Friday, December 5, 2008

Best Songs (that aren't on a Best Album) of '08 - In No Particular Order

... and so it begins... the lists have been coming in, which is excellent, but I thought I might push things back a little bit so that we have maximum participation. So far, I've got about a fifteen lists or so, but I'm hoping to bump that number up a little bit...

At any rate, maybe we'll push the deadline back a week until next Friday and see whether that helps at all... and again I'll stress that all you need to do is write down 5 things... anything at all... don't feel like you need to include any type of explanation...




1. "Chasing Ghosts" from The Day Before EP by Snob Scrilla (Sydney, Australia)
The song: A fast paced rap song with a female backing vocal... I don't know why I even try and explain the songs...

The album and why its not on "the list": I haven't heard the EP, but I'm pretty sure I'd get sick of this in about... okay, I'm sick of it, next song.


2. "Beautiful Girls (Sean Kingston Cover)" by Deer Tick (Brooklyn, NY)


The Song: A cover of the dance track by an indie rock/pop band. The lead singer has kind of a scratchy voice - which I like - that kind of reminds me of Nils from the RAA... (Rob ponders whether his next cover project [now that Maya has agreed to do 'Valarie'] will be to try and convince Nils to do a cover of the Deer Tick cover of 'Beautiful Girls')

The album and why its not on "the list": N/A - I'm pretty sure its not on an album.


3. "Hiroshima (B-b-benny hit his head)" from -An Album I'd rather not mention - by Ben Folds
The Song: A great energetic intro song that is kind of reminiscent of the Ben Folds Live era Ben Folds. In other words, the song is an upbeat piano driven song that tells a (relatively) interesting story.

The album and why its not on "the list": because its terrible. Just god awful. I wrote about it a little while ago. And, you know what, I think I like it less and less... god, I'm getting angry just thinking about it... moving on...


4. "27 Jennifers" or "Put it Down (below)" from Golden Delicious by Mike Doughty (Brooklyn, NY)


The Songs: Singer-songwriter stuff that gets eaten up by college kids everywhere. In the live performances that I've seen (on video) he does this really cool vocal thing that is probably the singer-songwriter equivalent of scatting (the singing thing, not dropping a deuce). The live stuff is really cool and well worth checking out.

The album and why its not on "the list": because its really, really, really, overproduced. Like John Mayer overproduced.


5. "Caught on Video" from Happymatic by the Hilotrons (Ottawa, On)
The song: kind of a bloopy and bleepy pop song, with a really catchy hook.

The album and why its not on "the list": I haven't heard it, but the other other songs I've got are a still bloopy and bleepy, but without the hook and catchy melody.... and, that's about as descriptive as its going to get.

2 comments:

Allan said...

I can send you Happymatic if you like.

ack said...

If you like the stripped down Doughty.. you really out to find yourself a copy of Skittish. It's just him and his guitar, it's amazing and it's got a fantastic cover of Real Love.