Volume 8, Track 14
“Big Train” by Mike Watt (1995) On the album cover for Ball-Hog Or Tugboat? is the phrase “Sex with you is like watching scientific wrestling.” This most likely falls into line with Mike Watt’s overall humor. (Watt was the bassist for Minutemen, whose songs, with titles like “Political Song For Michael Jackson To Sing” and [...]
Volume 8, Track 13
“I Will Dare” by The Replacements (1984) “How young are you? How old am I? Let’s count the rings around my eyes How smart are you? How dumb am I? Don’t count any of my advice” The opening lyrics of “I Will Dare” are nothing if not blunt and so too is the music. Aside [...]
Volume 8, Track 12
“Star Sail” by The Verve (1993) “Star Sail” begins The Verve’s debut full-length album A Storm In Heaven with a textural and mesmerizing quality that makes it the clear favorite to win the award for “Best Shoegazing Album Since Loveless“. Richard Ashcroft’s vocals and the guitars are almost surgically arranged in layers and at times [...]
Volume 8, Track 11
“Margaret vs. Pauline” by Neko Case (2006) The ‘vs.’ in the title of this song is what everything hinges on. Because it does not denote physical competition or even an implied mutual hatred here, the song is free to act merely as a story, with the vs. acting as a device to give the commentary [...]
Volume 8, Track 10
“Wish I Could” by Norah Jones (2007) Norah Jones absolutely confounds me. Part of me genuinely believes that she is capable of creating a modern equivalent of Astral Weeks: someone who could seemingly excel at singing stream-of-consciousness-style lyrics amongst a sea of complex and minimalist music. This part of me, unfortunately, is usually beaten down [...]
Volume 8, Track 9
“From Out Of Nowhere” by Faith No More (1989) Faith No More’s debut album The Real Thing was such a breath of fresh air when it was released because it really couldn’t be quantified or categorized as something definitive, or be assigned a static label. This was, however intentional, in direct defiance to the labeling [...]
Volume 8, Track 8
“Bye Bye Love” by Ray Charles (1962) Never has a song that is so fundamentally sad and depressing (“Bye bye love/Bye bye sweet caress/Hello emptiness/I feel like I could die”) been done up so beautifully and wonderfully energetic. Like many musicians growing up before WWII, Ray Charles was influenced by country music and in 1962 [...]
Volume 8, Track 7
“Nature Boy” by The Sea And Cake (1995) For whatever reason, “Nature Boy” is a tough song for me to adequately describe. Logically, it can be described as such: it begins with some rolling drums that steadily get louder before mildly exploding into an indie rhythm that is equipped with energetic-yet-mellow guitars and a nicely [...]
Volume 8, Track 6
“Orphans” by Beck (2008) For all of the weirdness and irony and crazy sampling that Beck is capable of throwing at you, he is quite equipped to make really polished music that gives his odd lyrics some actual character. A lot of his early work (namely Odelay) had a certain genius about it but since [...]
Volume 8, Track 5
“Care Of Cell 44″ by The Zombies (1968) What a lot of people forget about when it comes to the British Invasion is how remarkably efficient it was in separating who the Tier 1 artists from everyone else. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks: this was a veritable murderer’s row of talent. [...]
Volume 8, Track 4
“Them Bones” by Alice In Chains (1992) Creepy-ish screams and heavy riffs: when done right it can be downright mesmerizing to listen to. Alice In Chains didn’t tinker around with how to start Dirt–“Them Bones” starts out with the quickness and ferocity of a gunshot, and assaults you in an abstract way not unlike how [...]
Volume 8, Track 3
“Grand Ole Opry Song” by The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (1972) The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band were a California-based hippie-ish folk band that had scored a minor hit in the late ’60′s with their version of “Mr. Bojangles.” Somewhere along the line they decided to completely change gears and released one of the most acclaimed [...]
Volume 8, Track 2
“Movin’ On Up” by Primal Scream (1991) Released a couple of months into my freshman year and mere days before my 14th birthday, Screamadelica has held up surprisingly well after all these years. A lot of this can directly be attributed to “Movin’ On Up,” the flawless opener that melds quasi-hippie, -folk, and -gospel influences [...]
Volume 8, Track 1
“Tired Of Sex” by Weezer (1996) “Tired Of Sex” starts off Pinkerton in much the same way that “My Name Is Jonas” started off Weezer’s eponymous debut: it has a raucous energy about it that is nicely layered and it is built around lyrics that could very easily be construed as being ironic, random, or [...]
Volume 8 Introduction
Even though Volume 6 was all about overlooked final songs, I could not have adequately described the importance of how an album ends without first covering how an album begins. I also included literature in the argument—namely, that the opening lines of Anna Karenina or Moby-Dick are not entirely dissimilar to the opening tracks of [...]
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