It’s friday again, which means I get to bore you with my bizarre taste in music.
1. **Spock’s Beard, “A Guy Named Sid”.** SB is a fantastic neo-prog band, one of my favorites. This is a track off the first album after their long-time lead singer/songwriter left the band. It’s definitely a big change in sound for them, but they’re still excellent.
2. **King Crimson, “The King Crimson Barber Shop”**. A few years ago, my wife bought me a set of special KC reissues. The reissue of “Three of a Perfect Pair” included a bunch of extra tracks – remixes of “Sleepless”, extended versions of some of the instrumental stuff – and an *extremely* silly barbershop quartet sung by the guys.
3. **Marillion, “Berlin”**. Marillion is a progressive rock band that’s been around for quite a while. This is off of *their* first album after their long-time lyricist/lead singer left. They didn’t do quite as well as SB did after the singer left: the first couple of albums with the new singer just didn’t stand up to the older stuff. (Although they did eventually find their feet again; they’re recent work is fantastic.) This is probably the best track off of the first album with the new lead singer.
4. **Scott Vestal and the BG’98 Band, “Home Sweet Home”**. Scott Vestal is one of the best banjoists in the world today. He plays everything from very traditional Scruggs-style bluegrass to incredibly out-there purely improvised jazz. In the late 90s, he recorded a series of yearly albums of mostly traditional instrumental bluegrass. It’s really pretty cool to see just what a bunch of really talented guys can do with even something as silly as this old folk song.
5. **Sonic Youth, “Jams Runs Free”.** A very typical Sonic Youth track off of their latest album. It’s a bit *smoother* than some of their older stuff, but it’s got the same sound to it – the semitones, dissonance, and other strangeness; it’s just more subtle.
6. **The Clogs, “Sticks and Nails”**. More post-rock. The Clogs are an excellent classical-leaning post-rock trio. This is a very dark, percussive, dissonant piece.
7. **Darol Anger’s Republic of Strings, “Father Adieu”**. A really wonderful track from of one of Darol Anger’s new projects.
8. **The National, “Friend of Mine”**. An alternate face for some members of the Clogs. The National is a very interesting band – you can definitely hear the connection to the Clogs, and yet it’s also very traditional country-rock style songwriting. Good stuff; not necessarily something that I’d want to listen to every day, but really great once in a while.
9. **Broadside Electric, “Seafood Invasion”**. An instrumental track from a really great Philadelphia area electric folk group. I learned to play the tin whistle from the whistle player in this group.
10. **Kaipa, “A Complex Work of Art”**. A *wonderful* track from the re-united Kaipa. Kaipa is the band where Roine Stolte of the Flower Kings got his start. It sounds like a cross between old Yes and the Flower Kings.
Good Math/Bad Math
The beauty of math; the humor of stupidity.
I only discovered Spock’s Beard a few months ago and really liked what I heard – it also happened to be Feel Euphoria. Good stuff.
I bought my first Marillion album at random when I visited Montreal years ago. Childhood’s End. Liked the title & the cover. Became enchanted. I have several others, but the only other one I got into was Fugazi. Both have great introspective lyrics. The music is good too, of course!
“an extremely silly barbershop quartet sung by the guys.”
I don’t know that one, but I would assume it’s in the same style as The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles & Fripp… Is it?
You might find this interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:1_Ceres
So much ranting against minor Planet numbers being an insult, and personification of Ceres. One quote:
Come on… The primary point against the numbers is that they are not part of the object’s name. They are not used by other encyclopedia. They are rarely used by the general media. Wikipedia is not a scientific journal no matter how much some people commenting here wish it to be that way. Wikipedia should use the common-name (see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names)) over the systematic-name except in special circumstances, for example carbon-12 and carbon-14. The astronomy articles could learn a lot from the chemistry articles in general. They don’t call iron “Fe Iron” to try and distinguish it from other uses of the word. Ceres is admittedly not as well known as iron, but the same principles really ought to apply. aLii 23:27, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
Let me ask, yes I know this falls a bit into the realm of the wierd a bit, would you prefer to go by you ID# or your name? Since a user “name” is used, I must assume a name is preferred. But on the off chance some prefer being called by a catalogue number I will endevor to find an appropriate number to affix to those persons names whenever I have future need to refer to them. Abyssoft 00:06, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
No idea what’s going on here.
-Adam
I wouldn’t describe The National as very traditional country-rock style songwriting. Their latest album, Alligator, has some rootsy elements to it, but it is quite distinct from basic country-rock.