Introduction
Five Songs, 12/27/2021
Five Songs

Five Songs, 12/27/2021

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Gift of Gab, "Rat Race"

You know a song is banging when I'm nodding this hard along with it, even just listening to it on one shitty earbud.

Wilco, "Either Way"

The opener of Sky Blue Sky, and it's one of my very favorite Wilco songs. There's that breezy organ in the background, the little chord change going into the chorus, there's kind of a fakeout after the second chorus where he drags it out and it seems like it's going to crescendo to a huge bit but turns into just a pleasant solo. It's a bright, optimistic sounding song, but there's so much subtlety to it, it rewards a close listen.

Napalm Death, "Point of No Return"

There aren't very many albums which truly break new ground. Usually, progress in any artistic endeavor is incremental, and music is no different. Musicians build on each other's work, and develop ideas, and new branches are explored. Because performances happen in front of other musicians, there's an organic process whereby ideas spread, and you seldom can point to a single artist and moment and say that that's where a thing started.

Scum is one of those moments. No, they didn't invent extreme metal. Metal had been pushing the envelope for a while, with thrash well under way, Possessed and Bathory doing their things already, and the Cambrian explosion of subgenres was already kicking off. But grindcore, the genre that essentially just sees how fast metal can be played, was essentially invented by one band, on one record. They set the template and the bar, and more or less, the genre was already fully developed. Later grindcore records, even from decades later, clearly strongly resemble this stuff.

This is easily the biggest ratio of writeup to song length in this entire project.

Julieta Vinegas, "Sería feliz"

Had to copy and paste the title to get the right character on there. I don't even know what that "i" is called. I'm very ignorant!

Superchunk, "Hyper Enough"

I know we've had this song before, but it rules! No regrets! Exclamations!

J-Zone, "The J-Zone Fan Club"

I love the beat on this track so much.

Joshua Buergel
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