Clang & Clatter

It’s Friday. IckMusic. Friday Five. You know the drill.

At the Drive-In - “Skips on the Record” (Acrobat Tenement, 1996)
At the Drive-In. Love the attitude. Hate the out-of-tune guitars on their debut. And you can’t blame it on the usual culprit Omar Rodríguez-López since he was playing bass at the time.

I Mother Earth - “Three Days Old” (Scenery and Fish, 1996)
iTunes is at it again. This week it’s a another selection from I Mother Earth’s second release. This particular tune has too many thematic shifts for me to really get into. Your mileage may vary.

Switchfoot - “Twenty-four” (The Best Yet, 2008)
Switchfoot is one of those CCM bands that I really used to like (around the New Way to be Human era) but is becoming much harder to stomach of late since becoming so popular. I purchased this “best of” collection for my pre-teen son who began to listen to some of their songs a couple of years ago. “Twenty-four” comes from the fourth release The Beautiful Letdown, which was the last major release from the band that I purchased, and is the band’s typical radio-friendly ballad, not that that’s a bad thing. Had I known at the time that The Best Yet was the usual last-ditch effort to cash in on the band by the record company after Switchfoot ended contract relations with Columbia/Sony, I would have refused to buy it.

King’s X - “Prisoner” (King’s X, 1992)
One of my all-time favorite King’s X tunes from their often-overlooked—though at one point most popular and best-selling—self-titled fourth release. This was the last album on which the band would work with manager/producer Sam Taylor, citing the usual creative differences reason. Seeing as the band’s next release was the stripped-down, grunge-ish Dogman, and hindsight being what it is, it’s not hard to believe that now. King’s X retains that classic King’s X sound from the first three albums, but introduces a bit of a darker side, both sonically and lyrically. Guitarist Ty Tabor’s playing is excellent throughout the entire album as it is here on “Prisoner,” making the album worth checking out if for that reason alone.

Toad the Wet Sprocket - “Scenes from a Vinyl Recliner” (Bread and Circus, 1989)
I first heard this song on a live bootleg of a Glen Phillips solo concert, and I much prefer that stripped-down acoustic version to the one on the TTWS debut album. That being said, I love the song, and in typical Glen Phillips fashion, the lyrics and song title become deep and weighty as you dig into them, with the allusions to the “circus” portion of the album title (itself a phrase that has come to mean to placate the masses) and the hint of comfortably and safely watching the misfortunes of others from the outside. Deep.

Hey, no Rush or Geoff Tate this time. I guess that’s something.

It’s Friday, so it’s time once again to hit shuffle in iTunes and play the Friday Five game at IckMusic. Here’s my contribution for this week:

Rough Cutt - “Black Widow” (Rough Cutt, 1985)
Slow-ish, ballad-y, over-reverb-y fare from one of the second-tier revolving-door-roster L.A. metal bands (Ozzy guitarist Jake E. Lee being one of a few notable big-name players). This particular band had the advantage of having Ronnie James Dio’s wife Wendy as a manager, thus garnering quite a bit of attention and direction from the man himself, but even that (and soulful vocalist Paul Shortino) couldn’t save Rough Cutt from a life of relative obscurity outside the Sunset Strip scene. Overall, this eponymous debut album was quite good at the time, but unfortunately it hasn’t aged as well as others from the same era.

The Damnwells - “God Bless America” (Air Stereo, 2006)
My introduction to The Damnwells was “I Am A Leaver,” a much better track from this same album. This track could have been made much better by removing the unnecessary drum noise opening and the incessant sizzling cymbal that plays through to the second verse. Then there’s the whole middle part that makes absolutely no sense in the context of the song and the noisy feedback-laden outro that fades into a completely different musical theme. Probably not the strongest song to have ended the album on. But then again, band leader Alex Dezen has never been one to follow convention.

Megadeth - “Good Mourning/Black Friday” (Peace Sells…But Who’s Buying?, 1986)
This song opens with the sweet arpeggiated “Good Mourning” instrumental before taking a more sinister direction into the sneering and snarling we have come to expect from Mustaine. The song changes tempo several times, gaining speed with each change, before finally heading off the tracks amid the chants of “Black Friday.” Good stuff.

At The Drive-In - “Ursa Minor” (Vaya, 1999)
I have basically given up trying to describe At The Drive-In to other folks. If you haven’t heard them before, you really need to take a listen and make up your own mind about them. This one comes from the 7-track EP released less than a year before the band’s swan song Relationship of Command, which in my opinion should be mandatory listening. Vaya represents a more put-together and polished version of a band that essentially started life alot closer to its hardcore origins than it ended up, and one that will always be an example where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts (Jim Ward with Sparta, Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López with The Mars Volta).

King’s X - “67” (Ear Candy, 1996)
Low, rumbling, groovy ode to channel surfing. I love guitarist Ty Tabor’s super-saturated distortion on this track, and like everything off Ear Candy, “67” contains lots of instrumental and vocal embellishments that you usually only pick up on when wearing headphones.