A quick note on the entry that's under the cut here:
I had wanted to arrange this so that each artist/category I was going to detail would have their own cut (like on LiveJournal), but I'm just not good enough at newer/different coding to get it to work here. Thus, for right now, everything is just as sectioned as I can get it behind one cut.
The lack of ease of navigation, therefore, frustrates me enough that I'm apologizing.
I imagine that nobody who's gonna read this is gonna give too much of a damn, I just figured I'd mention.
So now, on to what I came here to do tonight: ramble endlessly about music.
I've mentioned some music that I like here variously - The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Adele, Florence and the Machine, David Byrne (of the also-fantastic Talking Heads), Jenny Lewis / Rilo Kiley, Serge Gainsbourg, and on and on and on.
I shall break down, in this post (and possibly another to follow), some good shit you should give a try to if you haven't - and if you have, well... maybe it's just a decent variety for you to have a peek at?
In any case, enjoy. ^___^
(PS) If any of the videos I link to in this post do not exist when you click on them, please tell me so I can get the links fixed.
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Shilpa Ray and Her Happy Hookers is an interesting band that I've listened to in pieces, and admittedly don't know much about, but Venus Shaver is just such a good song to crank up in the car - the other stuff from the album is quite good.
Neutral Milk Hotel, though now defunct,were a band active through the 90's. I'm especially fond of King Of The Carrot Flowers, but Jeff Magnum's songs about Anne Frank also tend to be fairly good.
Another fantastic band, James, is perhaps best known for the song Laid (warning: that video could give you secondhand embarassment towards 1993). I think it's a shame that the rest of the album didn't get as much recognition. 'Everybody Knows' (which I, regrettably, cannot find a youtube link for, and should NOT be confused with the Leonard Cohen song of the same name) is actually a very nice song.
The Butthole Surfers had a nice little song back in the 90's as well, Pepper. Some may argue that it's not their best song, but it's the one I liked the best. The verses are bizarre and mildly disturbing, but the chorus is really the important part here.
Metric is a Canadian band who I not only love, but saw live at The Town Ballroom a few years ago. Fronted by Emily Haines (also known for her work with Broken Social Scene and her own solo albums), they hold stature as one of the most-listened-to bands during car rides I've been on with Tami.
Though I'd say, personally, that their better songs are the dark and slow, the faster stuff is also obviously quite good.
(Sidenote: Crystal Castles opened for them at the particular show I saw. All I remember is some cunt aiming an industrial-strength strobe light right in my eyes for about forty minutes while some guy piped some kind of techno <i>right into the speakers from his laptop</i>. I pretty much wanted to die. Maybe it was just an off night for them, I don't know.)
The Good, The Bad, and The Queen is an album from a band with no name. It was one of Damon Albarn's million little side-projects, and it's quite good. While I personally love Herculean, the entire album is well worth the listen.
If you were over the age of ten in the nineties, I'm willing to bet that you've heard of Mazzy Star. You might not have. So Tonight That I Might See is basically one of the most perfect albums ever made. Not one of my favorites, per se, but an album that is wonderfully arranged, musically sound, and can be simply put on and left to run without you feeling the need to skip around the whole thing.
Moxy Früvous are (were?) some of the coolest people to ever come out of Canada. Perhaps best-known (and rightly so!) for The King Of Spain, that shouldn't box them in. While Bargainville is what introduced them to the world at large, I'd call Wood the superior album. Despite the quality of their studio recordings, though, even I can admit that their live work (it's not hard to find examples) benefits from the amazing, madcap spontaneity.
Portishead are undoubtedly known best for Glory Box from 1993's Dummy. The video is probably best known for how good-looking Beth Gibbons is, whether done up as a man OR a woman. The song itself sampled a piece of Ike's Rap 2, a song by Isaac Hayes.
Hooverphonic's debut single, 2Wicky, similarly sampled a song by Hayes (Walk On By, itself originally recorded by Dionne Warwick, written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David).
Both songs were featured in Stealing Beauty, which had a RIDICULOUSLY GOOD SOUNDTRACK.
Speaking of obscenely good soundtracks, let's make a pit stop over at Tank Girl. While the film itself was a horrific butchery of the comic book on which it was based, you get not only lovely tracks from Bush, Björk, and Portishead, you also get the fantastic duet cover of Cole Porter's Let's Do It done by Joan Jett and Paul Westerberg.
On the same subject, Romeo + Juliet also had one of the best soundtracks of all time. Among its selections are Garbage, The Cardigans, Everclear, The Butthole Surfers, and Radiohead.
I'm not entirely sure how well-known The Tragically Hip are outside of Canada, but they're pretty fuckin' huge in Canada. (I grew up very close to Canada. Apparently, that's the only reason that I know who they are.) While I feel like the attention they deserve could not be truly served in a big conglomeration post like this, I felt that not mentioning them among what is apparently becoming A Post About Music Of The 1990s would be a travesty. Phantom Power and Day For Night are basically two of the best, AND two of my favorite, albums ever made.
(Seriously, though. The top Google hits when you type in 'phantom power' relate to heavy machinery. Google doesn't even know who the fuck they are without a little bit of digging. This is ridiculous.)
For your consideration:
New Orleans Is Sinking
Poets
Bobcaygeon
Locked In The Trunk Of A Car
At The Hundredth Meridian
Ahead By A Century
Little Bones
Nautical Disaster
(Normally, I would tell children to READ A FUCKING BOOK, but in this case I would recommend OPENING YOUR FUCKING EARS.)
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On that note, I'm taking my leave for the evening - it got late quick while I was trying to figure coding out, but that should not suggest that this is all I have to say about music.
There's PLENTY more ground to cover.
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