I just realised I wrote up my June playlist and forgot to post it at all, which benefits no one. Jul
I just realised I wrote up my June playlist and forgot to post it at all, which benefits no one. July coming soon, but for now please enjoy three hours of two month old thoughts on the new Kanye, the Red Dead Redemption soundtrack and two songs about drinking beer.Ghost Town - Kanye West: Now that the dust has settled around Kanye’s month of chaos I can safely say Ye is great and Ghost Town is the best song on it, though it’s not a coincidence that the best song is the one where Kanye says the least.DLZ - TV On The Radio: I’ve been obsessed with this song for a long time. The combination of the absolutely hypnotising drums and very good cryptic lyrics about impending doom is exactly my shit. Also the whistling right at the very end is a perfect moment.Hyph Mngo - Joy Orbison: Someone had a thing on twitter the other day that was like ‘quote tweet this with a phrase you remember that if you told a younger person they wouldn’t understand’ and someone said Hyph Mngo and I felt age 100. This song really was such a game changer and that whole wave of stuff like this, Koreless and Jame Blake’s EP’s around then was such an incredible time to be alive. I am aging decades by the second and will not be around much longer.The Shootist - Bill Elm & Woody Jackson: I’ve been thinking about game soundtracks a lot the past month or so for some reason and Red Dead really is an all timer. They did such a great job capturing the whole feeling without it just being a straight Morricone rip-off (though obviously it is mostly a Morricone ripoff).Touch Me - Wish & Fonda Rae: This song is so fucking good to begin with but then it gets really really good in the middle part and where they just start going hogwild with the sampler on her vocals, and then again at the end when it starts sounding like a Battles song.In The Vespers - Colin Stetson & Sarah Neufeld: Ever since I finished MGSV again I’ve been thinking about open-world stealth as a genre and how I’d do it, and this song is really the perfect kind of soundtrack to the game I’m thinking of. It’s already got four alert levels built in, all the way from Tense to FUCk and back down to Calming Down But Still Scared.Human After All - Daft Punk: Human After All is still a beguiling album in sound and vision after all this time. The amount of noise emananating from every single element in this song, and songs like Technologic is just so strange compared to everything they’d done before and since, but I think that’s what I like about it. It sounds like it was made in 1979 when electronics were a novelty and everyone accepted that they’d be noisy as hell. Also I had an emotional moment this month while I was driving and listening to this song and reflecting on how we are all, human.. after all.. so who knows what’s up with me.Disparate Youth - Santigold: The production on this song is insane. The drums, the guitar, the bouncing piano, it just has so much momentum the whole way through and holy shit I just realised that the video I was talking about last month that referenced The Holy Mountain that I couldn’t remember is L.E.S. Artistes by Santigold what an incredible two for one.Violence - Parquet Courts: This song has the potential to be embarrassing but it’s saved from itself by the specificity of the lyrics and the backing vocals that sound like a smiling swing band saying 'violence is daily life!’.Jane Says - Jane’s Addiction: The steel drum as the central melody line in this is such a strange and beautiful choice and also this song has two chords and no chorus. There are truly one million ways to make a good song.Heatstroke - Calvin Harris feat. Young Thug, Pharrell Williams, Ariana Grande: I really can’t believe I missed this song that came out like a year ago, so thank god my girlfriend told me about it. It’s incredible. Everyone is operating at full capacity in this song and the structure is so good, the Pharrell/Thug pre-chorus could be a chorus on its own but then Ariana and Pharrell trade lines foe the actual chorus, amazing. Also when Thugger says 'she got every read bottom like a baboon’ the way the backup says ’..baboon’ slightly apprehensively cracks me up.Maximum Black - Bohren & Der Club Of Gore: More Bohren, carrying over from last month. This is one of my favourites of theirs, mostly just for the choir sound and the all-time great sax intro at about 4:30. When you start at absolute zero, dialling it up to a 1 sounds like bomb going off.Dust Bunnies - Kurt Vile: This is like most Kurt Vile songs in that it’s sort of just about hanging out and feeling kind of funny, which is a mindset I really relate to.Here For The Beer - The Sloppy Boys: A bunch of guys from The Birthday Boys have a band now and it’s really great. Comedy music is hard but this album is the best kind where it’s just dumb ass rock and roll story songs and odes to partying. The way he says 'autographed baseball’ makes me laugh every time.Beer Pressure - Municipal Waste: Anyway that song reminded me of this song, which is almost the exact same song with a slightly different mindset.Credulous! Credulous! - BATS: There’s really something to listening to a song for ten years and then having it suddenly dawn on you one day that it’s about an epilleptic 16 year old in the distant past getting treppaned by a mystic and a team of scientists in the present figuring out what happened.Please Take Your Hand Away - Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross: Everyone’s (me) always talking about how good The Social Network soundtrack is but nobody’s ever talking about how they did a sequel that’s just as good and goes for longer than the actual film when they released the nearly 3 hour Girl With The Dragon Tattoo soundtrack a year later. What an achievement!What Does Your Soul Look Like Part 2 - DJ Shadow: This song is really on a whole nother level. It is really a kind of magic that you can get a 15 minute song out of a two note bassline and a drum loop, but when they’re this good it looks easy. The drums especially are just absolutely hypnotising.One Of One - Kamasi Washington: Kamasi somehow outdid himself on this one my god. The groove in this is just amazing, and the way it twists and turns into something darker and darker before the sun shines through and the hook comes back is incredible. The way the theme comes back all twisted up with strings near the end. Great stuff.My Exit, Unfair - mewithoutYou: I honestly very nearly got converted in high school just because I was listening to so much mewithoutYou, and it still informs a lot of my religious thoughts. A running theme through a lot of their songs is wrestling with and trying to accept the idea that God has a plan for you that you definitely don’t understand and getting extremely upset about it and that’s about where I’m at.Stand - R.E.M.: Apparently this was the theme to a show called Get A Life and it’s funny because it really does sound perfect for a 90s tv theme. It sounds like it’s two and a half minutes too long. Release the 30 second TV theme version REM.BFG Division - Mick Gordon: I was watching a guy speedrun Doom on GDQ and the music for that game is so amazing, but it sounds really funy when the whole sppedrun is just clipping through a wall and rocket jumping halfway across the level to trigger the checkpoint. Mick Gordon really nailed this soundtrack, it’s a massive part of the atmosphere of the game and it’s really the logical expansion of the MIDI themes of the original, it sounds like the original in HD, this is what you thought you were hearing.Angel’s Rest - Marisa Anderson: Marisa Anderson’s songs are so loosely structured they often seem dreamed up on the spot, but the sounds and moods seem so carefully considered that the notes themselves aren’t so important.Looks Like I Picked The Wrong Week To Quit Oxygen - Michael Giacchino: If Michael Giacchino doesn’t get an Oscar for The Incredibles II soundtrack I’m going to riot. The climax of this is so big I had to stop myself from applauding in the theatre, it’s irrepressible.AM // Radio - Earl Sweatshirt & Wiki: I was having a week where I was really feeling like the phrase “I don’t like shit, I don’t go outside” and so I suddenly remembered this album. This beat is so, so good. It sounds like nothing else, and it only adds to the alien flavour by giving the second half of the track to an instrumental.World In Harmony - Adebisi Shank: Adebisi Shank are really the perfect band. They love to have fun and have a big time and they started out with a perfect first album and only got bigger and better by the time they got to the third and broke up. This song is so powerful, and my billionaire dream is to finance a new F-Zero game and get Adebisi Shank back together to do the soundtrack.Make Luv feat. Oliver Cheatham - Room 5: I’m slowly putting together a playlist of songs that sound like Music Sounds Better With You by Stardust in order to invoke some kind of euphoric 'best night ever’ and ascend to heaven but this song is the only other one I have so far.A Love Supreme Part II: Resolution - John Coltrane Quartet: I don’t feel qualified to say anything about A Love Supreme, so I don’t think I’m going to. I literally don’t know where to start with this. It’s damn good music.“You Got A Killer Scene There, Man…” - Queens Of The Stone Age: This song is a real vibe. This should be a whole genre but I’ve never really found anything else like it. It’s like if The Doors were good I suppose. It’s shocking that this song only goes for 5 minutes because it really feels like it could go for 20 and you wouldn’t mind. I remember a few years ago I opened this in Audition and slowed it down to 75% and I really recommend it, it makes the whole thing feel as sludgy as I think it’s supposed to be and makes all the breaks that much more impactful.Never Let Me Go - Sarah Blasko: A friend sent me this and said it sounds like a Bond theme and he’s absolutely right, especially towards the end where it all starts stacking up. Maybe it would need a bit more brass to be a proper Bond theme but still, I love it.Protection - Emma Ruth Rundle: I love Emma Ruth Rundle so much and I’m so excited that she’s got a new album coming out. The absolute textural thickness she can conjure up in a song like this blows me away. I don’t know what it is about her voice but it sounds like the 90s somehow. Does that make sense? This feels like 90s music, like the grunge female songwriter thing went a slightly different way and I love it. listen here -- source link
#playlists