing the chorus as "i need a pair of shoes 'cause i'm fallin'", when it's clear the dude is really singing "parachute". shoes would help with the landing, would they not? watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ez6M5XU8eo 131012 ... the evil angel on my shoulder yeah, and the letter f would help to make the word "infused" look a little less winded. you can't win them all. 131012 ... raze 256. van morrison // angeliou from the album "into the music" (1979) van morrison wrote most of the songs that would appear on "into the music" while walking through the fields of epwell, england with an acoustic guitar slung around his neck. he found something special out there in the cotswolds. as great as the first vinyl side of the album is (if you can listen to "bright side of the road" without your mood being lifted, i fear there may be no hope for you), the second half is even better — a fantastic slow burn to rival the best moments on "astral weeks". this live performance of "angeliou" from 1980, at the montreaux jazz festival, loses the great rhythmic piano line that propels the verses on the original album version, but there are some great new band dynamics in its place. the video and audio are a tiny bit out of sync. ain't no big thing. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDTFvJLJc_0 131013 ... raze 257. my brightest diamond // something of an end from the album "bring me the workhorse" (2006) shara worden may be the closest thing i've heard to a female jeff buckley. in a song like this, it can get a little eerie. not that it's a bad thing. listen: http://youtube/NbHDd7LmFqY 131014 ... raze fails at the linkage damn you, youtube. that should have been: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbHDd7LmFqY 131014 ... raze 258. destroyer // rubies from the album "destroyer's rubies" (2006) it is now and it is never. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVcvEmIQ2wM 131015 ... raze 259. yeah yeah yeahs // modern romance from the album "fever to tell" (2003) as good as karen o is at rocking out, i think she's even better in the quieter, more vulnerable moments. like this. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=df4ZpLeaEPM 131016 ... raze 260. jazmine sullivan // lions, tigers & bears from the album "fearless" (2008) when's the last time you heard a percussion-free r&b song that lived outside of 4/4 time? for me, it was...i don't even know. but here's jazmine sullivan to show us how it's done. she asks a good question, too: why do we love love, when love seems to hate us? watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh5mEat46fc 131017 ... raze 261. dan hartman // i can dream about you from the album "i can dream about you" (1984) 80s guilty pleasure moment #8. i heard this song on the radio every so often while i was growing up. there was something in it that was a little bit haunting to me back then. maybe it was those octave vocals during the verses. time has robbed it of that ethereal otherness, but i still think it's an interesting synthesis of 1960s motown sensibilities and overblown 1980s production touches. one reigns in the other while being encouraged to put on weight. the music video is ultra-cheesy. it's so cheese-tastic, it might cause your cheese-o-meter to explode. and i wouldn't want to be responsible for that. so here's the song on its own, with no moving images. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9N1DSccGy4A 131018 ... raze 262. tomandandy // post suicide music from "the rules of attraction" (2002) i haven't read the book, but the most affecting character in the film adaptation of bret easton ellis's "the rules of attraction" is the unnamed "food service girl", played by theresa wayman. she's on-screen for all of three minutes, and i don't think she has one word of spoken dialogue. she writes love letters to dawson — i mean james van der beek's character. he mistakenly assumes the letters are from someone else. she ends up committing suicide, and this song plays over a montage showing all the times she was right there in front of him and he didn't even notice her (a montage that ends with the beek punching jessica biel in the face). even in death she's invisible. the only person seen to mourn her — the only one who seems to even know who she is — is shannyn sossamon's character...and she's the one the beek thinks the letters are from. shannyn, by the way, named her first son "audio science". vomit along with me, will you? anyway. next to the harry nilsson song that plays during the hard-to-watch suicide scene, this is some of the best music in the movie. it isn't, however, on the soundtrack album. why would it be? i mean, why release a soundtrack album that's actually a complete representation of the music heard throughout the film it's meant to reflect? that's crazy talk. lucky for us there's the internet to make finding such things a little easier. theresa wayman, as it happens, is a member of the band warpaint. i had no idea. anyone who can inject some pathos into a film that's otherwise more about depravity for depravity's sake *and* make good music is okay by me. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_wlTCMfKwM 131019 ... raze 263. 10cc // i'm not in love from the album "the original soundtrack" (1975) i first heard this one not on classic rock radio, but in "the_virgin_suicides". it creeped me out. part of that was the movie itself, and part of it was the song. the eerie wash of sound that runs through the whole thing was created by the band overdubbing their voices all singing the same note. the result was mixed down to a mono track on 16-track tape. the process was repeated for each track, with different notes sung, until there were 256 voices spread out over 16 tracks. several of those tracks were cut into tape loops, each of them containing the basic notes of the chord progression, and the loops were then "played" on the mixing desk by manipulating the faders to create chromatic chords and vocal arpeggios. today you'd just sample a single vocal track and use a midi keyboard to play whatever notes you wanted. in the time before computer-based recording and samplers, it was a much trickier, more involved process. and i'd be willing to bet no digital sampled virtual vocal choir would have the same richness or sonic power that was accomplished here with a little time, effort, analog tape, and a razor blade. you can hear the influence this had on billy joel's "just the way you are", right down to the similar tempo, but i don't think his song has anything close to the same punch. "just the way you are" is schmaltz where this one is cynicism, light and airy where this is thick and murky, and billy's background vocals are just that — background noise. here they're an integral part of the arrangement, at once lush and hollow. so the question left is: is the singer in love and in denial? or is he a soulless husk of a person incapable of loving? you decide. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQR3u6LtmUs 131020 ... raze 264. thao with the get down stay down // beat (health, life and fire) from the album "we brave bee stings and all" (2008) thao nguyen's voice has got some kind of pretty-but-defiant fire in it. i like it. but oh, how can i stand it, when she runs, when she runs like a bandit? listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WJRjJncphk 131021 ... raze and another reason i like her: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fO3dBzV0O8#t=159 131021 ... raze 265. ry cooder // she's leaving the bank music from "paris, texas" (1984) "paris, texas" goes on the list of my all-time favourite movies, and ry cooder's soundtrack is one of the reasons why. i think it's a perfect marriage of sound and image, and the decision to make the dobro the lead musical voice was a masterstroke. in pieces like this, the guitar almost seems to weep. i tend to watch the films and listen to the music i like best as infrequently as possible, in an effort to preserve some of the initial mystery and keep them a little elusive. i've become the polar opposite of someone who puts things on repeat. in ten years i've only watched "paris, texas" twice. the first time was with my dad, and that was ideal. we both let it cast its spell on us. the second time was some years later, with some friends i thought would appreciate it. it was too slow for them. they had the collective attention span of goldfish fecal matter and heckled through most of the film, tossing in moronic asides that added nothing to the experience. the third time, whenever that is, i think i might watch it alone. really feel its lonely heart pumping cinematic blood through my chest while i borrow it for a while. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofBTd_54e5I 131022 ... raze 266. outkast // aquemeni from the album "aquemeni" (1998) even the sun goes down heroes eventually die horoscopes often lie and sometimes y nothin' is for sure nothin' is for certain nothin' lasts forever but until they close the curtain it's him and i aquemini listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Wl3rM3AlC0 131023 ... raze 267. manu katché // lo from the album "playground" (2007) i heard the first few songs on this album not long after it was released, on a french radio station, before i knew manu existed as a solo artist. some might call it "smooth jazz". it's definitely on the mellower, more melodic side of things. it's also some of my favourite recent jazz i've heard. good music for a late night drive. good music for a late night anything, really. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9SlZ7IwjZI 131024 ... raze 268. the afghan whigs // honky's ladder from the album "black love" (1996) does anyone do "pissed off and horny" better than afghan whigs frontman greg dulli? maybe pj harvey at her most abrasive. but as far as fellas go, i'm hard pressed to think of anyone who can best dulli's mixture of ragged soul and pure, unapologetic lecherousness. granted, this song is more about the anger and not so much about the come-ons...but who's keeping score? watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS4Moad0rXA 131025 ... raze 269. feist // lonely lonely from the album "let it die" (2004) i didn't want to like feist. anything that gets as much hype as her sophomore album "let it die" did is immediately suspect to me. but i couldn't get away from that voice of hers. guess what i figured out? i like feist. these three lines: "distance makes the heart grow weak so that the mouth can barely speak except to those who hide their needs" cut like a very sharp thing. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlIDp7Rk2Ag 131026 ... raze 270. fleetwood mac // sara from the album "tusk" (1979) this is the most beautiful thing stevie nicks has ever written, i think, and it was criminally trimmed by two minutes when "tusk" was first released on CD. the song was 16 minutes long in its original form, then edited down to less than half of that for this "full" album version. i'd kind of like to hear all those missing verses, but i think 6 & 1/2 minutes is just about right. just long enough to get lost in for a while. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHJb87nNsGY 131027 ... raze 271. the luyas // too beautiful to work from the album "too beautiful to work" (2011) i was listening to the latest califone album just now and thinking about how much jessie stein adds to the few songs she sings on. her childlike voice plays off of tim rutili's cracked tenor in a really interesting way. turns out she makes her own music too, and she plays the moodswinger. what's not to like? watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PfxoCyH59g 131028 ... raze 272. justin timberlake // blue ocean floor from the album "the 20/20 experience" (2013) i'm as surprised by this one as you are. who knew JT had a weightless ambient ballad like this in him? listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgNk_TV3otA 131029 ... raze fails at the linkage actually, the sound quality on that one is abysmal. sorry 'bout that. try this link instead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWmyT8DM1r4 131029 ... raze 273. beck // mutherfuker from the album "mellow gold" (1994) there used to be a pool hall here called nine ball heaven, until someone was stabbed and killed inside the place and it closed down. there was a giant jukebox inside, full of a diverse array of whole albums to choose songs from. i remember alice cooper, led zeppelin, nirvana, even jeff_buckley. when we were still teenagers, one of me and my then-best-friend's favourite things to do if we had some time to kill and no solid plans was to smoke a magic cigarette and head to nine ball heaven to shoot some pool. i ran into my high school law teacher there one time when i was high out of my mind. that was funny, and awkward. another time a pretty girl followed us outside as we were leaving and asked what my name was. i told her and asked her why she wanted to know. "oh, i was just..." she said, trailed off with a weird little smile, turned around, and went back inside. i blew that one, didn't i? my friend would have fun pumping the machine full of quarters and he'd put together a whole half-hour playlist of music for us. i have a vivid memory of jim morrison singing "people are strange" while a group of thuggish-looking guys glared at us like they wanted to kick our heads in. they'd put some money in the jukebox and picked some rap songs after my friend did his thing, only for the classic rock to keep going, and going, and going. my friend really liked playing this song, on a semi-regular basis. it scared the hell out of me every time. made me paranoid. i think what really did it was the creepy falsetto singing during the second and last choruses. good old beck. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08YLK1Hf_ug 131030 ... raze 274. matt maxwell // c'est l'halloween from the album "comment ca va?"(1984) is this the best grade school french song of all time? it was definitely the most fun to sing, though i was also partial to matt's "combien de jours?" back in the day. that was a catchy tune. and there's one i've never been able to track down to figure out who it was by, though i can still hear it in my head — a peppy song with a woman singing a chorus of, "une et deux et trois et quatre et une et deux et trois et quatre! une et deux et trois et quatre, et une et deux et trois!" would you believe that one was about numbers? matt never came to play for my school, but jacquot gave a live concert in our gymnasium around the time i was in the fourth grade. he had no band. he used backup tapes and played a black electric guitar, and it was weirdly thrilling. my grade school was the best. happy halloween. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy5V1lD_0Rs 131031 ... raze 275. gary_burton and steve swallow // vashkar from the album "hotel hello" (1975) i picked up "hotel hello" on a whim when i found it in a used record bin, not having heard any of steve swallow's music but knowing gary_burton is awesomeness personified. there aren't many musicians who can make a vibraphone sing the way he does. the allmusic review dismisses this album as "thoughtful background music with no real surprises or excitement". well, sometimes that's not a bad thing. sometimes reflective music that doesn't demand your undivided attention every step of the way is exactly what you need. today was one of those days for me. i've always enjoyed percussion-free duo recordings like this. you get to hear musicians think and improvise in a different way than they would with a drummer. gary plays vibes, organ, and marimba here, while steve plays bass and piano. the songs alternate between bluesy vamps and dreamy mood pieces. i wanted to put a moody little track called "sweeping up" here, but the only song from this album i can find in stream-able form online is this one, a cover of carla bley's "vashkar". it's pretty moody and nifty in its own right. listen: http://grooveshark.com/#!/album/Hotel+Hello/9225573 131101 ... raze 276. aretha franklin // dr. feelgood from the album "i never loved a man the way i love you" (1967) aretha was a force of nature. she still is, but when she let loose like this in her prime...talk about intense. here, in amsterdam, the sweat tries to tell her face it's tears, but she knows better. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5eWL_-eY8Y 131102 ... raze 277. angus & julia stone // big jet plane from the album "down the way" (2010) it's pledge drive time at the local university radio station, and i sat in on a friend's show today. he plays all australian / new zealand bands and artists. there were a few songs i heard that grabbed me, and this is one of them. how the hell something melancholy and pretty like this ever found its way into a maybelline commercial is beyond me. music supervisors are a weird bunch. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFTvbcNhEgc 131103 ... raze 278. mergingmoon // greyen from the album "kamikakushi" (2013) mergingmoon is a self-described japanese "new wave melodic death metal" band. i first heard of them last night, c/o anthony bourdain's show "parts unknown" on CNN. CNN! brain = explode. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzcugYWll7Y 131104 ... raze 279. chet atkins // autumn leaves recorded live in 1972 i think the thing i've always liked best about chet atkins is this kind of relaxed joy that comes across in just about everything he ever did. you can see and hear it in this performance. the man's just sitting there, doing his thing, making it seem completely effortless. i'd bet anything he played the same way whether he was on a stage or in his living room. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkztrtOjpH4 131105 ... raze 280. the shins // kissing the lipless from the album "chutes too narrow" (2003) back when "chutes too narrow" and broken social scene's "you forgot it in people" were both relatively new and swimming in hype, i asked a radio DJ friend if he thought i should crawl out from under my rock of ignorance and pick them both up. "the broken social scene album is something every pop music fan should own," he told me. "the shins album is something every MUSIC fan should own." i don't know how right he was. but ten years on, i still think this is a great song. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ntjGeiUe64 131106 ... raze 281. seefeel // charlotte's mouth from the album "quique" (1993) i think simon reynolds, in his review of the debut seefeel full-length album twenty years ago, nailed what the band sounded like at their best about as well as it could be nailed by anyone. they "struck a sublime groove midway between MBV's sensual tumult and aphex twin's ambient serenity", he wrote. "you try to squint your ear in order to bring the music into focus, then give up, and just bask in the gorgeous, amorphous glow." it's hypnotic stuff. and though it isn't always present, sarah peacock's wordless singing is an essential element of that "amorphous glow", perhaps best heard in this song. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR1vkGXseJY 131107 ... raze 282. bent by elephants // saskatchewan pool from the "BBE" EP (2009) i got this EP when it was first released, in what looked like homemade packaging, from bent by elephants guitarist luke fowlie. i sent him some of my music and a handwritten letter along with payment for the EP, because i'm a dinosaur without a paypal account. he wrote me a letter back. i fainted. then i came to and listened to the album. there's a different version of this song on the 2010 full-length "this is water" (david_foster_wallace reference, eh?). the production there is a little richer and cleaner, but i think i prefer the rougher magic of this earlier version. that floating little bridge section before everything explodes is so much more effective here, with those violin harmonics and the drums dropping out for a bit. listen: http://bentbyelephantsband.bandcamp.com/track/saskatchewan-pool 131108 ... raze 283. shawn colvin // viva las_vegas from the album "till the night is gone: a tribute to doc pomus" (1995) if you've only ever heard elvis presley's giant grin of a version of this song, be prepared to do a bit of a mental double take. talk about reinterpreting a tune and turning it inside_out. i actually think it works better this way. go figure. viva los 90s. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g87Mu9SNqwk 131109 ... raze 284. howlin' wolf // how many more years? from the album "moanin' in the moonlight" (1959) howlin' wolf breaks it down. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDQskReNjbw 131110 ... raze 285. sky ferreira // you're not the one from the album "night time, my time" (2013) i wasn't expecting to like this half as much as i do. i guess i've come to expect nothing too inspiring from the old "controversial burgeoning pop star" song and dance routine. but here comes sky to give me a little something to cheer about. if the go-gos woke up next to the talking heads one morning in the early 1980s and they all fused themselves together in one of the telepods out of david cronenberg's 1986 remake of "the fly", they might have come out sounding something like this. i suppose you might call the results "the gawking toes", or something like that, and the bass would slither, what was left of belinda carlisle would sound like this, and it would be infectious and good. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFCZP1Nz3Ds 131111 ... raze taking the final stretch over to 335_songs_part_four, where i may or may not succeed in making no typos at all. come watch me fail! 131112 ... raze replacements for dead links & fixes: #153 accidentally duplicated the link for 152; proper link for the flamingos is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvzNeh4Mq1o #194 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lAo-LEYeOw #203 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gibCEMjkhY4 #223 this is only available in pieces now, at least as far as the 1955 recording is concerned. but here's the first variation (which i mistakenly referred to as the second, forgetting that what i thought was the first variation is actually the aria), and my favourite part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQuEvFtrVPs #226 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmhL0Ynn_dc #230 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_3LhYwbN-U #245 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH5wbYP5xkQ #263 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxdcM-bTIyA 131212 ... raze a few more replacement links: #176 the link here is still good, but i should have included the link to that moody music video the first time around, because even though you lose the instrumental outro, it's good stuff. here it be: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CviqQkJ1Q0 #181 here's the song i wanted to include the first time around but couldn't find on the old tube of you: http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Lost+Ring/2GhCIq?src=5 #197 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-hKBmTAADo #203 because disney shares (the artist formerly and now again known as) prince's disease of thinking crummy quality streaming video snippets on the internet are somehow eating into their gold-lined pockets, the full version of this song can no longer be found on youtube. so here it is on metatube. eat it, disney. eat it, and then get heartburn so bad you can't sleep all night. http://www.metatube.com/en/videos/62767/Disney-s-Everybody-Wants-to-be-a-Cat-Song-Aristocats/ 140122 ... raze and two more. #233 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgfWvwP6vHc #246 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4XZWZ91kfc 140401 what's it to you? who go blather from