Playlist : April 4th - 8th, 2011

Hello and welcome to Work Tunes.

My playlist for this week features an artist I've only just discovered, the new LP from Snoop Dogg, an eclectic mix from Spin Magazine and Jenny Lewis among others. See here:

1. Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues
2. David Dondero - Simple Love
3. Digable Planets - Beyond The Spectrum : The Creamy Spy Chronicles
4. Josh Rouse - Under Cold Blue Stars
5. Radiohead - Hail To The Thief
6. VA - Spin Magazine, April 2011
7. VA - Uncut : Hard Drive
8. Jenny Lewis - Acid Tongue
9. LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
10. Snoop Dogg - Doggumentary

Top Five Artists Last Week

1. De La Soul
2. Nas
3. Drive-By Truckers
4. Best Coast
5. Steve Tannen

Song of the Week : Drive-By Truckers - Used to Be a Cop

This week’s track is from the latest Drive-By Truckers album, Go-Go Boots. It’s about a police officer whose life has gone to hell. Thrown off the force for a bad temper and nerves, he’s a one time abused child, unemployed divorced alcoholic stalking his ex-wife.

Feel good track of the year!

There’s a driving bass line and drum track with the scream of some nice lead guitars under some raw vocals. It’s great storytelling and a great performance. Hope you like it. The album as a whole is really interesting. The vocal duties are shared by at least three members of the band, including a female, so it has an eclectic feel while being roughly cohesive. Check it out.

Outro

That's me for the week people. Shouts to my homegirl @Hay2theley who has asked me to impart my knowledge of the old school to her. I knew there was a reason I read all those books/watched all those movies/bought all those albums/painted all those pieces/did all those turtles.

Respect. Peace out. In the name of Herc, Bam and Flash, yes ya'll.

Playlist : March 28th - April 1st, 2011

Hey there Work Tunes peeps. This week I have got a couple of new albums (Iraho and Go-Go Boots), an old favourite or two (Let Love In and Pretty In Pink OST), an album by a band I've been meaning to hear more of for a while (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and a recommendation from a trustworthy Twitter source (The Felice Brothers). What it all looks like together is something like this:

• Awesome Dre - Can't Hold Me Back
• Iraho - Iraho
• VA - Pretty in Pink OST
• Justin Townes Earle - Good Life
• The Felice Brothers - Tonight At The Arizona
• Beastie Boys - Hello Nasty
• Drive-By Truckers - Go-Go Boots
• Nick Cave - Let Love In
• Steve Tannen - Stopped at a Green Light
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz

Top 5 Artists

1. De La Soul
2. Uncle Tupelo
3. Bright Eyes
4. Mr. Bungle
5. The Velvet Underground

Song of the Week : The Buggles - Astroboy (And the Proles on Parade)

I stumbled across this album last week and my first thought was “OMG they had a whole album?!” ‘They’ being The Buggles, he one-hit-wonder extraordinaires who wrote Video Killed The Radio Star.

The other tracks on the album are fairly diverse. Sometimes they sound a bit like Madness, others you think it’s The Cars, but generally nothing else sounds like Video (which I still maintain is a superb pop song).

I thought I’d make a track SOTW just so you could say you’ve heard more than one The Buggles song. I chose this one because it’s about Astroboy and he’s pretty mint.

Adios Amigos

That's it for now. I will try and narrow down the whole month's list to maybe 5 albums for a proper review later in the week. Until then, keep a good head and always carry a light bulb.

Playlist : March 21st - 25th, 2011

Hello and welcome to Work Tunes. For this week's listening, I've dug into an old school favourite I just bought on vinyl, grabbed an album from one of the 80s ultimate one hit wonders and slotted in yet another Dolorean LP.

Check it out:

1. Televison - Marquee Moon
2. Velvet Underground & Nico - Velvet Underground & Nico
3. De La Soul - Three Feet High and Rising
4. The Strokes - Angles
5. Wilco - Wilco (The Album)
6. Nas - Hip Hop Is Dead
7. Dolorean - Violence In The Snowy Fields
8. Uncle Tupelo - No Depression
9. Bright Eyes - Lifted
10. The Buggles - The Age of Plastic

Top 5 Artists This Week

1. Dolorean
2. Train of Thought
3. Jack Johnson
4. Blind Pilot
5. Hilltop Hoods

Song of the Week : Bright Eyes - We Are Nowhere And It's Now

I’ve always liked this album, but it has mostly been a likeable sound, if you know what I mean. I’d listen to it, but all it really was was melody that sounded good and Conor Oberst singing over the top. The lyrics, I never really listened to before, but there was a general sense of “I’m a hipster… I live in New York… I’m so cool it hurts… Usually, I’m drunk and sad.”

What happened the other night at sleep time though, due to using earphones instead of Bluetooth (earphones being louder), I didn’t sleep but listened to it. This song made me click that there is some really exceptional writing on this album. I’ve always known that about Lua but only because of the other version.

With lines like:

Like a ten-minute dream in the passenger’s seat

While the world it was flying by

I haven't been gone very long

But it feels like a lifetime

And

Where the waitress looks concerned

But she never says a word

Just turns the jukebox on

And we hum along

And I smile back at her

I suddenly had some interest in what was being said. And yes, it still says “I’m a cool NY hipster who is drunk and sad” but it lays out a series of images that seem like a scene from a mumblecore indie film. Plus it has Emmy Lou Harris, which is always a bonus. Hope you like it and it doesn’t bum you out too much.

Ciao for Now

Next week there will most likely be two posts. The first will be for that week's playlist and the second for a proper review of the best of the month. Hope to see you there.

Ciao for now, you kooky kids.

Playlist : March 14th - 18th, 2011

Hello and welcome to another pared down version of Work Tunes.

This week there's a couple of new artists for me in Blind Pilot and Jack Johnson. Yes, I have honestly heard no Jack Johnson (well apart from that song he did where Ben Stiller was in the film clip). I'm also looking forward to the remix version of Gil Scott-Heron's 2010 release I'm New Here - done by Jamie XX and called We're New Here.

This is what it all looks like.

• Jack Johnson - To The Sea
• Beach Fossils – What A Pleasure
• Hilltop Hoods - A Matter Of Time
• Train of Thought - Moving Heads
• J Mascis - Several Shades of Why
• REM - Collapse Into Now
• The Murmurs - Pristine Smut
• Vetiver - To Find Me Gone
• Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie XX - We're New Here
• Blind Pilot - 3 Rounds and a Sound

Top 5 Artists Last Week

1. Dolorean
2. Snoop Doggy Dog
3. Tori Amos
4. Sonic Youth
5. Mellow Drum Addict

Song of the Week : Dolorean - Country Clutter

I know a couple weeks back in a daze of being newly smitten with Dolorean I picked one of their songs. It was a good song, but probably not a good representation of them. The other day, my copy of their latest album The Unfazed arrived. This track, Country Clutter is more true to why I really like them. It’s interesting how it shuffles along in a bit of a death march as well as building at points like it’s about to kick the distortion pedal on. Lyrically, it’s honest and angry and a little bit bitter, which I always like. Enjoy!

Postscript

Most of this post was cobbled together prior to today. I saved this draft before hearing about the earthquake in Japan. I debated whether to just post it without acknowledging that tragedy, but I just couldn't do it.

The footage I've seen tonight is impossible to ignore. The thick slow sludge of the ocean around Sendai swallowing the farm lands and the vast tracts of sheds; sweeping houses and vehicles and fences along, like some cheesy black blob from a 1950s sci-fi film. I'm not one for prayer, but I do hope with every ounce of my own being that no more lives are lost. The last I heard, more than 200 bodies had washed up on the beach. It's terrifying and horrid and all too big to fathom. 200 lives or 200,000+ as on Boxing Day, 2002, it makes no difference; one is too many.

起死回生 kishi kaisei :

Wake from death and return to life.

Playlist : March 7th - 11th, 2011

So here we are again. I've decided to just list my playlist every week to keep track of what I've played. Then every month, I will blog a selection of albums from all those I've played. Make sense? Good. Let's continue.

• Paul Kelly The A - Z Recordings (Disc 8)
• Sonic Youth - Dirty
• Ben Folds Five - The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner
• Tori Amos - Scarlet's Walk
• (Please) Don't Blame Mexico - Concorde
• Mellow Drum Addict - East Bound Train
• Snoop Doggy Dogg - Doggystyle
• Spin Magazine - March Issue Playlist
• The Whispertown 2000 - Swim
• Gillian Welch - Revival

Top 5 Artists of Last Week

1. The Rolling Stones
2. Radiohead
3. Digable Planets
4. Edie Brickell and New Bohemians
5. Dolorean

Top 5 Tracks of Last Week

1. Conor Oberst with Gillian Welch – Lua
2. She's Spanish, I'm American – These Long Summer Days
3. Ryan Adams & The Cardinals – Magick
4. Justin Townes Earle – Christchurch Woman
5. Digable Planets – Pacifics

Song of the Week

This week I have gone with a track that came with my most recent edition of Spin Magazine for Zinio on my iPad. It’s great how the digital version always has a playlist for free from iTunes.

This is Wye Oak – Civilian. I don’t know a lot about this band, but I have heard their most recent album over at NPR It’s a pretty good listen. Fairly moody indie pop with a decent layer of fuzz and jangle. Civilian has a bit of a country stomp about it while keeping the indie atmospheric vocals before it launches into a bit of rock. Not bad at all.

Playlist February 28th - March 4th, 2011

Howdy pardners, welcome to what may be the last Work Tunes.

After reading a blog about simplifying your life and finding more time for what you love, I realised that I could probably stop this blog and focus on Make Films Not Movies. Though I do enjoy talking music, I prefer movies and I’m not finding enough time to watch and review them.

There are other things I can cut out of my schedule though, so I have some decisions to make.In any case, for this week I’m listening to :

• Paul Kelly - The A to Z Recordings (Disc 7) : With just two more discs to go, I should probably make next week the last week for Work Tunes. Disc 6 of this epic box contained a humdinger of a ditty in Shane Warne. With a swinging summer horn and calypso rhythm, the track was a great bit of levity in a fairly serious set of songs. This disc features mostly S and T songs, including perhaps two of PKs best known in To Her Door and Sweet Guy.

• Rolling Stones – Rolled Gold (Disc Two) : The second part of the Rolled Gold Best Of compilation features some of the Stones' meatier tracks including Sympathy For The Devil, Wild Horses and You Can't Always Get What You Want. There are more of the early 70s songs here than on Disc One, which had several very early tracks from when the Stones thought they were Mississippi Bluesmen. I prefer this side of the band.

• Dolorean - You Can't Win : After hearing the latest effort from Dolorean last week, I was reminded why I really dig this band. Simple chord progressions, quiet twang and thought out lyrics will always be high on my list of things-i-like-in-music. Dolorean does all of that so well.

• Digable Planets - Reachin (A New Refutation Of Time And Space) : Lately, the Native Tongues style of jazz beats and positive, conscious lyrics has been sounding pretty good to me. I flip out over Blowout Comb by Digable Planets, but this is another great album. If only they were still around. Maybe they could resurrect Black Star while they were at it.

• Thom Yorke - The Eraser : Last week, I slowly but surely became in awe of The King of Limbs, Radiohead's brand new release. One thing I liked about it is the layering of electronic sound, which is the same thing I like about The Eraser. The King of Limbs is superior to Thom Yorke's solo debut, in my opinion, but this is still worth a listen.

• Radiohead - OK Computer : A lot of listeners would agree that OK Computer is Radiohead's finest hour. It has made countless critics' lists of the best albums of all time, or of the 90s of the UK and so on. The critical response to The King of Limbs has been mixed, to be polite. I wanted to play this album this week to get a better gauge on the difference. I bleieve TKOL will someday get a little more love than it does now.

• Sonic Youth - Goo : Goo was Sonic Youth’s seventh release, but got them a good deal of attention from further mainstream than usual thanks to the Seattle ‘scene’ that broke around them. The album after this, Dirty, got even more. Though it was released in 1990, Goo contains much of the sound everybody went crazy for not long after. It is the start of a more cohesive, less experimental Sonic Youth sound and a decently fuzzy and rocking album. The biggest track on the album is Kool Thing. We of course all know how cool Kim Deal is, thanks to the Dandy Warhols.

• Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians - Ghost of a Dog : Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians' 1988 release Shooting Rubber Bands at the Stars has always been one of my personal favourites. I have only ever had a cassette copy of this, it's follow up, until recently when I bought the CD. Stand out tracks are the title track and the jaunty Black and Blue.

• A Tribe Called Quest - People's Instinctive Travels And The Paths Of Rhythm : More Native Tongues, which is good for what ails Hip Hop. This Tribe album has two of the groups few hits in Bonita Applebum and Can I Kick It? But you can't go past the smooth grooves of Youthful Expression and the played-for-comedy I Left My Wallet In El Segundo.

• Marcy Playground – Marcy Playground : Remember Sex and Candy? Yeah, me too! But that's about all I ever knew of Marcy Playground. So when I saw this CD on ebay for 1c, I thought "why not?" I haven't listened to it yet. Fingers crossed.

Regardless of whether I decide to give this blog away, I will be making a playlist every week. I may just blog here once a month a list of the albums I enjoyed most and try to review a movie a week for MFNM.

Thanks to those who come to read. If I’m here next week, I hope you will be too.

Ciao for now.

Playlist February 21st - 25th, 2011

Hey hey kids! What's news in your worlds?

Let's get right into the music shall we? This week I'm excited to be listening to the latest Dolorean release and I'm spinning a few albums that I recently bought on second hand vinyl. Apart from that, I address a shocking Grammys snub and name drop on a signed CD.

Here's what it all looks like:

• Dolorean - The Unfazed : After (happily) rediscovering Dolorean last week, I was going to spin their third album You Can't Win (2007). Coincidentally though, Dolorean happen to release a new album The Unfazed just this year. I have deliberately laid off listening to any of it until I play it this week. I did enjoy Not Exotic a lot last week though; so much so, I played it several times at work and at home. You can download the title track from The Unfazed for free on the Dolorean Store.

• Paul Kelly - The A - Z Recordings (Disc Six) : Disc Six in Paul Kelly's not-even-complete A - Z catalogue contains the fictional reflective South of Germany, the tent boxing tale Rally Round the Drum and the reverent ballad Shane Warne. It's a mark of the man's brilliance that he can release a box set of 100 very solid songs and still have lots left in the bag.

• Guru - Jazzmatazz Vol. 1 : Because Guru was horribly snubbed during the Grammy Awards memorial segment, I'm listening to Jazzmatazz. Personally, I think it's a little foul of the music industry to ignorantly neglect to mention the death of a pioneer in a musical genre that has dominated it's sales for the last 15 or more years. In the words of the great Chuck D, another rap pioneer, "Who gives a fuck about a God damn Grammy?".

• Gully Platoon - The Great Divide : Mr Tirren Staaf aka Pegz recently held an impromptu Twitter competition to guess which 70s rock band bass player his name was inspired by. I guessed right (Tiran Porter of the Doobie Brothers btw) and was sent three signed CDs. One of them was this 2009 Gully Platoon release. I haven't heard it yet and wasn't even aware it existed, despite being a massive fan of Pegz' solo stuff. I expect good things.

• Rolling Stones - Rolled Gold (Disc One) : I've been going on about getting some Rolling Stones vinyl for a while now. Last Sunday, I found this double LP compilation at the Melville Markets and snapped it up. It’s jam packed with Stones classics from As Tears Go By to Wild Horses. So jam packed, in fact, that I'm going to split it up and bring in disc two next week.

• Camera Obscura - My Maudlin Career : I first checked out Camera Obscura on the recommendation of Sarah Silverman. They are a melancholic, sweetly-crooning three piece Scottish band formed in 1996. My Maudlin Career was released in 2009 and is their newest release. Standout tracks are definitely Careless Love and Away With Murder.

• Josh Rouse - Home : Josh Rouse has for some time been my overall top artist on last.fm. Partly that probably has something to do with how well his music suits the whole family (and so he gets a good spin on the weekend as well as during the week), but it's also indicative of how many really enjoyable albums he has cranked out. This one is one of the best. Hey Porcupine, Laughter, Parts and Accessories and Afraid To Fail are all outstanding.

• Bob Dylan - The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan : Another Melville Markets vinyl purchase. I bought this CD when I first got into Dylan in the mid 90s. This is the album that features the monumental Blowin' In The Wind, Hard Rain's a'Gonna Fall and Masters of War. I haven't played my record yet, but I am looking forward to it. This will tide me over.
  

• U2 - The Joshua Tree : Along with Leonard Cohen - Songs Of Love and Hate, this is the last of the vinyl I bought on Sunday (not counting Miss 4's gatefold copy of Thriller). Like much of the world, Joshua Tree was when I really got into U2. With massively popular hits like Where The Streets Have No Name and Pride (In The Name Of Love), it was touring this album that led to Rattle and Hum and U2's subsequent rocket through the stratosphere of fame and fortune.

• Radiohead - The King of Limbs : The latest release from the UK rock Gods has already received mixed responses across the Interwebs with some calling it 'gorgeous' and others unimpressed. A lot of the unimpressed seem to be those upset that it wasn't free like In Rainbows, but I haven't heard it yet so I'll reserve judgement.

*Puts on Molly Meldrum hat* Do yourself a favour and check Dolorean out. Their Not Exotic and You Can't Win albums are excellent.

Until next week, may you have the music in you. Peace.