The Microphones, "You'll Be In The Air"
There are going to be a fair number of artists where I exhaust what I know about them or have to say about them fairly quickly. The Microphones are one of them. You can check out the previouslys down below for my previous tepid takes!
Overall, this is one of my concerns of this project - will I just run out of things to say about everything? Will it just devolve into random junk? Probably. I could critique the exact song in question, I suppose, but I'm not sure I really have the musical vocabulary to make that work consistently.
Big Black, "Jordan, Minnesota"
This particular version is from the posthumous live album Pigpile, which is inessential. The song itself was originally the opener of Atomizer, their first full-length LP, and has a bit of a history. The song itself is about Jordan, Minnesota (obviously), a town which became the center of a massive number of child sexual abuse allegations, complete with satanic overtones. The case itself turned into a mess, with the investigations being incredibly poor procedurally, and ultimately, it's not entirely clear what went on, other than it being a horrible situation. Steve Albini later said he regretted writing the song, for having fallen for what might have been trumped up charges and exaggerations by the state, but reading about the case now, it seems obvious that there was widespread abuse going on.
Larry Sanders, "The Story of My Love"
This comes from Product Placement Breaks, a compilation record of the songs that were the sources for the samples used by Cut Chemist and DJ Shadow in making Product Placement. It's a pretty enjoyable compilation on its own.
Nitzer Ebb, "Reasons"
I used to love Nitzer Ebb, an industrial dance outfit that helped set some of the standards of the genre. At its best, this stuff could be kind of hypnotic and primal. And at its worst, it was repetitive and unimaginative. Nitzer Ebb usually covered both extremes, often on adjacent albums - their first and third albums were pretty good, their second and fourth were pretty bad. This comes from one of those pretty bad albums.
Caspar Babypants, "Made Up My Mind"
This is Chris Ballew of the Presidents of the United States of America, doing kids music. That sentence probably tells you all you need to know.