Happy Thanksgiving to all my American reader/listeners! I don't think I have any non-American reader/listeners! I barely have any American ones. Hmm, let's do "dinner" for a special word. For those of you who haven't seen me explain these before, when I do a special, I search for a word or phrase in the library and pick the random songs from that.
The Evens, "Dinner With The President"
The Evens (Amy Farina and Ian MacKaye) put out their second album, Get Evens, pretty quickly after the first one. And I think it's a step forward, they seemed to be more comfortable with how to write songs to suit such a stripped down lineup. Is folk-punk a thing? I guess it is.
They Might Be Giants, "Dinner Bell"
A delight! When John Linnell declares that he doesn't want a bag of beef, you know, I feel him. I don't think I want a bag of beef either.
The Beastie Boys, "5-Piece Chicken Dinner"
Wouldn't be Five Songs without a dumb throwaway!
Slint, "For Dinner..."
On an album full of quiet moments, of long, slow builds, "For Dinner..." might be the quietest track of them all. It's a pure instrumental, and for most of it it's all about the atmosphere. It's an appropriate lead-in to "Good Morning Captain", the triumphant climax of an emotional record, so it's an effective bit of scene setting. Outside of the context of their record, it's just kind of a pleasant five minutes.
It's at this point, when I added the tag, that I realized that we haven't had Slint on before! I'll just mention here that if you aren't familiar with Spiderland, you owe it to yourself to grab a dark room and some good headphones and just let it wash over you. One of the greatest albums from the rock underground of the 90s, and I'll give them a proper intro next time.
The Slackers, "The TV Dinner Song"
Whew! Glad we got something lighter, even though that's kind of a brutal transition. The Slackers will do these little songs like this, with kind of a spare arrangement, and they're lovely. You get plenty of Vic Ruggiero's warm vocals, and just little bits of horn to fill things out. A real charmer.