New Post!: November 2019!

Cage the Elephant

I'm so excited! This is a great episode and we are getting very very close to caught up! I can hardly believe it. I hope you all have been enjoying these episodes. I think they're fun overviews of different things that happen during a month of Alternative Radio!


Countdown #411

***Featuring***
Absofacto
Billie Eilish
The Black Keys
Cage the Elephant
Coldplay
DREAMERS
Green Day
Illenium & Jon Bellion
Lana Del Rey
Meg Myers
SHAED
Sublime
Suzanne Vega
twentyonepilots
Weezer
White Reaper

Links to 410

New Countdown!: September 2019!

Well the first thing that we have to take care of is the fact that I skipped August's Artist of the Month. So we do a little backtracking on that front, but then we have a bunch of new songs and one BIG Grammy winner! Enjoy!


Countdown #409

***Featuring***
Billie Eilish
The Black Keys
Cage the Elephant
Dominic Fike
Green Day
Illenium & Jon Bellion
Lana Del Rey
Matt Maeson
Of Monsters and Men
Paramore
Panic! At the Disco
SHAED
Sublime
twentyonepilots

New Countdown: July 2019!

Matt Maeson

Well, if anything, we could say that July was pretty Sublime. Eh? Eh? But seriously, this is an excellent and fairly quick episode. It's chock full of excellent tunes. Some old, some new, and some new covers of old stuff. Enjoy!


Countdown #407

***Featuring***
AJR
Billie Eilish
Dominic Fike
Half Alive
The Head and the Heart
Lana Del Rey
Lumineers
Matt Maeson
Of Monsters and Men
Panic! At the Disco
Pearl Jam
SHAED
Sublime

Special Countdown: 12 Years of Last.Fm (Part 3) (#30-#21)

Rise Against

It's the end of the month, so that must mean that it's time for another installment of 12 Year of Last.fm. It's a great episode with a wide range of music. Enjoy!


12 Years of Last.fm (Part 3)

***Featuring***
Alkaline Trio
Bad Religion
Dar Williams
Elliott Smith
Frightened Rabbit
Pearl Jam
Rise Against
Sublime
Sufjan Stevens
Thrice
Vampire Weekend

New Countdown!: Murder and Anagrams

Cage the Elephant

It starts SO strong and then by the end it all starts to unravel. Of course, it's still a fantastic episode definitely worth listening to and playing for your friends, it's just that you might preface this one with "Ok, I know he sounds crazy by the end, but...."

:)

Countdown #187

***Featuring***
Arctic Monkeys
Bastille
Cage the Elephant
Fitz and the Tantrums
Foster the People
Lorde
The Neighbourhood
Phantogram
Sublime
Vampire Weekend
The White Stripes
Young the Giant

One Year, 100 Albums: #62 Sublime - 40 Oz. To Freedom

Punk Rock Changed Our Lives

Sublime 40 oz. to Freedom, 1992

Part 2 of "Man the Early 90's Were Filthy, Huh?" is the debut album from polygenre band Sublime. There are some truly explicit things going on on this album and I will now confess that I was listening to it for almost the entirety of a family trip in roughly 2000 or 2001 and reveling in the taboo content. My mom would have COLLAPSED if she'd heard what was going into my ears. And sometimes that's the best way to forge a lifelong love for an album :)

I think of my favorite things about 40 oz to Freedom is that it feels like it was loosely and casually put together by EXPERTS. There's a lot of playing around and silliness, but you can tell that, at the end of the day, these guys know what they're doing and they'll take the song and album exactly where they need to be.

From "Waiting for My Ruca" all the way through "Rivers of Babylon" (I don't always listen to the Thank You track. I'll admit it) you're on a roller coaster of genre shifting and partying and drugs and fun times. The album has (let me count) 6 covers. The Toyes (a little known Portland (I think) reggae band), Bad Religion, Toots and the Maytals, the Grateful Dead, Descendents, and the Melodians are all on the covers list. You could almost count the Specials, too, since "Message to You Rudie" is heavily represented on "D.J.s"

And they do it all with ease. This is what I would want to be able to do if I ever started a band: Be incredibly knowledgable about a wide range of music and be able to incorporate it all into the music that my band made.

Sure, Sublime made catchier songs/albums, but, for me, it never gets better than their first album when they were just hopping from sound to sound to sound and having a great time.

I'm going to try to cover as much of the range of sounds that are on this album with the video and featured tracks, so here we go.

I actually had found another sample video for this album like the one I had for Paul's Boutique, but, in my opinion, it wasn't as strong or comprehensive, so I nixed it. 

Sublime - Don't Push

Sublime - New Thrash

Sublime - KRS-One

You can buy 40 oz. to Freedom at Amazon, Amazon MP3, and iTunes

I Posted More When I Didn't Have a Hard Drive...

...But I'm going to make an effort to correct that. I think one of the problems is that I feel like I have to get a post out in the same sitting as I start it. And if I want to include music (which I always do!), that can seem a little daunting. But I'm going to try to realize that it's not like that. It's like writing a paper for school (only more fun!): you have to write drafts. Take it slow (I never used this concept in school, either.)

OK, so, first order of business. Remember the brackets? The battle of the bands? Well, I'm going to Sally Forth on that. We have some Round 1b business to take care of. Thanks to a certain Ms. Wells, I am lacking a vote in the NOFX vs Strung Out match-up. So, the first person to vote for one of them in the comment section of this post, regardless of if you've already voted in this round, will be the deciding vote!

Now: Round 1c!!!! (exclamation points make things more exciting.....!!!!)

1. Red Hot Chili Peppers vs. Sublime

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Readymade from Stadium Arcadium
Sublime - Seed from Sublime

2. Outkast vs. Ben Folds Five

Outkast - Morris Brown from Idlewild
Ben Folds Five - Army from The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner

Now: Trent Reznor wants to give you 1.25 free albums!!

That's right. If you have ever had even a passing interest in Nine Inch Nails, here's your opportunity to pick up the new NIN LP "The Slip" and "Ghosts I", the first part of "Ghosts I-IV" which is a series of instrumentals composed in 10 weeks in late 2007. It's free! And worth checking out! Go here for The Slip and here for Ghosts I

Here's a song from each!

Nine Inch Nails - 1,000,000 from The Slip
Nine Inch Nails - 3 Ghosts I from Ghosts I

Ok. Despite what I said up there above, I'm going to go ahead and post this. I just get so excited with the links and the words and the public reading my stuff!! Plus, I only crossed like 2 things off my list of things to talk about, so maybe I'll come back in a couple days and cross some more off!

Have a great day!

Brackets

Ok. So NCAA Basketball March Madness is pretty much over now, but I decided I wanted to try something related to tournament brackets. The classic rock station that we occasionally listen to at work is having a battle of the bands with this tournament bracket and everything. So that's what I'd like to do too.

I'm a part of this website called Last.fm that keeps track of music that I listen to on my iPod or computer. And so, using the chart that it has for the Artists I've listened to most, I have made up a bracket of my own. It's really neat, but I don't think you get to see it yet. First, I'm going to gauge the interest in this endeavour with something of a pre-tournament set of match-ups. There are some positions on the bracket that are ties (basically, I've listened to two or more artists the same number of times) and so we're going to pick who gets those positions right now.


RULES FOR SAMPLE SONGS (Pre-tournament and Round 1):

For the first two contests, I will be posting songs from the contestants' most recent LP (not including greatest hits, live, or B-sides collections) that I own. Round 2 will have a different set of rules.


Oh, and the winner of the whole thing will have an entire post devoted to them including a playlist created by yours truly that you can download and burn to a CD in memory of the time we've spent together! Awww.

OK. So here are the pre-tournament match-ups and their sample songs:

1. Fall Out Boy vs. Sufjan Stevens
Fall Out Boy - You're Crashing, But You're No Wave from Infinity on High
Sufjan Stevens - Decatur, or, Round of Applause For Your Stepmother! from Come On Feel the Illinoise

2. Outkast vs. Blink-182
Outkast - Idlewild Blue (Don't Chu Worry 'Bout Me) from Idlewild
Blink-182 - Easy Target from Blink-182

3. Coheed and Cambria vs. Catch-22 vs. Taking Back Sunday
Coheed and Cambria - Feathers from Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV: Volume 2: No World For Tomorrow
Catch-22 - So Cold from Dinosaur Sounds
Taking Back Sunday - My Blue Heaven from Louder Now

4. Jack Johnson vs. Sublime
Jack Johnson - Sleep Through the Static from Sleep Through the Static
Sublime - Jailhouse from Sublime

5. Alanis Morissette vs. MxPx
Alanis Morissette - Everything from So-Called Chaos
MxPx - Well Adjusted from Before Everything and After

6. Ben Folds vs. The Get Up Kids vs. Foo Fighters (Now, that's Ben Folds (solo) not Ben Folds Five)
Ben Folds - You to Thank from Songs For Silverman
The Get Up Kids - Martyr Me from Guilt Show
Foo Fighters - Let It Die from Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace

7. Descendents vs. Linkin Park vs. No Use For a Name
Descendents - I Won't Let Me from Everything Sucks
Linkin Park - Given Up from Minutes to Midnight
No Use For a Name - Bullets from Keep Them Confused


So, take a listen if you don't know the artist, leave a comment with your votes and I guess the voting will close at like 11 pm EST on Monday. Thanks in advance for participating!