For a long time, to my discredit, I naively thought that Nirvana were either a singular phenomenon or a band whose closest cousin was Pearl Jam. Only when I started really listening to music did I realize what different musical universes Nirvana and Pearl Jam really existed in. And coming to this realization took some discovery of the many of the lesser hyped bands from the ’80s and ’90s who both developed the sound Nirvana would eventually mainstream and the genuinely grungy bands that were too actually grunge to be what the mainstream was passing off as allegedly “grunge”.
Jesus Lizard is one of the bands any Nirvana fan should really spend some time with. And stay tuned for more such bands as the rest of this top 366 list of my favorite bands continues to countdown all year until the new year.
An exciting recent find, I found this band in the wee hours of the morning during an overnighter working on the dissertation. I was listening to an archived October 2 interview with xkcd cartoonist Randall Munroe carried out last fall at Skeptically Speakingby Desiree Schnell. At the end of the file with their interview, The Burning Hell’s glorious deadpan send up of all things irrationalistic “Everything You Believe Is A Lie” came on and I must have replayed it about 5 times in a row before finally just searching out their music on Lala and deciding to buy their entire 2008 Happy Birthday album, on which both of the gems below can be found.
Essentially, to sum up what they do, in a sentence, from their stuff plays like a lost Magnetic Fields album.
Harry Nilsson is sort of a cross between John Lennon and Bob Dylan in my mind, I fell in love with his brilliant song “Don’t Forget Me” through the brilliant Neko Case’s version—but more on her in the late autumn. I’m also, embarrassingly enough, a sucker for the film “You’ve Got Mail”, so I opted to include his lovely version of “Over The Rainbow” which ends the film and for which there’s a lovely little tribute video I found .
Dave here, your Camels With Hammers webmaster! Dan asked me to provide todays installment, as it’s one of my favorite artists, Ryan Adams, who I run a fan website and message board for at alt-country.org. Ryan fronted Whiskeytown, one of the most influential alternative country bands during the 90’s, and launched his solo career in 2000 with what most consider to be his best album, Heartbreaker. I was first introduced to him with the release of Gold, and it’s still one of my all-time favorites. Since then he’s been hit or miss, but has still managed to put out some great songs. Here are a few of my favorites, including the beautiful “Oh My Sweet Carolina” with backing vocals by Emmylou Harris, and the video for “New York, New York” which was shot just days before 9/11.
A few weeks ago Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers revealed they would be releasing a new album called Mojo this spring. Somewhat amazingly, this fulfilled the final of three major projects that Tom Petty had listed wanting to do four years ago. At the time I was skeptical he would actually put together a reunion with his pre-Heartbreakers band, Mudcrutch, but then he did, and that he would put out a major live compilation, but he has, and now the third of his goals has come to fruition, a Heartbreakers album on which his illustrious bandmates will have the opportunity to shine.
Long time Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers concert goers and bootleg collectors know that this band loves to jam. Their studio output before the 2000s always focused on radio-ready, excess-free punchy pop rock, but for decades they have indulged in numerous extended versions of their radio hits and played special jam songs that have never been released in studio versions to this day. When I discovered their live music and their instrumental skills revealed therein is when they really became for a spell my one all consuming musical obsession. And despite some of the album’s atrocious lyrics, I really enjoy The Last DJ for the way it in many ways premieres the Heartbreakers as an in-studio guitar heroics band. And I loved “Crystal River”, 2008’s song in which Mudcrutch let loose with a terrific ambling jam song.
So when Tom’s been talking with relish about the prospects of a real Heartbreakers album, his first since 2002’s The Last DJ, I have been expecting this to be the big jam album. 2006’s solo project, the incredibly catchy and consistent Highway Companion, was a throwback to the pure pop Petty of his 1989 classic solo debut Full Moon Fever. But I had a feeling he was thinking of his studio reunion with the Heartbreakers not as an opportunity to reprise the Heartbreakers’ apex of 1979’s Damn The Torpedos but rather to make an album devoted to songs which resemble their live jam sessions more than anything prior. And that’s precisely what the first cut delivers.
Except that–instead of showcasing the Heartbreakers’ own unique sound and abilities as a jam band, the song is an embarrassing knock off of Zeppelin (and some say the Beatles but I don’t yet hear that). It’s pretty disappointing. Below is the new song, “Good Enough” followed by its forebear “Since I’ve Been Loving You” followed by what is, in my wide experience of their live music, the band’s most incredible performance ever—the extended version of “Refugee” they played on the 1991 tour and captured best for their Take The Highway video. In my humble opinion, it’s better than anything Zeppelin ever did and it manages to be pure Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Here’s hoping the rest of Mojo captures more of that magic than tries to ape Zeppelin’s, in spite of its quease-inducing title threatening an over the hill act going out of its way to show it’s got its “mojo” by showing it can keep up with all those fresh ’70s bands with their impressive 21st Century “mojo”.
An atmospheric-bluegrass-folk-Beachboyharmony kind of bandwhose debut album is best listened to straight through so that it can wash over you. The first song below is my favorite of theirs and the second is another really good one put to a claymation video, so heads up to fans of claymation.
Clergy Guy has a great post on his time spent visiting the elderly. Read the whole thing. Here’s just his moral, but there’s a lot of fun getting here:
Often someone will grab my hand and speak urgently of what they used to do. “I was a policeman for 35 years.” “I owned a ranch.” “I have five children.” They want me to know that they were once somebody significant.
When I walk into a stuffy smelly room to visit an old man in his bed and I see WWII medals on the wall behind him, I realize that older folks have nothing more to prove. They are heroes who refuse to go away.
Could I ask you a favor? If you’re like me, you don’t like going to the nursing home. Please go anyway. You will make someone’s day just by entering the building. You could find a blessing, too, if you look deeply enough to really see the people.
I’m pretty sure there’s a law on the books somewhere that you can’t make a movie about the ’60s counterculture without featuring “Time of the Season.” And that’s the way it should be, as far as I’m concerned:
The 21st Century ’70s Springsteen, Craig Finn writes songs that are anthemic, evocative, and rich with narrative and emotional detail and perceptiveness. If his talk-singing didn’t become a slog so often, his band would rank much higher. This song always makes me smile though:
The Good Life’s Album of the Year is an album of a year long relationship and as a sucker for concept albums and songs about the complications of relationships, I eat it up. I love this (long) song most. It’s the only one with a female lead vocal on the album:
Aerosmith are quite simply so much the quintessential ’70s-’80s rock band to my ears that it renders them positively bland, being the formula perfected to the point of having nothing distinctive left. But that said, I came of age in the mid-90s during their last great revival and so there will always be a set of songs that I go back to. Plus I enjoyed their back to the blues record Honkin’ On Bobo and love what they did with Run DMC and what Eminem and “Weird Al” have done with them. So, there’s a lot to highlight below:
So, DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince are a childhood favorite and “Men In Black” was essentially the song of the summer in 1997 as, dancing and singing along to it, I cleaned theaters playing the film Men In Black for weeks on end. I rarely listen to either musical incarnation of Will Smith anymore but pure nostalgia keeps him on the list:
So earlier in the month CWH webmaster Dave and I went to see Laura Marling, who is one of both of our favorite recording artists, and we featured two great videos taken during the show here on Camels With Hammers and expressed hopes that video of Laura whistling her way through the string portion of one of her songs would surface online. I had observed a girl in the front row recording that song and so figured there was hope it might show up. Well, it appears that that girl has heard my desperate plea and come forward with the amazing footage. Behold the power of the internet.
And to hear how the song goes in its recorded form, the song’s official video can be found here.
I have their newest album, Ashes of Grammar, and it’s a really enjoyable hour long psychedelic atmospheric experience taken all in one straight through listen. They’re the kind of band whose songs I wouldn’t even attempt to listen to apart from the full context of the album because they’re so jarring and hard to get a read on when isolated. But listened to as an album it all is really engaging. To characterize their sound I would say they’re the only band that I can think of who belong in whatever genre Animal Collective belongs to. When I first heard Ashes of Grammar I considered it the first Merriweather Post Pavilion-influenced album I had heard. Whether or not that influence is direct or not, I have no idea.
Here’s their appropriately titled “Headphone Space” from an album that belongs in your headphones to be maximally enjoyed:
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