Uncle Tupelo, "Graveyard Shift"
If you type the words "Uncle Tupelo" into a blog twice within an hour of midnight, it summons the band. Or so I'm led to believe by the worst horror story in the world, "Attack Of The Alt-Country Band That Apparently Was Bloodthirsty For Some Reason".
You know, that dumb joke assumes that anybody read yesterday's entry, and it occurs to me that that's quite arrogant. Whatever, that joke owns. As does this song! It's the opening track of the opening album from Uncle Tupelo, and while it's a pretty straight ahead rock song, you can hear the lyrical themes that they would develop in their career.
Weezer, "Fall Together"
Will no one rid me of this turbulent Weezer album?
Polvo, "Every Holy Shroud"
One of the things that this series can actually do a useful job of is highlighting all the random EPs and shorter things that underground bands put out back in the day. Mostly EPs disappear from any band that doesn't get big enough to have compilations put together to gather non-LP tracks, which can be a shame, as there's usually nothing separating the quality of EP songs from the ones on the proper records. So, unless you were following the band when they were making music, they basically just disappear. And so it is here: this is from Celebrate The New Dark Age, an EP from 1994 that contains seven songs that fit right alongside the rest of Polvo's peak period.
The knock on Polvo was that they sounded like Advanced Pavement Substitute, which is mostly really unfair, but, uh, this song isn't exhibit A in the defense's case.
Nine Inch Nails, "Everything"
This song might be the poppiest song that Nine Inch Nails has recorded after the first record. I mean, this isn't that far from a New Pornographers song, when the dust settles. This album overall probably is the lightest thing he's done since that first record as well. It's still very good, though, as Reznor is a serious craftsman, so he doesn't actually need things to be dark for him to be successful.
Abyssal, "Under the Wretched Sun Of Hattin"
Been a while since we've had some full-on death metal around here. THAT STREAK IS OVER. Listen to those vocals. It sounds like they're coming from his toes. What's the next notch past "guttural"? By and large, it's probably a good thing that I can't understand any death metal lyrics. I probably wouldn't be happy to learn what's going on with this.