Nominally a UK ska band, more a rock band with a horn line. At its best when it is large stadium music about regrets. When it makes more normal songs it loses me. Has a bit of Panic! at the Disco to the vocals.
Favorite: “Guiding Lights”, “The Long Road To Zurich”
La Loma is a band from…somewhere. The album was recorded in france, sung in Spainish. This had apparently been on my wishlist for a long time and I just bought stuff if I didn’t hate it because I believe in stretching my musical horizons even if I’m just gonna go back to screechy emo about dead people.
Anyways the songs are cool moody lounge songs that are also hypnotic and repeitive. But also have some rousing choruses to shake your butt to. It gets weird at some points!
Favorite: It’s a 5 song EP that is meant to be taken as a whole work.
Thank Jack White’s Third Man Records for just finding stuff. Alexis Zoumbas was an early 20th century violinist. I heard this for about half a second before I bought it. It is captivating. This is definitely some of the best music I’ve ever heard. Maybe the shitty recording is adding to that. Just fantastic.
No Time’s “Like The Present”. Good joke band-nerds. I just mentioned in that thread I’ll like just about any early 2000s 3rd Wave Ska. This isn’t that but it is whiney pop punk from the same time period that no one had bought. I expect I’ll listen to it twice through than promptly forget about it. But it will give me nice warm feelings. Hey they can actually play their instruments and have whiney high school songs.
Edit: Okay there are ska songs on this and the high school-ness of this had made me clinch my body a few times.
As a Texan I’ve wanted to crack the code of enjoying older country music. I can enjoy it sure, and then I want to go back to whiney white boys playing too fast.
Linda Martell has a beautiful voice and these songs are lovely. I want to like this so bad. I want to get lost and cry to songs of heartbreak. Maybe it just isn’t in my brain or heart.
Same thing here for this recent Canadian effort of Nicolette and the Nobodies. Just lovely beautiful songs that can’t melt my ska-punk heart. Some things are out of your control including your taste.
Why not 3 for 3. For 5 bucks and the artists involved not hard to see why I picked this up the same as I would have from a gas station in 2004. I have thoughts that “woah Willie Nelson was that great.” And then it has these great talking interstiticals.
Do I also have to force myself to listen to these songs and not just click on Rufio’s Perhaps I Suppose, music I actually like as opposed to appreciate. Being a well rounded person is hard.
Beauty School - “Gloom” pointing. Now this THIS I like. Despite everything. Independently Lady Rude and a dear friend described music I liked as too fast and too chang chang chang. Well this fits that mode. I like that everyone is barely keeping up with the song. I love some gang vocals. I like when a singer changes their style midway through a song. I like screamy songs about mourning, and looking at the lyrics, this isn’t changing things.
The album is FREE you ain’t even got to pay for it. I heard the title track and went “yeah that owns.” So I’m gonna have a time eatting on songs about being in college and trying to make a successful rock band. They name drop Dan Deacon. There’s a lot of PUP and Jeff Rosenstock here. I would have hated this album in my late 20s and 30s because it is about people younger than me. Now that life I lived is a lifetime ago and I can appreciate from a distance the emotions within.
Call Me Malcom is also depression UK Ska Punk. It feels more like a blogpost more than the others and is less enjoyable. For whatever reason the empathy never activates in me, the rhythms never make me dance so I’m just going “yeah man that sucks, for you.” The songs are a little to direct about self-harm, suicide usually with the singer being the subject. Yeah I’m self-destructive. There was a later track I just deleted that is way to explicit about what he wants to do.
That said as soon as “I was never really here” plays you go “wait okay.” It sounds like it has a different producer. It is driving. The song isn’t about self-destruction but how that’s ruined a relationship. And how they can’t believe someone still can love this husk. I’ve been trying to place which band it reminds me of. Anyways that song was worth that album.
Flip side of this happy go lucky chiptune music from the composer of EARTHBOUND. I saw this live during Diggin’ The Carts.
It is creative and fun and joyous.
How was I gonna pass up a punk album by a band called The Tim Version. Is it punk songs about death? Yeah apparently. I bought it for the name and I bounced my head to the first track. There are shock, country songs on this record. Proving this thread I like the punk songs better.
Reading the lyrics, this is too dour and true and reminds me the hell world we live in.