The Dramatics, "In the Rain"
Oh baby. Listen to that reverb! Those strings and horns! I don't think I'm cool enough to listen to something like this, frankly. The Suede Denim Secret Police are going to haul me off.
Deerhoof, "Department of Corrections"
There's something really uplifting about the alchemy of Deerhoof. The contrast of the spastic guitar lines, powerful drums, and sprightly vocals is genuinely irresistable. It's just really fun stuff, and the fact that Deerhoof is still out there cranking out tunes like this is really reassuring. We're almost twenty years out from Reveille, the first great Deerhoof record, and they're just chugging along.
Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, "Who Painted Whistler's Mother"
One of the magic tricks of the Shadowy Men was that they managed to conjure some genuine emotion out of their instrumental tracks with nothing but guitar, bass, drums, and some reverb. Well, and a bit of whistling here. But there's a real arc in this song that kind of gets me every time. They didn't need lyrics, it would have been superfluous to this tune.
Bathory, "Possessed"
While Venom and Mercyful Fate were huge influences on black metal and extreme metal in general, even more than them Bathory really defined the shape of black metal to come. The early Bathory records (this is the second) sounded like they were recorded in a garage (because they were), but from that primordial sludge emerged genre markers that are still there to this day: strangled vocals, relentless drums, furious walls of guitar, and a savagely raw production. There are plenty of black metal bands and fans who still believe that if you don't mimic the production in addition to the other sounds that it's not proper ("trve") black metal. At any rate, beyond the historical impact, you can understand why people found this compelling, there's a fascination to this murk even today.
Waldgeflüster, "Der Traumschänder"
This is from a split LP with Panopticon, and...well, here's some more modern black metal. As you can tell, Waldgeflüster aren't doing the crappy production thing, so I guess just enjoy the contrast. As with Panopticon, Waldgeflüster are incorporating some folk into their formula, and it's reasonably effective here.