longfadinginstant: 2008

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

(yeah) a bunch of christmas music

yes, i own one of these.

it's kind of a lazy collection, as i put no thought into the order i'm presenting them to you, but here's a bunch of christmas songs:

cocteau twins "winter wonderland"

cocteau twins "frosty the snowman"

and surprisingly jon spencer did what could be called a christmas song for his non-christmas "acme" album way back in the late 90s. musically there's nothing christmas about it, but listen to the words and...

jon spencer blues explosion "high gear"

belle and sebastian "o little town of bethlehem"

sonics "don't believe in christmas"

wizzard "i wish it could be christmas everyday"

gary glitter "rock and roll christmas"

the band "christmas must be tonight"

emerson lake and palmer "i believe in father christmas"

bee gees "thank you for christmas"

bee gees "medley: silent night-hark the herald angels sing"

margo guryan "i don't intend to spend christmas without you"

the wedding present "step into christmas"

me first and the gimme gimmies "hava nagila (christmas version)" i'm not going to include this one on the combines mix stream since the track also contains a long silence, followed by a few more songs.

here's the whole bunch combined:

and then of course the download for the zip file

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Friday, December 12, 2008

12/12/08

taken, while driving, on the 10 freeway, heading east from santa monica.

roy wood "why does such a pretty girl sing those sad songs" roy obviously listened to pet sound before writing and recording this one:

johnny osbourne "eternal peace"

venom "live like an angel (die like a devil) another alternative to listening to "ace of spades" for the millionth time. the lyrical logic doesn't make that much sense, as at no point in the song is the "angel" side of it explained. it's all "devil".

megadeth "hangar 18" not only one of the greatest metal songs of all-time, also one of the greatest guitar solos ever:

roger miller "chug a lug" underage drinking anthem:

DOWNLOAD ZIP FILE

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Thursday, December 4, 2008

12/04/08

another pic from my kitchen window

swan lake "the partisan, but he's got to know" i don't listen to the swan lake album enough. also, this reminds me, i've got to get some frog eyes albums, as i believe this is a carey mercer contribution (though you do hear spencer krug and dan bejar (can't stand him actually) in there):

del davis "baby don't wake me"

pullman "to hold down a shadow"

howard roberts "girl talk" not sure who wrote it, but i've heard lots of takes on "girl talk", and this one is my favorite. i love how i always forget there's a guitar in there on the melody as well, and not just an organ:

dios malos "long long long" one of two beatles cover they did, that i know of:

the beatles "hey bulldog" one of the few beatles songs you haven't heard to death. it was advertised as "unreleased" when they issued "yellow submarine" on cd back in 1999, but i'm not sure how true that was. i think there was some technicality in there. also one of their best.

download zip

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Wednesday, November 26, 2008

11/26/08

(photo i took from the top of my building)

i was hoping to make a full mix with some of the below tracks this week, but i didn't have time, so here's the usual:

two tracks from two different french new wave collections. i've been listening to both (songs) on repeat this week:

ruth "poloroid - roman - photo"

perspective nevsky "moment of hate" sounds like it could be a misfits song by the title, but it's nothing of the sort:

empire of the sun "walking on a dream" new project from the sleepy jackson guy:

natalie portman's shaved head "hush hush" they're fun enough. nothing to get excited about or anything but, you know:

chapterhouse "if you want me" you have to give this one a little time before if get loud enough to appreciate:

liz durrett "outside our gates"

sixto rodriguez "forget it" i was hoping to use this one for a breakup but i didn't get the chance:

or, if you want to listen to them continuous:

and finally, for dave (his preferred method):
CLICK ME

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Thursday, November 20, 2008

11/20/08

elvis presley "good time charlie's got the blues"

cocteau twing "half gifts"

frank sinatra "i fall in love too easily" i prefer sinatra in his 40s, once his voice took on some character. he was a bit of a generic crooner in the beginning, but there's something genuine in his voice on this track from early in his career:

camper van beethoven "chain of circumstance" not only did i forget about this song, i forgot that camper ever even sounded like this:

holopaw "cinders"

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Thursday, November 13, 2008

unclaimed mix

another mix that didn't find it's home. it starts off with omd's "extended souvenir", which, to me, was a big discovery, but was probably a big single back when it was released. it's a good mix despite slowing down quite a bit. the last song "cammie" is maybe one of the saddest ever. anyways, you can either stream it, or download it.

DOWNLOAD HERE.

note: the songs are tagged for use in itunes / on an ipod, and will show up under the artist name "mix from shawn"
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Friday, October 17, 2008

10/17/08

sunset rubdown "three colors" (daytrotter session) this version from the daytrotter session is far better than what appears on the ep, where the songs is split into two parts, bookending the release.

my my "reverse charge" this what your brain sounds like at 5am, but you don't ever hear it cause you're asleep.

grandpaboy "i'll do anything" a very meatloaf-esque sentiment from paul westerberg and the rest of the replacements (or at least that's the rumor). what's interesting about this recording is that it's mono (hence the name of the album title it's taken from). but it sounds great, and i feel like i can still hear where the instruments are within a real space despite the absence of a stereo mix.

stan bush "city under siege" despite cheesy 80's-ness, there's something to this track. i'm not going to tell you which movie soundtrack it came from (a movie that i've actually never seen).

sportsguitar "get you out"

ALSO:

i was told by my co-worker and friend, megan, that i could not sneak up on her. so, today, when she stepped out of her office, i decided to hide in a box next to her desk. not for the purpose of actually sneaking up on her and scaring her, but for the dumb joke of it all. mike, in his brilliance, turned the tables on me and made the whole thing worth it. what you'll see is a large brown cardboard box (that's the one i'm in) and mike's taping up the holes i'm cutting so i can see out.

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Tuesday, October 14, 2008

10/14/08

tonight stepf is taking me out to a surprise show for my birthday. last year (about this time?) stepf and ali were so kind as to surprise me by taking me out to see joanna newsom at the disney music hall for my birthday (which is in december). she performed this new, and still as of yet unreleased, song:

joanna newsom "(unknown title)"

creedence cleawater revival "porterville" another example of why i hate "best of" collections (as in you miss out on songs like this one).

secret machines "underneath the concrete" not sure when the album comes out, but it's leaked...so far i like it a lot more than the last one. i'm guessing this will be the single, if there is one.

the left banke "and suddenly"

talulah gosh "my best friend"

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Monday, October 6, 2008

10/6/08

orchestral manoeuvres in the dark "electricity" (dindisc 1980 version) - one of two omd songs i was considering posting. i actually like the other one better, but i'm going to save it. for years i had ELO confused with OMD.

titus andronicus "titus andronicus" - does conor oberst hate the singer cause he sounds so much like him, or does he love them because of it? the smoking popes singer sounded a lot like morrisey, and morrisey loved them for it.

chris bell "make a scene"

roger waters "4:33 am (running shoes)" - if any part of you enjoys pink floyd's "the wall" and you haven't heard roger waters first solo album "the pros and cons of hitchhiking" then... uh, go buy it. and then listen to it. and then be depressed.

ozzy osbourne "goodbye to romance" - ozzy osbourne's solo albums are surprisingly weak and un-metal. and, with a few exceptions, they aren't that good. this here ballad is pretty good though, and a example of why he wasn't really the scary satanist guy i remember being so afraid of as a kid.

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Friday, October 3, 2008

10/3/08

i don't remember where i read about sixto rodriguez, but at some point i guess i read a review or something about the reissue of his 1970 album and downloaded it, cause there it was in my soulseek folder:

sixto rodriguez "crucify your mind"

michael hurley "slurf song" - i checked out michael hurley after cat power covered his "werewolf song" on her "you are free" album. i was expecting someone a lot less goofy based how dark "werewolf" was.

emerson lake and palmer "sheriff" - elp work best when not progging it up.

bell x1 "flame" (chicken lips remix)

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Wednesday, October 1, 2008

remixes by justice

i read a month or so back in an interview with justice that they were through doing remixes for people. too bad, cause as amazing as their original stuff is, their remixes are equally amazing. here's a few:

klaxons "as above so below" (justice remix)

franz ferdinand "the fallen" (justice remix)

daft punk "guy man after all" (justice remix)

mgmt "electric feel" (justice remix)

mystery jets "you can't fool me dennis" (justice remix)

and then here's the band fucked up covering the justice song "stress"

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Thursday, September 25, 2008

9/25/08

boise cover band (doug martsh) "loving pauper" - thanks dave.

the oblivians "live the life" - after hearing chris talk about them so much over the years, i finally checked them out.

seaweed "brand new order" - takes me back to senior year of high school. not that i ever really listened to them, i just remember always seeing the cd case in my friends car.

guided by voices "some drilling implied" - never really got into them when they were around, but i've been going though their stuff and giving them a second chance. i like the heavier sound here.

radiohead "climbing up the walls" (zero 7 remix) - i've got this on some sort of uk promo only vinyl 12". it's the first thing i look up whenever i check ebay to see what things in my music collection are worth. on cd it appears on the cmj comp "certain damage #85".

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Saturday, August 30, 2008

finally

i've devoted my music compiling skills to something else recently. so, anyways, when i make a mix for someone, i listen to it a lot. listening to it myself is one of the big reasons i like making them. as such, i've been really into this song, the lead off track on the most recent unclaimed mix i put together:

sebastian tellier "divine" (danger mix)

bigstar "stroke it noel" - another song i've been listening to a lot due to it'ss inclusion on the same above mentioned mix. cd2 track 2.

tweak bird "eternal squardance" - along with 400 blows, my favorite band in LA. love these guys live.

genesis "riding the scree" - i've been checking out early genesis as a possible band to get obsessed with and start collecting their catalogue. maybe.

white zombie "soul crusher" - back in high school i heard "thunderkiss '65" played on the radio and it blew me away. they'd only play it late at night for some reason, and i remember staying up way past my bedtime (yeah i still had one) waiting for them to play it. recently i had to hear it again so i "found" the album. not the best thing ever, but "thunderkiss" and then this song, still hold up. wow that guy sucked after this.

and just to reming you how great "thundrkiss" was, in case you forgot:

White Zombie - Thunder Kiss '65
Uploaded by WhiteZombie

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Thursday, July 31, 2008

Jonathan Richman

jonathan richman is the mr. rogers of the music world. although i can't imagine that any of us grew up on him. still, even hearing his songs for the first time, you get the same feeling as if you did.

"i'm a little dinosaur" the legend is that jonathan recorded the first modern lovers album, which didn't get released. despite this, and over time, a legend grows. the modern lovers album becomes a lost punk classic. finally he resurfaces and a show is booked at CBGBs. The packed house gathers expecting a punk show, but jonathan's gone through some musical changes in his time away, and this is what they got:

"important in your life"

"lydia"

"up in the sky sometime"

and here's a bunch of continuous tracks so you can help yourself to a happy day.

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Wednesday, July 30, 2008

7/30/08

someone gave me the s.o.d. album today. pretty awesome. anthrax without the joey belladonna operatic metal vocals. i mean, i loved the guy back in the day, but these days, not so much. anyways, i was given the files as mp4s, and for some reason this is the only track i could get to convert to mp3 so that the player could read it. Interestingly enough, they did a version of "chromatic death" with anthrax as well. same for the song "milk" which i couldn't convert to mp3.

s.o.d. "chromatic death"

unwound "beyond the salt" a shortened version of a the song of the same name from "leaves turn inside" that can be found on the comp for the sonic youth curated ATP festival. not very representative of unwound's sound if you don't know them.

i'm going to post a lot more swervedriver tracks. here are a couple of b-sides:

swervedriver "zedhead"

swervedriver "hands"

holiday "it's only love"

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Wednesday, July 23, 2008

7/23/08

as amazing as refused's "shape of punk to come" is, i'd have to give melt banana the win in mixing harcore with electronic music elements:

melt banana "like a white bat in a box, dead matters go on"

melt banana "introduction to charlie" this was the track that introduced me to melt banana. it came on the radio just as i was about to pull into the underground parking at work. i ended up driving around for 15 minutes waiting for them to announce who it was

motorhead "i won't pay your price" more so than any band i can think of, motorhead's fans only seem to know 1 song ("ace of spades"), or maybe two ("overkill" as someone pointed out). well, here's a third for y'all.

nina simone "you've got to learn" great closing lyric line.

fennesz "shiseido" aside from the one song i know of with singing, i think this is as song-y as fennesz gets.

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Monday, July 21, 2008

7-21-08

the smoking popes album "destination failure" was the first album i worked, from the beginning, to college radio when i started in the college promo department at capitol. i remember thinking, but these guys suck, when i found out. surprisingly, a few of my stations informed me otherwise, and after giving the album a chance i really got into it. it's another one of those lost classics that i never understood how it didn't find an audience. so, here's my favorite track:

the smoking popes "megan"

little wings "queen of valencia" - always thought this was beautiful love song till i paid attention to the lyrics and realized that it's about orange juice (did i post this already?)

this came up on shuffle the other day for the second time:

connie francis "eighteen"

vice gave the newest lair of the minotaur album a bad review, citing the lord of the rings-esque lyrics as the reason. only after seeing them live though do you understand they're halfway tongue in cheek. so far it's my second favorite album of the year.

lair of the minotaur "hades unleashed"

melanie safka "miranda" - the rhino imprint that released the reissue of the melanie's "photograph" only did a run of like 3000 copies. as such it's way too expensive to buy new, and impossible to find new. thank god for soulseek.

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Thursday, June 26, 2008

5/26/08

i used to associate boards of canada with unemployment late afternoon naps. as those days found their end, i didn't find myself in the mood for boards of canada anymore. luckily this track came up on shuffle while underground waiting for he subway and now i have a whole new context to enjoy the subtle menace they add the enivironment.

boards of canada "seeya later" (from the "hi scores" ep)

while spent suffer from being a little too much of their time to be given lost, or forgotten, "classic" status, that doesn't mean they didn't write and record two great albums. i just don't listen to them as much as i used to. actually, ever. still...

spent "excuse me while i drink myself to death" (from the album "songs of drinking and rebellion")

spent "ready, ok" (from "songs of drinking and rebellion")

-note: spent had 3 singer songwriters in the band. i never like the third guy's voice though, so, not putting any of his songs up.

you may leslie gore from that awful "it's my party, and i'll cry if i want to song". sadly that song turned out to be her legacy rather than this:

leslie gore "i don't want to be a loser"

and even though it soulds like it might have been produced by phil spector, it was actually quincy jones.

as prolific as will oldham was under his various palace monikers, he seems to be even more so as bonnie prince billie. so much so that i wonder how many of his fans are even aware of his earlier stuff. this was always my favorite palace song, and i alway associate it with the summer before my sr. year of college.

palace brothers "(end of) travelling" (originally released on the "mountain" ep)

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Monday, June 23, 2008

6/23/08

i got a ton of trojan records comps from a friend that i'm still going through. here's another good one:

the gaylettes "yester-me, yester-you, yesterday"

also finished going through my elvis albums over the weekend to see what gems i could find. elvis was pretty much ruined by the imitators, but you can't forget that he's the guy the beatles and led zeppelin looked up to.

elvis "fools fall in love"

lady sovereign had so much promise. the year her album came out (was it 2006?) it was my number one most anticipated album, but after hearing a few of the album tracks that hadn't already been released as singles, i didn't even bother to download it, let alone buy it. here's why i was so excited:

lady sovereign "feline mix" - recorded live on the air. it takes a few minutes to get into the body of it, so be patient.

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Thursday, June 19, 2008

6/19/08

i was looking for a song to go in a scene in the show i'm on and in the process got hooked on the badfinger song.

badfinger "where do we go from here"

also came across this great cover of fred neil's "everbody's talkin'" on a trojan records comp.

ernest ranglin "everbody's talkin'"

elvis presley's recording of blue moon may be the spookiest record ever made. i don't know how it hasn't ended up the theme for some legendary movie slasher. this is why i always wanted to music supervise on a horror movie. what lame ass movie executive decided that every scary movie had to feature rob zombie start to finish?

elvis "blue moon"

mud also does a great, more upbeat version that i'm sure you could fit nicely into the same film once you establish the creepiness of elvis'.

mud "blue moon"

lambchop "i'm a strager here" apparently the lyrics to this are from an old folk song, but the opening line has appeared in various forms, mostly as a blues opener, and altered as a line in dylan's "subterranean homesick blues". the opening line was actually what came to mind and made me want to post it.

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Tuesday, June 17, 2008

6/17/08

i tried to write a script once. this was the songs that opened it:

merle haggard "sing a sad song"

really the script was about just thinking about scenes to put to music. this song was next up:

sparklehorse "heart of darkness"

i drove home to visit my family over the weekend. I listened to the tinariwen album twice, once on the way up, and once on the way back. then i listened to it the next day on the subway home from work. i hate that i've succumbed to a "world music" act, but it's so good. i'll have to not listen to NPR twice as hard to make up for it. it is cool to hearing eastern music played on western instruments. they sound like they'd culturally be playing music based on the quarter tone scale but because of the instrumentation are using the semi tone scale. but i'm pretty ignorant when it comes to that stuff, so it's just a guess as to why it sounds both familiar and foreign.

tinariwen "nak assarhagh"

tinariwen "ahimana"

chet atkins "yesterday" - chet atkins has a whole album of beatles covers, called "pickin on the beatles".

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Friday, June 13, 2008

6/13/08

chris stamey and the dB's "(i thought) you wanted to know" - i came across this song by accident while downloading something else. don't know anything about chris stamey aside from being aware that there was once a band named the dB's.

camper van beethoven "tom's flower's 1500 valves" - one of my favorite camper songs.

i have favorite songs, and favorite albums, and favorite bands, but the music that means more to me than anything else is the music of maurice ravel. while driving across country on a move from california to delaware we stopped at a store and my dad picked up some classical music tapes for the trip. years later, back in california, i claimed the ravel tape as mine, and along with "appetite for destruction" (my official lawn mowing album) and a jazz mix my band instructor put together, it was the soundtrack of junior high and my freshman year of high school. really it's "daphnis et chloe suite no. 2" that i'd say is the best piece of music ever written, but it's broken up into 3 tracks and it would be a shame for anyone to hear it with two long pauses while the player loads the next track. so, here's "alborado del gracioso" and two versions of "pavane for a dead princess".

"alborado del gracioso"

"pavane for a dead princess" (symphonic)

"pavane for a dead princess" (solo piano) - the amazing thing about this performance is that it's actually ravel himself playing the piece, even though he'd never been in a recording studio. He did "record" some of his pieces onto a player piano reel. supposedly player piano technology of the time did allow for a piece to be reproduced exactly as it was originally performed. decades later they put a player piano in a studio and recorded ravel's performance, minus ravel.

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Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Electric Light Orchestra / I Wanne Be The Guy

more so than any other band, electric light orchestra put out a greatest hits with ever every album. this means that actual greatest hits, or best of, you were thinking of buying is pointless. if i were you, i'd make sure to at least own "on the third day" through "time". that's 7 albums, minus their half of the "xanadu" soundtrack, which i haven't heard, so there may be 8. anyways, here's a sampler of the 7.

also, "el dorado" has one of the best alum covers ever:

Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

and: over the weekend i came across this video labeled "the hardest video game ever" in the post. i'd never heard of the game, but watching the video, something about it seemed familiar. ooooh yeaahhh, that's what it's like trying to get a girl to go out with you. i've played this game before, even though i haven't.

"I want to be the guy" (the name of the game. very appropriate) - seems harmless at first, but at about 40 secs in...

it seems to be so impossibly difficult and frustrating that you wonder, why bother? yeah i know.