These are easy and fun to write, so here you go! I’m also going to start embedding what I consider to be the best or most interesting song into the article, depending on YouTube availability. It only took me 2 ½ years to figure out how to do that!
#1) Led Zeppelin – “The Rover” – Physical Graffiti (1975)
As seen in Random Ten #21. Let’s try again.
#1) Bob Marley & the Wailers – “One Love/People Get Ready” – Exodus (1977)
Ahh, new! And incredibly famous. You ever hear this one?
Bob Marley gets an unfortunate bad rap because every asshole in college has that mosaic poster of him smoking a joint (I had it, too!). He was somehow morphed into a posthumous crusader for white, teenaged pot smokers and his music has become subsidiary to that ever-present image of him with the weed smoke coming out of his mouth. And that’s too bad, because Bob Marley has a lot of really good music that will be dismissed by many offhand simply due to the nature of his fans. Just like a great number of rappers and bands like U2 and Dave Matthews Band, an artist doesn’t necessarily suck just because a bunch of morons follow them. Except 311. They fucking blow.
#2) Dave Matthews Band – “#41” – Listener Supported (1999; this is a live album. “#41” originally appeared on Crash [1996])
Speaking of the well-dressed, flatbrim-hatted, “I totally like all music, brah, even though I listen to two bands” devil.
You know what this song reminds me of? Driving around North Andover smoking weed and delivering pizzas as a teenager. I was so (not) awesome. People looked at my shitbox Buick and heard “#41” blaring out the windows and must have thought, “That guy is a fucking loser.”
But to those hypothetical people of the past I say that “#41” is a really good song. Matthews can come across as creepy and desperate in some of his love songs, but in “#41” he mostly hits the right notes. Maybe some of his and the band’s success can be attributed to his “everyman” voice. He’s a crooner, but he doesn’t have the voice for it. This works in his favor in this case because he sounds like any other person in love except with the ability to articulate it. The simple guitars and the horns don’t allow the track to delve into uncomfortable sappiness, so it never feels completely emasculating or embarrassing. The prerequisite jam, however, is really, really, boring. This is a good pop song; I know it’s live and everything, but the jamming here doesn’t elaborate or improve on anything. It just makes me forget the good parts.
#3) U2 – “Mofo” – Pop (1997)
Just because I mentioned these bands doesn’t mean I want to listen to them. You may remember Pop as the album that had that song where the members of U2 dressed up like the Village People for the video. That’s about all I remember of it. I want to say critical opinion was dismal, but I’m sure the album sold like a hundred million copies anyway.
I really want to listen to the rest of this record, because if all of it sounds like “Mofo” it is amazing that one of the biggest rock bands in the world escaped this relatively unscathed. I think U2 was going for some sort of house/trance/techno/rock hybrid here, which just sounds really weird from them. I appreciate that they had the balls (and the status) to try something like this, but “Mofo” is not a pleasant listen. This sounds like the music you hear during some futuristic fight scene in a shitty movie like Underworld. Not good at all, but an interesting one-time curiosity.
#4) Beck – “The Horrible Fanfare/Landslide/Exoskeleton” – The Information (2006)
I feel like I wrote about this song in a Random Ten once but I can’t seem to find that. This does, however, give me cause to dust off my old column on The Information. Recycling!
Where U2 sounds odd trying out radically different forms of music, Beck sounds at home, no matter what he does. He could release an album of Cat Stevens covers playing nothing but a Theremin and no one would bat an eye. I bet it would be awesome, too.
You may guess this track is split into a few movements. “The Horrible Fanfare” is the first, and it lives up to its billing. Airy, dark and haunting, the first two minutes of the track sound like a drum machine death march. “Landslide” is more straightforward and inviting, but still lumbers along slowly. Bits of light are allowed through only via Beck’s up tempo vocals and some piano flourishes. “Exoskeleton” then returns the track to insanity, featuring ambient noises and spoken word dialogue about God knows what.
What’s cool about Beck is that he never comes off as pretentious. This song is a great example. All sorts of crazy shit is happening, and though this isn’t a great listen, none of his embellishments induce an eye roll or an exasperated “jeez”. The end of the song with the disembodied male voice talking about spacecrafts and exoskeletons over beatless droning? That’s just Beck.
#5) Dr. Dog – “I Hope There’s Love” – We All Belong (2007)
Dr. Dog has a great feel for melody and how even the simplest vocal harmony can make a song memorable. “I Hope There’s Love” resembles a lo-fi Beatles in this respect; overtly simple but incredibly effective. The entire song is nothing but tinny vocals and what sounds like one of those terrible children’s keyboards playing an accordion tone. It works.
#6) Bone Thugs-n-Harmony – “Friends” – The Art Of War (1997)
The Art Of War is one of my favorite records ever because it was such a colossal misstep. After the success of E. 1999 Eternal (“Crossroads”, “1st Of Tha Month”), Bone Thugs decided that the best follow up would be a double disc record, forcing listeners to slog through 28 songs. A double-disc usually isn’t a good idea for even the most prolific, proggy, “intelligent” rock group, but for a rap combo whose primary subject matter is how much weed they smoke? Death. They never truly recovered from this.
Before I started the track I was hoping they might incorporate the hook from Whodini’s 1984 hit of the same name, and they do! Of course, that makes me want to hear that other song and not this one. When the beat is right and the hook is memorable, Bone Thugs can actually sound pretty good. But when the indecipherable lyrics are piled on top of a boring melody, as happens here, patience and tolerance don’t last long.
#7) Pantera – “Hard Lines, Sunken Cheeks” – Far Beyond Driven (1994)
When I first heard Pantera, I deemed them the heaviest metal band on earth. What other band could be heavier? Well, I had yet to hear death metal bands who sung about stabbing fetuses with ice picks or black metal bands who loved Satan so much that they actually burned down churches. When I did find out about those other bands, I was content to solidify myself a few rungs up on the heavy metal ladder. Pantera’s fine. Rotting Christ might be a bit much.
“Hard Lines, Sunken Cheeks”, like most of Far Beyond Driven, is incredibly methodical. The song is a seven minute dirge. Pantera eschews some of the melodies and relative lightness of a lot of thrash metal. Their music is often legitimately scary. Singer Phil Anselmo’s scowl halfway through the track would foreshadow some of his later work in various black metal groups. His menacing and off-putting grunting in the last minute of the track, coupled with the spiraling and whiny guitars, sounds particularly demonic. “Hard Lines, Sunken Cheeks” isn’t pleasant, but it arguably captures Pantera at their most evil, and may be worth a cursory listen just for that.
(It’s also amazing that an album that originally had this as a cover debuted at #1 on the Billboard album charts.)
#8) The Jayhawks – “Sioux City” – Blue Earth (1989)
May as well revisit these guys! This is such a drastic change from the last track that I think I need a minute to cleanse my palette. This sounds like a song from Aladdin to me right now.
OK. Actually, it sounds like Johnny Cash. Very simple all around, very pleasant throughout. “Sioux City” is a nice three minute ditty with a good chorus, nice changes, and good guitar parts. This is a standard “pretty good” alt-country song.
#9) Phish – “Weigh” – Slip Stitch And Pass (1997; this is a live album. “Weigh” originally appeared on Rift [1993])
You know what this song reminds me of? Driving around North Andover smoking weed and delivering pizzas as a teenager.
Slip Stitch And Pass seems antiquated now because pretty much every concert the band has ever performed is available for sale or download. I’d still argue that it is near essential for Phish fans, however, because it presents the band at a high point in their career (early 1997) playing very tight and concise songs. “Weigh” is only a few seconds longer than on Rift, but the band sounds like they’re having fun on it, working in their experimental style within the shortened time limit. Maybe that’s why the album is so interesting. Phish doesn’t sound abridged here; nothing sounds missing on “Weigh” or elsewhere on the record. It’s just that even their live performances can occasionally benefit from temperance and brevity.
#10) Steely Dan – “Throw Back The Little Ones” – Katy Lied (1975)
Steely Dan kinda sounds like a cheesy jazz lounge act. An awesome cheesy jazz lounge act. Unconventional vocals, great piano, really smart in both lyrics and arrangements. Steele Dan always manages to be genuinely and happily surprising, deviating from the path to take the song somewhere unexpected but also essential. “Throw Back The Little Ones” contains a lot of great moments like this, including a simple, wonderful piano outro that serves as the finale for both the song and the record.
John Lacey
No comments:
Post a Comment