Shufflin Along 03

Taking a break from Joshi Wrestling footage from the 80s to do another one of these while I am supposed to be working.

NIGHTCALL by KAVINSKY

Okay, so I liked Drive as much as the next person. It feels like one of those movies like Batman Forever that will forever be associated with its soundtrack. I get a sense of menace in the song that I didn't pick up on at first. "I'm gonna tell you something you don't want to hear / I'm gonna show you where it's dark, but have no fear" sounds awfully threatening when issued through a monotone robot voice. Couple that with the female counter-vocal in the chorus and the whole song is a cool little microcosm of the relationship at the heart of Drive. That's a neat trick for a film soundtrack, and I appreciate it. We could have gotten something like The Black Keys doing a song called "Scorpion Jacket" so let's just count our blessings here.

YAMA TRANSFORMS TO AFTERLIFE by GRAVE MIASMA

Metal subgenres are completely out of control, so I'm not entirely sure what to label this. Blackened Death Metal, maybe? Anyway, there's been this trend over the past few decades to take a world religions 101 approach to your blast beats and screaming. So intead of endless songs about Satan and/or Odin, we get songs about Kali, Yama, and the occasional Yokai. I appreciate that even if I suspect that the entire exercise feels a bit cynical. I don't know. I enjoy it for what it is. Sometimes you get metal performed by legitimately scary people and sometimes you get metal performed by dudes with undergad degrees who go to a lot of Ren fests. I like them both, but I think it's important to remember how to tell the difference. If you're going to be stupid and frightening, lean into it. If you're doing art school metal, lean way into that as well. Get esoteric with that shit. This song and this band are JUST ok enough for me to keep them on my liked songs, but I'm not sure how much longer that's going to last. This is an inherently ridiculous genre of music. You really need to be legimtely dangerous or deeply creative and weird for me to get into it, and this song doesn't strike me as either of those things. I do get the sense that they probably have some songs somewhere that I could get into. More research may be needed.

MISERY IS THE RIVER OF THE WORLD by TOM WAITS

I love Tom Waits with all my heart and soul. This is off the album Blood Money, which I beleive was written to be part of a musical or something. You can really tell since this track begs to be sung along to. I always thought of this track as something you'd hear the donkey-children on Pleasure Island sing in Pinnochio if you gave them instruments and time. I sing this song all the time in my best Tom Waits / Cookie Monster voice, which is probably part of why people in my office regularly side-eye me.

GODDAMN LONELY LOVE by DRIVE BY TRUCKERS

Back in 2004-2005 I was living a pretty rough, mean, and pathetic sort of existence. I had a lot of bad habits, including heavy substance abuse and listening to lots of Alt-Country. I was freshly divorced, basically homeless, and thoroughly lost. I went on a fast sprial from gifted kid with a future to a factory worker with no friends. I refer to this time as "The Cold Times" in my head, because my truck didn't have heat and sometimes I wound up sleeping in the backseat and shivering under an old Mickey Mouse blanket when I wasn't crashing on my mom's floor or a friend's couch. My affection for this song comes from those days. I played this CD alot, particularly the last two tracks. I have a lot of memories of singing along to this song at the top of my lungs while peering through a little hole in the frost on my windshield and barreling down the highway at 2:00am on my way to do something ill advised. I don't have any more use for Drive By Truckers these days than I do for eating Xanax out of the trash, but sometimes you hold on to things. This song and "Lookout Mountain" are two things I held on to.