Tracks of the Week

Hey, only 8 days later instead of a month!

Anyway, been a bit of a weird week, here are the tracks that stand out in my mind from this week’s listening:

L.A. Guns: “Nothing Better To Do”:

Bassist Kelly Nickels’ fun little ditty, always loved this one [and fuck, I remember just about every one of those pin-up shots in the video, especially the cigarette up the nose one!]. Also, found this interview with Tracii Guns and Kelly talking about it:

On the other hand, I’ve also been listening to a ton of Faith No More…

Faith No More: “Chinese Arithmetic”:

My brother was huge into FNM, so this is a case of me swiping his tapes when I was little and getting into a non-sleaze rock band by accident. Well, I suppose at the time I was much more into “From Out of Nowhere” but eventually I developed an appreciation for the first two albums too, and probably this track was a bigger influence on my own work than I ever realized.

But back to the sleaze rock dudes…

Dogs D’Amour: “Ballad of Jack”:

Gutter blues. Love ’em. And “tea”… sure, I believe ya, Tyla.

Trying to find a particular Bang Tango track, “Don’t Count Me Out.” Yes, I said Bang Tango. Fuck off. They were great, bringing all sorts of funky goodness into the LA scene.

I’ll be goddamned if I can find that particular track, though I did find out there’s a Bang Tango documentary that I must track down. Anyway, I guess the next best thing will be “Soul To Soul”.

Band Tango: “Soul to Soul”:

Anyway, all the sleaze and blues rock stuff I’ve been posting about lately probably gives you a bit of a sense of why I love Faderhead so much, lyrically at least.

Faderhead: “Drunk German Bono”:

Live from the Terminus Festival in Calgary this July. It’s karaoke, I know, I always slam that shit, but on the other hand, the MacBooks are on open display, so it’s honest karaoke, unlike so many bands I see having some idiot or bimbo wiggle their hands behind keyboards that aren’t plugged into anything and the MacBooks are hiding.

Also, I give points for the Gibson t-shirt Faderhead’s wearing. Me likely Gibson!

Let’s carry on… also been listening a bunch to Combichrist’s “Give Head If You Got It” and “What the Fuck Is Wrong With You?”

Let’s give the video entry to “What the Fuck Is Wrong With You?” just because it doesn’t get as much attention as the other one.

Combichrist: “What the Fuck Is Wrong With You?”

And a perennial favorite of mine, Caustic’s “I Play Computer.”

Caustic: “I Play Computer [Workman’s Comp Mix by the Gothsicles]”:

My guitar teacher keeps asking me why the fuck I spent a few years making industrial when my passion seems to lie with blues and sleaze rock. I still don’t have a good answer for that, really, though I do like industrial and experimental. I’ve been trying to figure it out all year, and also why tracks like “Lucky Paw” that sounded very Aerosmith-y in my head before I booted up ProTools to start crystallizing them turned into something completely different by the time I was done. Not that I don’t like the recorded version of “Lucky Paw,” just that it’s completely different from how I hear it in my head, and now that I’m playing it on guitar it’s reverted back to the bluesy funky version it originally was.

But at least if he asks me to explain industrial music as it is now that no one other than maybe Four Pi Movement still bashes on shit with scrap metal [not that he’d know that], I have an answer to that, albeit a tongue-in-cheek but funny-because-it’s-often-true one. I’ll just send him the Caustic link.

Anyway, I guess to wrap things up, because I hear it’s Keith Richards’ birthday today, let’s add one more.

Keith Richards and the X-Pensive Winos: “Happy”:

Live at the Hollywood Palladium, December 15, 1988.