Gob, "Beauville"
I have regrets when it comes to the tagging system I use around here. Yes, it's nice to have all the bands tagged, that's useful. But I wish I had also tagged genres, and subgenres, and some of the common threads in these posts. Like "Canadian Punk" would have been a fun tag. Why did I listen to so many Canadian punk bands in the 90s? I dunno. I have no way of knowing if my punk consumption was disproportionately Canadian or not. How would you measure that? Count up the number of punk albums I own that came out in the 90s, weigh by population, see if they match the expected distribution? I suppose that would work, would likely be possible with some data scraping using the Discogs API, and is absolutely not going to happen unless someone were to pay me. Or if I get super bored.
Anyway, that's what you miss without genre tags. A simple way to go look at how many Canadian punk songs have showed up here.
There's an infinite amount of information being produced every day, by all of us. And that's indisputably some of it.
Thou, "Transcending Dualities"
A thing I adore about metal bands is when they slap super intellectual titles on tunes that sound like someone getting their toenails pulled out next to an oil rig shuddering to a halt. And that's not an ironic love or anything, I genuinely think it's great. Kind of a high/low kind of thing. It's fun!
Love Battery, "Searching for Rose"
If you're a long time Five Songs reader/listener, first, my apologies. [If you're a long time enough reader/listener, you've also seen that joke before.] I've written all of these, and I'm not entirely sure I've read them all. Anyway, one thing that I think we do best around these parts is highlight the forgotten underground acts of the 90s, the time period when the Five Songs Braintrust was most plugged in to music. That's what you're really getting by sticking around there. And there were plenty of bands that were unfairly buried at a time when they probalby should have been able to break out. Grunge lifted a lot of boats, but there were some strange blindspots. One of those, as I've mentioned before, is Love Battery, who had a five album run in the 90s that just smokes. Fuzzy and psychedelic, Love Battery just banged out strong record after strong record. I'm not sure any of this has persisted into people's consciousness of today, and it's a shame, they were a real highlight.
Wilco, "I Love My Label"
I assume that this song is a commentary on the label drama that Wilco had in the past, especially being dropped by Reprise after making Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and refusing to make changes to the record. Of course, the amusing coda to that whole thing is that Nonesuch put out the album, and both Reprise and Nonesuch are Warner Bros. labels. I have no idea how that happens!
Labradford, "Disremembering"
Fuzzy!