Random 10 for Jan. 15, 2008
2. Ween, “Where’d the Cheese Go?” This is a 29-second jingle that Deaner and Gener created for Pizza Hut in 2002, and naturally, the multinational flat food purveyor gave our boys the bum’s rush. In a 2003 statement, Ween said it “is one of the best tunes we wrote all last year,” and it truly is a track that you want to loop about four times just to get some mileage out of the groove. True to form, after getting sliced by Pizza Hut, Ween made a funnier and decidedly more explicit version, just so you know where they stand.
3. Sonic Youth, “Incinerate.”
4. Common, “The People.”
5. Club 8, “Heaven.” Ultra-brite summer pop from the Swedish duo Johan Angergard (Acid House Kings) and Karolina Komstedt, included on the duo’s first disc in five years, The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Dreaming. Songwriting and production have improved considerably since 2002′s Strangely Beautiful, which was already pretty great, but “Heaven” is more organic — Club 8 sounds truly flesh and bone here instead of the sexy robots we heard before.
6. The High Violets, “Cool Green.”
7. My Latest Novel, “Sister Sneaker Sister Soul.”
8. Jay-Z feat. Bilal, “Fallin’.”
9. Led Zeppelin, “The Song Remains the Same.” If I can scrounge the time, I’m going to do a track-by-track assessment of Mothership, the new collection of remastered Zeppelin that came out just in time for stocking stuffing last year. It’s nice to hear this music with some dynamic range now instead of those flat, straight-from-tape digital versions that were dumped into stores 20 years ago.
10. Photocall, “Silver Clouds.”
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Comments
Yeah, sorry about that. I had just gotten back into town, and without a real Golden Globes, I just preferred to stand down and relax. But, I’m planning a Grammys live blog (if they happen) as well as Oscars (if they happen).
Mothership is by no means a perfect collection — it’s missing too many key tracks for my taste, especially “Goin’ to California” and “Dancing Days” — but I’m going to round things out with iTunes, which has the entire remastered discography available.
I’ve been seeing a lot of articles lately complaining about mastering, and how they’re just blasting all the levels. But in my experience, just about everything that was released on CD prior to about 1995 sounds low and flat — the worst digital album in my collection is the first Violent Femmes disc. It barely registers above a whisper.
The first wave of Led Zeppelin releases on CD were better than that, but not by much, and that is a band for whom dynamic range is everything. Mothership has few surprises in terms of track selection, but they all sound great.
Still skipping “Stairway,” though. Probably will continue skipping it for the rest of my life.
I’m with Kev on missing the live Golden Globe blogging. I had to settle for Pop Candy, and they SUCK.
A Mothership analysis would be welcome; I had no real desire to pick it up, but if the sound is really that improved, it might be worth getting.
BTW, I’m a bit disappointed that there was no live blogging of the Golden Globes ceremony/pressconference/trainwreck. It seemed like such a great Shadenfreud opportunity to watch Billy Bush twist in the wind. I heard that on CNN when Johnny Depp won Best Actor Comedy/Musical, Larry King went off on how he couldn’t believe that Daniel Day Lewis wasn’t even nominated. Guess he thought There Will Be Blood was really funny.