To celebrate the 4th anniversary of the moon landing, here’s footage from For All Mankind, with Brian’s Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)” on the soundtrack.
I recommend both the movie and the soundtrack.
Posts Tagged ‘Music’
Happy 44th Birthday, Apollo 11
Saturday, July 20th, 2013Shoegazer Sunday: The Meeting Places’ “Now I Know You Could Never Be The One”
Sunday, July 14th, 2013The Meetings Places are a California shoegaze band that include former member’s of Alison’s Halo (a fine pedigree). Here’s the pleasant, ethereal “Now I Know You Could Never Be The One,” which sounds a bit like some of Slowdive’s pre-Just for a Day material.
Shoegazer Sunday: School of Seven Bells’ “My Cabal”
Sunday, July 7th, 2013School of Seven Bells are a band from New York City named after the mythical pickpocket school. They started out as a trio and are now down to a duo. “My Cabal” was evidently their first single, and is a pleasant, dreampop-y sort of number.
Shoegazer Sunday: Blind Mr. Jones’ “Mesa”
Sunday, June 30th, 2013Blind Mr. Jones was a UK Shoegazer band from the early 1990s. “Mesa” is from their second and last album, Tatooine. Since they broke up right after it’s release, presumably they were not the shoegaze droids the public was looking for…
Shiegazer Sunday: The High Violets’ “X-Tasy Monopoly”
Sunday, June 23rd, 2013The High Violets hail from Portland, Oregon. Here’s “X-Tasy Monopoly,” where the lead sunger sounds a bit like a Red Dirt Girl-era Emmylou Harris, which is no bad thing.
To Celebrate the Summer Solstice…
Friday, June 21st, 2013…there’s only one possible musical choice.
Shoegazer Sunday: Laboratory Noise’s “I Can Only Give You Everything”
Sunday, June 16th, 2013So a while back I posted a couple of songs from Laboratory Noise’s debut album When Sound Generates Light. Then I went to buy the album, found a CD cheap on Amazon, put it in my basket, and then got busy with something. The next day when I went to check out, the price had gone from something like $3 to something like $20.
Then it slipped my mind until I found it cheap on Amazon again and finally picked it up. Now I’ve had a chance to listen to it.
The verdict?
This is a tremendously strong Shoegaze album. Certainly the best I’ve heard since Midsummer’s Into the Trees, and possibly the best since Slowdive’s Just for the Day, my Shoegaze Alpha and Omega. Every song on it is at least good, and even the one song I didn’t care for the beginning of turns (“Earthrise”) beautiful about halfway through.
Here’s “I Can Only Give You Everything,” but any shoegaze fan should pick this up.
It’s that good.
They also have a new EP out that’s next on my listening list.
Shoegazer Sunday: Experimental Aircraft’s “Meet Me on Echo Echo Terrace”
Sunday, June 9th, 2013Austin’s own Experimental Aircraft are another band in the shoegaze/psychedelia/post-rock netherworld.
“Meet Me on Echo Echo Terrace” is from their album Third Transmission off Graveface records, run by Ryan Graveface of Dreamend and Black Moth Super Rainbow.
One caveat: They seem to have the same video (or variations thereof) for all the songs on this album.
When Novelty Records Go Bad
Friday, June 7th, 2013Can you imagine anything less hip than Milton Berle doing a Borscht Belt Schtick parody of The Beatles “Yellow Submarine”? Well, wonder no more!
All it needs is Joy Anne Worley doing an interpretive dance behind him on the Laugh-In set dressed as a sea sponge…
(Hat tip: Saved from the Paper Drive.)
My Top 10 Favorite Talking Heads Songs
Monday, June 3rd, 2013Apropos nothing but a stray comment, here’s my ten favorite Talking Heads songs:
- Road to Nowhere: Great road music, compulsively listenable, with dark, disturbing lyrical overtones. “There’s a city in my mind/Come along and take that ride/And it’s all right/Baby it’s all right”
- Dream Operator: Perhaps their most simple, beautiful, wistful song. “Let go of your life/Grab on to my hand/Here in the clouds/Where we’ll understand.” (The glass harmonica version off the Sounds From True Stories soundtrack is pretty wonderful as well.)
- Burning Down the House (live version): I prefer the hard-charging, straight ahead version off Stop Making Sense, but it’s very close, as the spooky, echoey album version has much to recommend it as well. “People on their way to work said, ‘Baby what did you expect?’/Gonna burst into flame, go ahead.”
- Heaven (live version): By contrast, the live version of this song is far better than the studio version. Their other wistful, beautiful song (though with far more ironic lyrics). “Heaven/Heaven is a place/A place where nothing/Nothing ever happens.”
- The Overload: Dark, heavy and foreboding, with a slow, inescapable baseline and lyrics that bring to mind W. B. Yates’ “The Second Coming.” A song (to my mind) about the end of all things. Compare and contrast with Laurie Anderson’s “Gravity’s Angel.” “A terrible signal…”
- Life During Wartime (live version): Another burner. I wonder if combatants in any of the various conflicts going on around the world play this between firefights. “This ain’t no party/This ain’t no disco/This ain’t no foolin around…”
- City of Dreams: Talking Heads at their most twangy. I wonder if disc jockeys at country stations ever slip this into the rotation. “We live in the city of dreams/We ride on this highway of fire/If we wake, and find it gone/Please remember this our favorite song.” (“City of Steel,” off the the Sounds From True Stories soundtrack, is even twangier.)
- Memories Can’t Wait: A long, deep drink of neurotic paranoia from inside a damaged mind unable to control its thoughts or direction. “Don’t look so disappointed/It isn’t what you hoped for, is it?”
- Hey Now: A pure dose of Zydeco-tinged, childlike goofiness. “Buy me a/rubber ball.”
- Nothing But Flowers: Byrne’s paean to modern American society, while tweaking radical environmentalists. “I dream of cherry pies, candy bars and chocolate chip cookies!”
Honorable mention: Once in a Lifetime, Nothing But Flowers, Electric Guitar, Psycho Killer (live version), Walk It Down
And this is just the Talking Heads; favorite David Byrne songs would be a separate list.