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Thread: bac0n's Five Star Songs

  1. #76
    What is best in life? D_Davis's Avatar
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    Hey B,

    You ever listen to Anything Box?

    Living in Oblivion

    Their first album is awesome.

  2. #77
    Director bac0n's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Daniel Davis (view post)
    Hey B,

    You ever listen to Anything Box?

    Living in Oblivion

    Their first album is awesome.
    Actually, yeah, I do! Quite a lot, actually. I can actually remember where I was and what I was doing when I first heard Living in Oblivion (I was in 7th grade on my way to a junior high basketball game. we got trounced).

    This is actually my favorite mix of the song.

    Edit: actually, this is my favorite mix.

    Great song.

  3. #78
    What is best in life? D_Davis's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting bac0n (view post)
    Actually, yeah, I do! Quite a lot, actually. I can actually remember where I was and what I was doing when I first heard Living in Oblivion (I was in 7th grade on my way to a junior high basketball game. we got trounced).

    This is actually my favorite mix of the song.

    Edit: actually, this is my favorite mix.

    Great song.
    Yeah - their whole first album, Peace, is great. I saw them live for this. They weren't very good (synth-pop rarely is live), but it was still fun.

    Love those mixes.

    I've got the 12".

  4. #79
    A Bonerfied Classic Derek's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Daniel Davis (view post)
    You know, I've never really listened to Built to Spill.

    Where is a good place to start?
    I'd say Perfect From Now On which is, well, pretty damn perfect or Keep It Like a Secret. Ancient Melodies is actually considered one of their weaker outings, but I still like it a good deal.

  5. #80
    Director bac0n's Avatar
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    The Gash by The Flaming Lips


    The Gash is one of those songs that, if I'm in a particular mood or frame of mind, can move me to tears. I can say that for, maybe three songs, two of which are on The Flips' monumental masterpiece, The Soft Bulletin. It sort of speaks to a certain forced hope in the face of despair, a struggle to find meaning when there seems to be none, when all we can do is just keep plugging away in the hopes, however distant they may seem, that one day our toils might actually amount to something good. I'm sure all of us have felt that way - spinning our wheels, tired, all we wanna do is just sleep for awhile, but something we can't touch or see or feel moves us to keep going. This song speaks to that, and it does it well.

    Fight Test & The Gash live (The Gash starts at about 4:45)

  6. #81
    What is best in life? D_Davis's Avatar
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    The Gash is amazing.

  7. #82
    Director bac0n's Avatar
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    Generation Celebration by Detektivbyrån


    I've mentioned these guys recently in the Discuss The Musics thread, but it bears repeating here. Detektivbyrån is my favorite discovery of the past several months. It's just impossible to listen to their stuff and not be put into a good mood, for this song is the essence of joy, in audio form. My four-year-old girl loves to dance to this song in her PJs, and even my mom couldn't help but tap her foot along when the song was playing out of the speakers. With a the fairy-like ring of the glockenspiel to appeal to the child in all of us, the keyboards to appeal to the hipster, with a smackerel of accordion to appeal to the polkaholic that I know lies perhaps dormant in each and every one of us, it really does have a cross generational appeal to it, suited just as well for a kindergarten class as it would be for a coffee house. Cappuccino drinkers and ankle biters rejoice!

    Get into your PJs and DANCE!

  8. #83
    Director bac0n's Avatar
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    The Girl From Ipanema composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim


    A few years back, I was taking guitar lessons, my goal being to learn jazz guitar. I started with the classical style to learn the theory, the basics. Noticing my fondness for the Spanish malaguenas I was learning, my instructor introduced me to some bossa nova songs, starting with The Girl From Ipanema, his reason being is that if I could play The Girl From Ipanema, I could play any Bossa Nova song, for all bossa nova songs use the same chords as does Girl From Ipanema, only in different order. Anyway, I never made it out of the Bossa Nova style in my lessons, cuz I loved the laid back sound of it, the feel of a cocktail on a lazy Brazillian afternoon. Most would confine this song to the pit of elevator music, and there certainly are versions of it that would fit that bill, but there are many other, great interpretations of this classic masterpiece that are anything but, my favorite being when West Coast Jazz master Stan Getz coupled his smoky smooth saxophone with the equally smoky, and very sexy voice of Astrud Gilberto. Throw in the relaxed guitar of João Gilberto, and you have yourself a winner.

    Listen

    Watch

  9. #84
    Director bac0n's Avatar
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    Good Morning Kaia by BT


    Remember a few entries back where I said that The Gash was one of three songs that could make me cry? Well the other one is What Is The Light, also on The Soft Bulletin. The third song is this one, Good Morning Kaia, and it's the only song of the three that can do so without the use of a single word. Good Morning Kaia is a love letter from a new dad, BT, to his new daughter, Kaia. Brian Transeau composed the entire song with Kaia sitting on his lap. As a relatively new dad - I have a girl about the same age as Kaia - a song like this really strikes a personal chord with me. And the song really captures that parental love that is so intense, so palpable, that the best way to describe it that I know of comes from the book Where The Wild Things Are: "We'll eat you up, we love you so." That probably won't make a whole lotta sense unless you're a parent, but if you are, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. And also if you are a parent, watching the video for this song will hit you like a punch, right in the chest. As a side, about three months after this song was released, around Christmastime, Kaia was kidnapped by her mother. Fortunately, both the mother and the two year old girl were found safe a few months later. Hopefully, life for little Kaia since then has been relatively normal and worry-free.

    Watch

  10. #85
    Director bac0n's Avatar
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    Greek Song by Rufus Wainwright


    Oh, to have the talent of Rufus Wainwright. No, that's too ambitious. I'd settle for a mere tenth of his talent. That'd be way more than enough for me to work with. Okay, I'll take the talent in his fingernail if you'll throw in a quarter of his good looks, but that's my final offer. Anyway, if this song is to be believed, The Greeks like bossa nova rhythms and Chinese violins. I ain't got no problem with that. In fact, if this really is true, then I'll hop on the next flight to Athens, cuz this song sounds great. A bit less burlesque-y (is that a word? oh well) than a lot of the other stuff that Rufus puts out, but that ain't no problem, cuz it's a lot less whiny too (not that there's any problem with that sorta thing). Just another relaxing lazy afternoon song to play when the weather's nice and there's nothing in particular that you need to be doing.

    Watch Live

  11. #86
    Director bac0n's Avatar
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    Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse by of Montreal


    That Kevin Barnes is one odd bird. I mean, what is up with the title of this song? I certainly don't know. But I don't care, cuz the song rules. An audio representation of manic depression and the drugs used to escape it, I can't think of a song which so deftly captures the feel of emotional panic, not only with words, but with chord progressions and instruments as well. The song opens with a keyboard stab that blares like an air-raid siren, the same sorta sound that could send firemen scrambling for their trucks and off to put out a fire. From there, it's a rollercoaster ride of romper-room playfulness facilitated by chemicals and denial, brief moments of relative happiness before suddenly being plunged back into the shit. Follows is some desparate calling for help and YAY the drugs kick in and we're back to the romper room! Yay chemicals! Sometimes cliche's and conventions can be used to one's advantage, and such is the case here, because we know just what's going on in Kevin Barnes' head just by the tone of the various passages this song pushes us clumsily through.

    Silly Video!

  12. #87
    Director bac0n's Avatar
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    Hello Meow by Squarepusher


    With must drum & bass artists, most of the emphasis is placed on the drums. After all the the splicing, recombining, processing and hyper-speeding-up of the drums, the bass track tends to be more or less an afterthought. Not so with Squarepusher. With him, the bass is front and center, and it is good. I'm talking really fucking good, the sorta good that a bonafide bass player would listen and say, damn, that guy knows his shit. And it should be, cuz Squarepusher IS a bonafide bass player. Hell, I'd put his skills up against just about anyone's, and his best songs tend to be the ones where his virtuosity with the instrument is the most showcased. Like this one, Hello Meow, off his most recent album Hello Everything. It's classic Squarepusher through and through, mixing playful keyboards, drums on speed, a nice groove, and of course, Squarepusher's kickass bass playing. It's a great build to a nice payoff, about 2:50 in where Squarepusher unleashes his skills and tears shit up.

    Watch him kick it live

  13. #88
    Director bac0n's Avatar
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    Hello Teenage America by Meat Beat Manifesto


    One of the trademarks of Meat Beat Manifesto is their (or rather, his) generous use of interludes to glue his albums together, and my favorite of those, and indeed one of my favorite MBM songs altogether, is Hello Teenage America, off their 1990 album, the fantastic 99%. Attention is grabbed quickly with a sample from a Mothers of Invention song, which starts things with a sorta Dave Brubeck vibe, but soon after you've been drawn in, something seems a little wrong, and from there things get off kilter pretty quickly. Eventually, we're drifting off completely into space, as Jack Danger's trademark atmospherics eventually take over completely. The only thing consistent throughout the song is the sharp but minimalist hip-hop beat. MBM has always been my go-to guy for creative use of synthesizer programming and sample manipulation in pursuit of heavy, layered atmospheric sounds, and this song, and indeed the entire album, shows that, even as far back as 1990, Jack Dangers was farther along than most other electronic musicians are today, 18 years later.

    Listen

  14. #89
    What is best in life? D_Davis's Avatar
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    Hello Teenage America is a track made of brilliance and genius.

    99% is almost 20 years old, and yet it still sounds like it is from the future, and it is still lightyears ahead of just about anything any electronic artist is doing today. It could very well be the Abby Road or Pet Sounds of electronic music.

  15. #90
    Director bac0n's Avatar
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    Here I Come by The Roots


    The Roots is one of those bands that I had heard so much hype about, that I finally gave in one day when I had a gift certificate and bought their damned album. And I'm glad I did, cuz there sure is a lot of awesomeness packed in to their album Game Theory. There's just something about ?uestlove's live drums that adds such a great, fresh dimension to their sound, and their almost 100% live-played instrumentation opens up myriad possibilities just not available to other hip-hop acts that rely on DAT-machines and turntables to support the rhymes. As a result, The Roots can be a helluva lot more dynamic than just about any other hip-hop outfit in existence, and they certainly are a helluva lot more fun to watch, cuz suddenly it's not all about the rapper - it's about an entire band. And that's frickin' cool. Case in point, Here I Come. Opening with a drumroll - something you rarely hear in a hip-hop song - it then goes completely bad-ass on ya, with a great synthhook, and builds from there. The coolest part, in my eyes at least, is during the refrain, Black Thought yells WAIT, and the entire song stops for a beat or two, then kicks back in. Doesn't really show up on CD, but when played live, it sure as shit does. You just can't do that with a DAT.

    Live On Letterman

  16. #91
    Director bac0n's Avatar
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    Hey Tia! by Mexican Institute of Sound


    If you think that the only music wafting up from south of the border involves mariachis, then boy oh boy, do I have a band for you. The Mexican Institute of Sound - or if you wanna be anal about it, Instituto Mexicano Del Sonido - is one of my fondest recent discoveries in the realm of electronic music. Taking perhaps queues from the digital kitsch of such artists as Fantastic Plastic Machine or Pizzicato Five, adding some Latin spice, a good measure of funk, and maybe a sprinkling of silliness, MIS has managed to create a fun, fresh sound that's all his own, a great soundtrack to a hipster margarita party. Perhaps the most dance-floor friendly track on the magnificent album Méjico Máxico is Hey Tia!, a marching band blast set to a heavy four-to-the-floor beat. In it, Camilo Lara, los cerebros behind MIS, shows his deft touch with samples, adding a threatening brass track to starkly contrast some happy-go-lucky vocals, with plenty of other audio trickery to keep plenty of interest. It's a really fun track, certainly one I would spin if I were ever to DJ a party, Cinco de Mayo or otherwise.

    Escuche!

  17. #92
    Director bac0n's Avatar
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    Hey Ya! by OutKast


    I don't care what the alterna-snob say, Hey Ya! is a great song, one of the best pop songs to come down the pipe in years. Being that I never listen to commercial radio and never watch commercial television, I was a relative late-comer to this song. It probably had already been out for a year or more before it had crossed my ears, and even then, my first exposure to it was on The Internet. Not on steaming radio, not on an MTV video, but rather, that now (in)famous video that mashed together It's Christmas Charlie Brown! with the song, so that it sounded like the Charlie Brown gang were performing a music video for the song. Yeah, that was my first exposure to that song, and even today, I can't help but think of that video when I hear the song. I know the rest of you have probably heard this song to death, but I haven't, certainly not enough to know that all the planets seemed to align when this song was put together, creating the perfect combination of ingredients to build quite possibly the perfect pop song. Catchy, unique groove? Check. Simple, easy to remember, quotable lyrics? Check. A refrain you can sing along with? Check. Does it sound as if the band is having just as much fun performing it as you are listening to it? Check. Does the singer dance really weird? Check check and double check. That, my friends, is how you build a pop song.

    Pick Your Flavor:

    Charlie Brown Style

    Ed Sullivan Style

    Ukelele Style

  18. #93
    Administrator Ezee E's Avatar
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    About time someone mentions The Roots on this site.

    Barbarian - ***
    Bones and All - ***
    Tar - **


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  19. #94
    Director bac0n's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Ezee E (view post)
    About time someone mentions The Roots on this site.
    Well, The Roots is a pretty awesome band, an few have the power to accurately articulate the sheer magnitude of their awesomeness. Perhaps people are intimidated. I don't blame them if they are.

    To be fair tho, I seem to recall Megs mentioning these guys on an occasion or two.

  20. #95
    Administrator Ezee E's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting bac0n (view post)
    Well, The Roots is a pretty awesome band, an few have the power to accurately articulate the sheer magnitude of their awesomeness. Perhaps people are intimidated. I don't blame them if they are.

    To be fair tho, I seem to recall Megs mentioning these guys on an occasion or two.
    They are coming to town here soon. I here they must be seen.

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  21. #96
    Director bac0n's Avatar
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    The Human Germ by Snog


    Snog, the brainchild of Aussie anti-consumerist David Thrussell, settled during the late 80s into a sorta techno-industrial vibe, releasing several albums with lots of clangs and blips and driving drum-machines, all the while railing against Corporate Consumerist Culture with enough vim and vigor to make Ralph Nader say, "dude, relax! you're gonna have a coronary!" It all reached a crescendo with 1995's Dear Valued Customer, a very aggressive, dystopian, synthetic sounding album that layered Thrussell's cynical, hissing vocals over what sounded like a 1000 computers at work processing orders and dispatching black helicopters. And then a funny thing happened. In what is perhaps the most dramatic turn of any electronic artist I know of, Mr. Thrussell went country/western for his next release, Buy Me.. I'll Change Your Life. It was a mixed bag, that album. The album was imminently forgettable: songs were too repetitive for my tastes, both in theme and in composition, but I had to give him chops for trying something new, something that is rarely rewarded for purveyors of industrial/techno music. The album also produced the song The Human Germ, a sort of resigned, depressed suicide note to a dying world, a guy who might have tried to make a difference once saying, I give up. The mood is past the point of despair past the point of desperation. The song has landed right smack in the middle of the muck of resignation, and the mood is gorgeously evoked with a cowboy orchestra brass section you would expect to find in an epic spaghetti western of old. A picture is painted of a cowboy riding out into the desert to die. Thrussell retains just enough of the old Snog sound to let you know he hasn't completely eschewed his past. Just enough clanks and blips to give you an industrial aftertaste, and a heavy hip-hop beat to maybe get you to nod your head on the beat while you're getting depressed.

    Video
    Losing is like fertilizer: it stinks for a while, then you get used to it. (Tony, Hibbing)

  22. #97
    Director bac0n's Avatar
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    I Paid My Money by Fear of Pop


    I'm sure all of you have some songs which immediately transport you to a certain place and time. One of those songs for me is I Paid My Money by Ben Folds vis a vis his side project Fear of Pop. I remember it clearly. I was visiting friends in The Bay Area. We were driving across the Bay Bridge from Oakland to San Fransisco, gabbering away and not really paying attention to the college radio outa Berkeley that was trickling out the car speakers. Then out of the radio came what sounded like guitars and keyboards having some sort of coordinated epileptic seizure and this cocksure joker ranting about dammit he paid his money and he's gonna see all of this movie, and he's gonna like it, dammit, no matter how bad it is. All talk in the car stopped instantly, which, if you knew anything about the people I was with, would realize was a herculean feat unto itself. Not a word came out of anyone's mouth for the entirety of the song, then when it stopped, the only thing was spoken by Mike, who ordered us to shut the fuck up, he had to find out who made this song. Once that information was gathered, the gabber started right up again, mostly about how awesome that song we just heard was. I think the very day I got off the plane I made a bee-line to the local record shop to grab the album.

    Listen
    Losing is like fertilizer: it stinks for a while, then you get used to it. (Tony, Hibbing)

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