Clang & Clatter

It’s finally Friday. Time for the Friday Five with IckMusic.

The Police - “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” (Message in a Box: The Complete Recordings, 1993)
iTunes shuffle is a strange thing. I have nearly 8400 songs in my music library, and it picks a song from an album covered in last week’s Friday Five. Nonetheless, this is one of my favorite Police tunes, and despite its being played out on classic rock radio, it’s a song that doesn’t have me reaching for the skip button.

Caedmon’s Call - “Center Aisle” (Caedmon’s Call, 1997)
This is not the first time CCM folk outfit Caedmon’s Call has shown up in my Friday Fives. This time it’s a track from their major label debut (they had released a couple of independent albums prior to this) penned by fellow Memphibian (turned Nashvillian by way of Houston) Derek Webb. He wrote the song on the way home from the funeral of a friend who had committed suicide at which he’d been asked to play. It’s a song questioning what troubles in her life were so overwhelming that could not have been worked out in that quiet room surrounded by the people who loved her. Beautiful and pleading, the song consists simply of Derek’s vocals and an acoustic guitar, a combination that always draws me in.

Tesla - “Love Me” (Mechanical Resonance, 1986)
Mechanical Resonance is one of those albums that I purchased at a mall record store as a teenager without ever having heard a single note. This is not one of the better songs on the band’s debut, but it’s not bad, and I do love the wah-wah saturated guitar solo.

The Damnwells - “Golden Days” (acoustic version from the Golden Days film trailer)
I have a sort of love/hate relationship with this band-turned-musical-collective. Frontman Alex Dezen’s songwriting can at times be equal parts pure genius and totally frustrating. Fortunately this is one of this better tunes.

Judas Priest - “Freewheel Burning” (Defenders of the Faith, 1984)
“Fast and furious” proclaims the screaming, squealing, and screeching Rob Halford in this song’s opening strains. That it is, as is much of what sadly would become probably the last truly great album by the mighty Priest. Excuse me, I have some headbanging and horns-throwing to do. Later.

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.