Band: Scott Bradlee's Post Modern Jukebox
Genre: Jazz
We were talking about music last night at work and since I like cover songs a lot I decided to ask what everybody's favorites were. After a resounding round of hate toward 5FDP and every cover they've ever played on of the guys mention Scott Bradlee.
I'm sure you've probably heard of this dude once or twice, but if you haven't please grace your ears with one of the songs he's organized.
Band: Family Force 5 feat Tedashii
Genre: Rock, Dance
Had a conversation at work about how much these guys are kinda sub par music since the lead singer left. They are kinda like the rockstars of Christian music scene that are also turn-up dance music. I really don't get what niche they are supposed to fall into, they're like Dance Rock.
But yeah, their whole thing makes it seem like they'd have an amazing live show, but ever since their original singer left all I hear is that they've just taken a dive in that regard, which is really kinda sad.
But hey, it's still fun music to just play in the background, right?
So full honesty here, I've never really listened to these guys too much. Or this guy, I can't remember how many people are actually in this group, but I kinda feel like it's only one guy come to think of it.
Buy anyway, I was listening to this album on shuffle and this rather melancholy song came on right about the time I was really feeling pretty blah. As somebody who is a little stuck in a rut that's a kinda common feeling though, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
I'm a little bummed that I'm late on the whole Gorillaz train, but I hear there's a new album in the works rather soon, so we'll see how that turns out.
Every now and then I have a strong of what I believe to be really nice posts, and then I end up crashing by slipping and not knowing what to talk about. Today though I have some fun trivia so you know this'll be at least halfway decent.
Firstly, let's dedicate this post to my mom. She works in a church, she leads worship, and she has a weird love for the Beastie Boys. I remember her telling me not to listen to them because they were a bad influence, but I feel like I listen to enough terrible music that we can admit that I listen to them from time to time. Heck, Jeff and I even covered one of their songs.
Second thing, here's a cool bit f trivia. Kerry King, the bald guitarist from Slayer, played the guitar solo in this and a couple other songs these guys have done. You can tell for a couple reasons. firstly, he's credited as doing it. Secondly his style of playing a mountain of the same not very quickly and absolutely destroying the whammy bar is more than a little distinctive. He sounds like that kid at Guitar Center that knows enough to make a mountain of noise, but not always in a good way.
Band: Hollywood Undead
Genre: Rap Rock
Language: Strong
So in case you haven't guessed from the last two posts and the kinda mess of a theme that Title Track Teusdays were you'll know that I've got a couple opinions about stuff like that and the "change" album.
Well this isn't the title track, but we gonna talk about it anyway.
I feel the need to toss this out there, I really do like this band despite all the negative things I may or may not say. I've got a lot of criticism for bands that I like because I tend to hold them to a higher standard. HU made a huge mistake though when they decided to kick Deuce out of the band. Sure, they had their issues and I'm sure things would have gone worse, but musically they took a huge hit when he left.
Sure, I love the American Tragedy album, it's got some of my favorite tracks on it and is all in all a great album. You do kinda hear in it though that the edge that the music in the first album had at times was gone. You can argue that they got better equipment and the change in their sound was simply a reflection of the fact that they actually had more to work with. I'm pretty strongly of the opinion that that's not the case though.
As the albums have gone on and Deuce's influence has lessened the old edge that the music had has slipped away. Don't get me wrong, the later albums have still had solid songs that have the old school edge to them, but it's only 1 or 2 tracks in an almost 15 track album. You can tell that the party songs on the original albums were the ones that the other members of the band worked on more and that the songs with an attempted message usually came from camp Deuce.
Like I said, the new music has it's appeal, I know a lot of people really enjoy the new stuff and there's a lot of things to like about it, it's just a direction that I didn't really want the band to go in. This is probably greatly due to my Nu-Metal obsession, but I was really hoping that 2nd Wave Nu-Metal would rise up from HU's popularity. They're going down a different path though and I'm forced to listen to some of their old material and wish for things that'll never happen. Still a good time and there's lots of other bands though, so I'm sure I'll get over it.
Who doesn't love a good food fight? Apparently P86 is a rather large fan of them because this whole music video is one of the more intense food fights you're gonna see, ya feel?
Now I gotta be clear here, I love this album. This was a really good album that P86 put out; this was hands down their "weird" album though. (by the way, see that mutha'? I used a semicolon. Probably wrong, but at least I'm breaking my unending string of commas, be happy for me.) A lot of bands seem to have that one "weird" album that doesn't really fit the sound they'd established for themselves in albums past. For Slipknot it was Vol. 3, for Stone Sour it was Audio Secrecy, for Metallica it was Saint Anger, and so on and so forth. You can generally find an album like this that quite often marks a change in the band's sound. The ones I mentioned were more of a stand alone change and not a total stylistic change, but there are dozens of bands I'm sure that come to mind for you that had "That one album" that changed their sound either for better or worse.
The cool thing about this album is this is mostly the direction that a lot of P86's later albums took. Not quite as extreme as this album shows, but still more than the old RATM style music they had on the first couple albums. Took a few albums for it to take though, but I still think you could hold this album up as an example of major change with the group.
Band: Five Finger Death Punch (5FDP) feat. Rob Halford
Genre: Heavy Metal
Language: Once, Strong
This was the track that spawned a great amount of excitement about 5FDP's album a few years back. It was fantastic because you've got one of the best vocalists in Metal guesting on one of the newer groups on a really solid song. There's a couple really good songs on the album, but hands down this is probably the best one.
It was a fantastic single to herald what promised to be a good album, and I feel they held the bar too high. The album was good, don't get me wrong. I've got a lot of love for the album here, it's got a couple of my favorite Death Punch songs on it, but with how nice this was the whole second album was just kinda... Flat. It felt like this album's rejects. But you know what? This song is still good, and that's what counts.
I was out looking for some new music on Facebook the other day and a friend of mine told me to check out these guys. He's a big fan of the early 2000s Hardcore scene and actually was a rather big part of it. I'm not sure what band he was in but I know he toured with a couple bigger names back in the day, so music like this is way nostalgic for him.
When he told me to check them out I wasn't sure what I was walking into, but then when the music started I was amazed to hear something that sounded like old school Hardcore music, even though it was released this year.
So I'm freaking pumped right now because I found out recently that Spotify has the instrumental tracks of Dr Dre's entire "2001" album. Like, for real, this is great. I plan on using these as background music all the freaking time, it's great for working too and such and stuff, ya know?
I'm just happy that this exists though. I know it was probably just a money making attempt by Dre back in the day that surfaced on Spotify again or something, I just think it's cool how he actually put it out in the first place. I can't think of many people just putting out all their beats in just an album, ya know?
Jeff was dropping a lot of names on me yesterday and I'm gonna pass some of them along. It all started with him trying to explain why I should never listen to any Goregrind bands as long as I can avoid it and it turned into a lecture on European Black Metal bands.
This song is pretty cool cause it's got a solid 3 movements to it. It starts out really ploddingly heavy with a borderline Alice in Chains vibe, and just gets better from there. Haven't seen the video, but I'm sure it's reasonably cool cause these guy's have a major viking theme goign on.
So this is like a discount history lesson right now. I don't have too much to tell ya here, but it's worth noting that these guys helped originate the style of music known as Goregrind. It's not exactly the most pleasing music for a lot of people since it's got elements of Death Metal and Grindcore, but it's a significant development in the Metal community.
This song isn't as standard an example of Goregrind, but that's ok cause this is a good song too. It's got a sick flow to it and the main riff is killer difficult to play because of the placements of the notes.
On one hand I have the misfortune of working with only one person that actually likes my kind of music. On the other though, the lack of sameness makes me listen to a lot of different kinds of music, ya know?
I've accidentally tried to talk music with 3 different people now that listen to this kind of music. I don't look for people with such an opposite music taste, it just kinda happens. Like, my music generally is either really heavy or just really intense and this stuff is clearly here to help people stay calm. I dunno man, it's weird.
I couldn't listen to this at my main job, but the side one is office work and I could totally work with this stuff in the background there. At least I could if my office work didn't consist of working with music loops and such. Eh.
I've got a confession to make, I've accidentally been playing some really heavy Metallica support by not posting Megadeth at all yet. We gonna have a Metal History Lesson™ to get you some info about this whole thing.
So way back when there was this group called Metallica. This is back before they hit it really big, kinda big, or really too big at all. We're talking pre "Kill Em All" old. Dave Mustaine was the original lead guitarist of Metallica back then and he also had a pretty major drinking problem. Now to be fair, it's not like the rest of the band didn't also have their fair share of issue but they as a group decided that Mustaine had more issues than the rest of them. So they decided to pack his crap, buy him a bus ticket, and send him home. Mustaine did get credited with 4 of the songs riffs and such, but he has claimed over the years that he was uncredited for a couple other songs that were released at a later time. If you listen to a lot of Metallica's early stuff you can kinda hear what songs he still had an influence in and which they had come up with without him.
But yeah, there used to be some seriously bad blood between the bands (for obvious reasons) so the fans were pretty polarized for a long time. As the years went by it was more and more accepted to like both bands, and now that they seem to have made up all the closeted fans of both groups can finally display their allegiance.
Keep your eyes open, we're gonna have another Metal History Lesson™ coming up in October.
Hold the freaking phone, Ghost just released an EP to accompany the "Popestar" tour and this song is straight up amazing.
Like, I'm not the biggest fan Ghost has ever had, but you really can't knock the style they do everything with, ya know? The fact that they took this band from "just another satan band" and turned it into such a huge Horror Rock piece is terrific. The music is solid too, it's like old 80s Sabbath era Metal with better sound quality.
And let's not even get started on this music video. It's like, a horror movie from the 30s or something and you need it in your life, please please please watch it. For me.
Also even cooler news, THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF YEAR 3 OF THIS BLOG! hypehypehypehypehypehypehypehypehypehype
One of my coworkers informed me that if I didn't love this band she wasn't going to talk to me again. Seeing as we have an eternal war going on I find that suspect, but I listened to the band anyway because I always want new music to listen to.
Turns out they're actually pretty good, so it looks like our war will continue another day.
Band: Fit For An Autopsy
Genre: Deathcore
Language: Some, Strong
So I got to see these guys open during the Thy Art Is Murder show that I saw Rings Of Saturn at. I wanna say they were the 3rd band of the night and if memory serves they had a decent show. It was kinda generic sounding stuff, but I also kinda assumed that's what I was getting into when I went to see the show, ya know?
Well the singer was helping man the merch booth during one of the later sets and I had a chance to talk to him. He was a super cool dude, really humble and interested in talking. We talked music for a little bit and it was a genuinely nice conversation.
Their music is pretty nice as well, but it's definitely something that a lot of people won't be into.
Band: Them Crooked Vultures
Genre: Blues Rock
Language: Mild
Supergroups are interesting things. Sometimes they're amazing gifts of music, other times they are just kinda overrated. This is John Paul Jones, Dave Grohl, and Josh Homme, and it's actually a rather good sounding group. I'm not too into Blues Rock usually, but this is some stuff I could get into after a while. I dunno, it's nice enough and worth a listen.
Band: Children Of Bodom (CoB)
Genre: Melodic Death Metal
I really love CoB. The band is amazingly talented and while I don't think I'd like Alexi's voice in another group it just really fits here. I'm rather excited because I think me and some guys from work are planning to cover this song. It's gonna be freaking difficult because I've never really played a really complex song on bass before, but I'm willing to give it a go. Worst case scenario if it falls through on their end I'll actually have learned a hard song to play, so that'd be cool.
Genre: Deathcore, Technical Death Metal, Aliencore
Saw these guys tour with Thy Art Is Murder a few months back and they probably were the most interesting band in the way that they opened their set.
The singer who had clearly been smoking more than a little weed before hand walks on stage after the instrument sound check and, after grabbing the mic just stares at the crowd.
He then starts just saying the word "meow". The whole crowd starts repeating him and he starts saying things like "Meow says the cat. Meow says the.... Dog." After that he just stared at us all and said "We are Rings of Saturn and we're going to play you some songs. This is one of them." At this point they immediately launched into one of the songs off of their newest album, the art for which is pictured above.
Solid time, I'd recommend seeing them live for the experience.
So in my attempts to just enjoy as much music as I possibly can I found that Spotify will make me playlists that are similar to what I have with very little artist crossover. This led me to finding a lot of enjoyable music such as these guys.
There's a really cool sound they have going on here that's a bit of a mix between Melo-Death and Folk Metal and it's more than a little enjoyable.
Don't assume you're going to hate this right away, it's pretty solid.
So when I was going to post Walk by Pantera the other day I accidentally found this song. It's really good though, I'm glad I accidentally found it. It's a nice smooth song that I feel like I can really get into, I'm gonna be checking out more of his stuff to see what's up.
Artist: Drake & Future
Genre: Rap, Hip Hop
Language: Strong
So part of the very end of Grindin' reminded me of this as I was listening to it. Not this song really, just kinda reminded me of Future. Freaking love that dude.
The song is really cool though. It's from a collaborative album that Drake and Future did a little bit ago that I happen to like an awful lot, ya dig?
The bass in this song is just a thing of beauty, it's slick and has a sweet flow to it that I really want to find in some other songs.
So this is the song that my brother can rap rather well. It's a really catchy song though, and it's kinda the thing that made me start to enjoy NF a bit.
I wasn't too into him for a bit because his beats are hella simple. Like, I've got guys like Stevie Stone and Kanye who have these crazy intricate beats that carry a lot of the song, but NF likes to carry the song by himself. Doing the work that most people have the beats do, ya know? I had a lot of issues with that at first cause a lot of the songs I listened to kinda had very similar sounds going on, but I'm a lot more ok with the stuff now then I had been, and that means I scored a cool new rapper to listen to, eh?
Band: Shinedown
Genre: Alternative Rock
Language: Debatably?
So Shinedown was in my town last month and I had planned on seeing them but it somehow fell through the cracks and I missed them and Halestorm. Ah well, I'm sure I'll get another chance eventually, right?
Solid group though. Nothing super stands out as "Oh my gosh, they the best!" but at the same time it's not like they're bad. Their guitar tone is rather nice and I love the fast way the singer says some of the lines. It kinda brings it toward my weird obsession with Nu-Metal, but that's ok.
I am appalled that I've never posted this song before. Like for real, do I even care about anything? I love this song because it's a really simple song that just manages to get people going whether they like Pantera or not. It's simple and repetitive and has a chorus people can just chant, it works in a lot of ways for people who just need to get people in the mood for a concert or something.
