I Knew It Wouldn't Take Long

Two weeks. Not exactly stellar, but at least I remembered today and not, you know, next week or something. So here's a belated random mp3 selección (at some point I'll come up with a clever name for this...if I remember).

Dinosaur Jr, "Cats In A Bowl"
While most of the time it's impossible to tell what J was singing, it's always been easy to make out the words when Lou sings (in any of his projects). Unfortunately, though I hear the words fine, I have no idea what on earth he's singing about here. Also, I could care less since it's a Lou song and even in Sebadoh I always preferred Jason's or Eric's songs for the most part. Lou always sings about girls and his feelings, which is fine if you're into that sort of stuff, but he's always been too sappy for my taste. In case anyone cares, Dinosaur Jr is my favorite band of all time and J is the reason I learned to play guitar.

At The Gates, "Slaughter of the Soul"
Title track from the best metal album made almost entirely in 3/4 time. These guys were fucking pros when it came to make such a standard time signature seem really interesting. This album is great, but I think my friend/drummer, Nick, has persuasively brought me over to the side that thinks Terminal Spirit Disease is their best work. It's a close call at the very least and, regardless, I'm going to be attending the reunion tour in a matter of weeks, or days (whatever the ticket date says).

The Mercury Program, "Re-Inventing A Challenge For Machines"
This band I know little to nothing about other than they were from Gainesville and their early stuff was lacklustre and had crappy vocals. At some point the smarted up and went all instrumental and I think this ep, From the Vapor of Gasoline, is when they made the change. This album and the two that follow (All the Suits Began to Fall Off and A Data Learn the Language) are both great albums to chill out to, especially if you like vibraphones. I consider this stuff "easy listening" but I guess that's relative to the rest of my collection, which is mainly not "easy" at all.

Autechre, "Dael"
These guys seem to pop up every time I put my iPod on random. I won't read into that at all because there's no point really. It's a random generator. Anyway, this track is awesome and has this sort of "farting" noise going on.

Miles Davis, "52nd St Theme"
I'm a terrible jazz historian and, frankly, don't care for a lot of it, though I appreciate the fact that jazz is responsible for probably 87% of what I love in music. As hard as I try I can't get into a lot of the old bop stuff, it all sounds the same and I can barely tell one great artist from another. Maybe it's a mental block or something. When this stuff was hitting the streets I can imagine the ruckus it caused, but it's so tame today that it lacks the nails to dig into my skin and really tear at me. Miles made some amazing music, but since I started listening to The Real Birth of the Cool it always turns into background music. Now Bitches Brew is still some out-there shit, but that was years after this stuff. Call me a weirdo, but I'll take some avant-garde fusion sound collage experimentalism any day.