rolling with the years

Pal Ken unearthed a pretty interesting musical meme, and because I have never been one to shy away from a quick and dirty source of content, I've decided to use it as the basis of today's post.

So here it is, an annotated list of the songs that topped the Billboard Hot 100 charts on every March 13 since I emerged from the womb on that date in 1972. It's a countdown to the End Times which offers clear proof that "popular" does not necessarily equal "good."

1972 - "Without You" by Nilsson - And thus I entered this world bloody, screaming, and to the tune of calcium-leeching soft rock.

1973 - "Killing Me Softly with His Song" by Roberta Flack - Even soul was affected by the power of the 1970's.

1974 - "Seasons in the Sun" by Terry Jacks - Is it any wonder I took to punk rock as strongly as I did?

1975 - "Have You Never Been Mellow" by Olivia Newton-John - The de facto anthem for the Me Decade.

1976 - "December 1963 (Oh, What a Night)" by The Four Seasons - Attempting to escape the malaise via fuzzy nostalgia.

1977 - "Evergreen (Love Theme from A Star Is Born)" by Barbra Streisand - Fuck you, record buying public of 1977.

1978 - "(Love Is) Thicker Than Water" by Andy Gibb - And the effects of cocaine abuse are stronger than cardiac muscle.

1979 - "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor - Saturday Night Götterdämmerung!

1980 - "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" by Queen - I can handle a little Mercury every now and again.

1981 - "I Love a Rainy Night" by Eddie Rabbit - "When the stars were right, They could plunge from the C&W chart to the Hot 100; but when the stars were wrong, They would remain in their own genre subdomain. But although They were no longer on Top 40 radio, They would never really pass from public consciousness..." - The Call of Cnt'ry'mu'zk

1982 - "Centerfold" by the J. Geils Band - I've already discussed the personal significance of this song here.

1983 - "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson - It was a given that this musical journey was going to pass through Neverland at some point.

1984 - "Jump" by Van Halen - What fuck is a "record machine," anyhow? Apart from being a way to dodge coming up with a rhyme for "jukebox," that is.

1985 - "Can't Fight This Feeling" by REO Speedwagon - Forget all the talk about Minor Threat and 7 Seconds, this here is the real font from which emo music sprung.

1986 - "Kyrie" by Mr. Mister - No, no.

1987 - "Livin' on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi - I preferred the Swinging Erudites' version, "Livin' on My Hair."

1988 - "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley - Happy Sweet 16, Andrew! We chipped in and got you a rickroll!

1989 - "Lost in Your Eyes" by Debbie Gibson - That's Deborah Gibson now, thank you very much.

1990 - "Escapade" by Janet Jackson - Six of one...

1991 - "Someday" by Mariah Carey - ...and a half dozen of the other.

1992 - "To Be with You" by Mr. Big - Music to peak in high school by.

1993 - "Informer" by Snow - Truly the Falco of his times.

1994 - "The Sign" by Ace of Base - ABBA 2.0

1995 - "Take a Bow" by Madonna - ...and exit the stage, please, before things get any more embarrassing.

1996 - "One Sweet Day" by Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men - Honoring the late Steve (Def Leppard) Clark and the late David (C+C Music Factory) Cole in the most insipid manner imaginable.

1997 - "Wannabe" by the Spice Girls - "What I really really want is to host bumpers for the Soap Opera Channel."

1998 - "My Heart Will Go On" by Céline Dion - Never underestimate the purchasing power of teenage girls.

1999 - "Believe" by Cher - The auto-tune effect that launched a thousand shitty Eurodance tracks.

2000 - "Amazed" by Lonestar - Country-fried cheese.

2001 - "Stutter" by Joe featuring Mystikal - If 6 was 9 was a forgettable R&B hit.

2002 - "Ain't It Funny" by Jennifer Lopez featuring Ja Rule - No, not particularly.

2003 - "In Da Club" by 50 Cent - Ugh.

2004 - "Yeah!" by Usher featuring Lil Jon and Ludacris - ...and Bella Abzug and Helmut Kohl and Madame Curie and Jim J. Bullock and that one dude at the gas station with the lazy eye.

2005 - "Candy Shop" by 50 Cent featuring Olivia - Ugh³.

2006 - "You're Beautiful" by James Blunt - Flattery will get you nowhere, James. My affections are not for sale to some next-gen James Taylor who yodels the word "beautiful" like he's just been kicked in the nads.

2007 - "This Is Why I'm Hot" by Mims - "I can sell a mill sell you nothing on the track." How refreshingly honest.

2008 - "Low" by Flo Rida featuring T-Pain - Honestly, this stuff exists solely for the purpose of being licensed into tinny-sounding ringtones, right?

When I embarked on this project, I had hoped that there would be at least a couple tracks in the list that even I wouldn't feel embarrassed posting. As it turned out, there was "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and not much else. (You may beg to differ, but mine is the hand that rests on the tiller.) So Queen it is then, along with an excellent acoustic cover of 1984's featured slice of pop rock bombast...

Queen - Crazy Little Thing Called Love (from The Game, 1980) - The greatest thing composed in a bathtub since Marat's Éloge de Montesquieu.

Aztec Camera - Jump (from a 1984 b-side; collected on The Best of Aztec Camera, 1999) - Maura once suggested that there was some kind of Dorian Gray relationship between Aztec Camera frontman Roddy Frame and Echo & The Bunnymen's Ian McCulloch, where McCulloch staved off the ravages of time by passing them on to Frame. If that was the case, the spell has apparently been reversed, as Roddy has been looking rather spry as of late, while poor Ian appears to be in the advanced stages of mummification.

waiting for the flash

Look at that sunavabitch go! Doesn't it just give you a tingly sensation all over, especially in the thyroid and reproductive organs? Since today happens to be the 63rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, I though it only proper to genuflect a little upon the event and its enduring legacy.

It was the ultimate product of the American "can do" spirit, the fireworks display that kicked off the beginning of the American Century (give or take a half-dozen decades). It showed the world that we had not only developed the means to end human civilization, but were also willing to use it if meant saving "a million lives" (or is that a billion now? Retroactive justifications are not immune to inflationary forces) or intimidating our uncomfortable Soviet allies with a display of overwhelming force upon a civilian target.


That last part worked so well that Joe Stalin's bunch of merry Bolsheviks wasted no time in acquiring some transuranic party poppers of their own, which wagered the future of the human race on a staring contest to end all staring contests. Fun times, indeed, especially for a kid whose global awareness was coming into sharp focus just as Ronnie Reagan decided to escalate the stakes in the name of God, country, and sweetheart defense contracts.

Flipping through issues of Discover and coming across absurdly cheery infographics about the science of the neutron bomb. Sneaking a peek at some of my father's National Guard manuals dealing with post-event assessment and body disposal. Lying awake at night, staring at the ceiling and wondering if I'd be one of the dead or one of the living who envied them. (Knowing what I know now about the target-rich environment of Boston's suburban ring and the power-over-accuracy doctrine of Soviet warhead design, it's clear I'd have been in the dead category, as anything inside I-495 would have become part of Boston Harbor after a full-on nuclear exchange.)

At least it all worked out in the end, right? America won the Cold War, or so I'm told. (How did you spend your promised peace dividend?) History ended, and we now live in a peaceful neo-liberal hegemony overseen by the bestest nation ever. The specter of radioactive annihilation is a thing of the past, a completely justified phase that we've put entirely behind us.

Strongarm sales of ABM equipment designed to provoke the Russians? Official efforts to make the use of tactical nuclear weapons acceptable to the American public? The same conglomerates which are responsible for spiking energy costs attempting to exploit the situation in order to build more nuclear power plants? You must be thinking of some dark alternate universe, friend.


Synch up your Doomsday Clocks, cats and kittens! We're packing a musical MIRV primed and ready to deliver megatons of melodic enjoyment, and you're standing at ground zero! The party doesn't stop until the last payload drops.

Crass - They've Got a Bomb (from The Feeding of the 5000, 1978) - When you've got a massive stockpile of hammers, everything looks like a nail.

Dr. Strangelove & The Fallouts - Love That Bomb (from a 1964 single; collected on Atomic Platters, 2005) - This peppy little track (most likely a Laurie Johnson effort) was released to promote Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece of apocalyptic comedy. Go-go until you're gone-gone.

The Cure - A Strange Day (from Pornography, 1982) - A languid waltz to the shores of the abyss. The view from the edge is fantastic, I'm told.

The Epoxies - We're So Small (from The Epoxies, 2002) - Adieu, my fair synthpunkers! While I'm saddened to see you go, you've left a fine legacy of two outstanding albums, a handful of great b-sides and compilation cuts, and a not-so-good final EP.

Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup - I'm Gonna Dig Myself a Hole (from Gonna Be Some Changes: 1946-54, 2008) - A master bluesman goes underground, twenty-nine years before Paul Weller got the same idea.

hungry so angry

Yesterday a friend asked me "Why'd you pick 'Armagideon Time' for your blog's name?" When I decided to create whatever-the-heck-this-site-is back in the spring of 2006, there was a short list of potential names I considered using. All but one, "The Land of Clear Blue Radio" (after The Soviettes' song), were Clash-related, in honor of the high regard in which I hold for the "only band that mattered."

"Capitol Radio One," "Gates of the West," "The Right Profile" were all worthy contenders, but none felt or sounded as perfect as "Armagideon Time." Apart from being the title of an outstanding track (whether one is referring to the Willie Williams or Clash version), it also dovetailed nicely with my own personal infatuation with things apocalyptic and foreboding. It's not a religious thing with me, but a legacy of childhood anxieties that I have carried with me into adulthood.

From the depressing extrapolations of 1970's sci-fi to the nuclear dread of the Reagan Era, my formative years were spend bathing in a popcultural spring of visions of the End Times, presented as an inevitable occurrence though the actual vector of Armageddon (nuclear war, ecological collapse, revolt by intelligent apes) varied from source to source. There is something I find fascinating in apocalyptic flights of fancy -- they way they speak to the collective anxieties of an given era/culture as well as the vicarious thrill of watching the human species choke on its own excessive folly or come up short against uncaring entropy.

If there's a sincere cautionary message, it's usually so overdressed in sensationalism or hyperbole that it devolves into unintentional parody, a trite moral to justify the big draw of the spectacle itself. Or else it merely emphasizes a small-but-dramatic part of the big picture over the little details, the ones with real-life significance.

I recently came away from a trip to the local comics and used book store with a plastic grocery bag full of old paperback sci-fi and horror novels. My haul, which set me back all of twelve dollars, was evenly split between works of relative quality by the likes of Huxley and Spinrad and number of volumes of "catastrophe porn." I use the term "porn" rather loosely (though not inaccurately, as we shall see) to differentiate these dubiously prophetic potboilers from the blanket term of "disaster fiction" coined and thoughfully analyzed by Mike Davis in The Ecology of Fear.

Unlike Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things or Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the apocalyptic elements in catastrophe porn are not integrated backdrops for an actual narrative, but in fact supercede whatever thin narrative might exist. Characterization and plot serve as skeletal frameworks from which to hang the series of sensational vignettes which are the real selling point of such works. It's not about whether or not Chuck Heston will reconcile with Eva Gardner -- it's about watching L.A. collapse into rubble and anarchy.

Here's a excerpt from the back cover of the 1981 Ace Charter edition of Graham Masterton's Famine, an excellent example of the subgenre which also happeded to be the first of the stack I pulled out to read:


Hilarious, offensive, and informative!

There is something of a plot in Famine. A big city actuary turned Kansas farmer and his Manhattan-loving wife find their existence turned upside down by a multi-pronged assault on America's food supply. While corrupt and/or politicians attempt to exploit or acknowledge the situation, the country falls into a state of complete anarchy. The mystery of who caused the crisis doesn't so much unfold as pop out like a built-in turkey thermometer. (Is it the Soviets? Who could it be but the Soviets? Maybe it isn't the Soviets? But who, if not the Soviets? Yep, it's the Soviets. Oh, well.)

Really, though, it's a lot of wheel-spinning in anticipation of the juicy parts, little lurid nuggets describing all manner of horrors unleashed by the disaster.

In Muskogee, Oklahoma, twenty men and one woman tried to break into a supermarket and steal boxes of canned meat, vegetables, and fruit. They were almost through loading when they were surprised by a National Guard patrol who machine-gunned all of them with warning. Their bodies were littered across the parking lot, and a reporter for the Herald-Bulletin of Tulsa said, "There was so much blood it was gurgling down the storm drains like crimson bathwater."

It's a veritable pagent of graphically-described murders, looting, riots, and a disturbing amount of rape, including one scene that surpasses anything from American Psycho for sheer "what the fuck is wrong with this author?" vileness). Ample lashings of sex and ultra-violence are the order of the day, resulting in something akin to a non-racist* version of Camp of the Saints or The Turner Diaries, apolitical save for the pithy observation that the American people overconsume, are overentitled, and are prone to violence.

Gee, I never noticed.

Masterton writes in a style reminiscent of James Herbert's, which is essentially a stripped down version of Stephen King's style with the sensationalism cranked to the highest setting. It certainly fits the level of the material, though lines such as this one...

"You've been growing wheat for nearly forty years, and all I've been doing is sitting on my butt in a stuffy New York office, telling little old ladies how to salt away their surplus dollars for a rainy day."

...and not recall the painful days of one's freshman creative writing class.

Famine is utter crap, but utter crap that greasily fulfills its purpose as a disposable, sleazy read which capitalizes on the fears of privation felt by a society that had recently experienced several shortages of essential goods. Yeah, I know, it seems so quaint and silly from a present-day perspective.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to take out a second mortgage so I can gas up the car and buy a loaf of bread.

Willie Williams - Armagideon Time (from Armagideon Time, 1979) - Back to the roots.

Eddie Albert & Eva Gabor - Theme from Green Acres (from Television's Greatest Hits, Vol. 1, 1990) - Ever want to see an episode of Green Acres where Oliver was seduced by a busty double agent working to cultivate a corrupt senator as the puppet leader of a future Soviet-occupied and famine-ravaged America? If so, then I have book suggestion for you.

*The book does mention that black looters were more violent than white ones in the initial wave of food riots, but by the end everyone has sunk to the same level of lawless behavior, though white L.A. residents are singled out as being especially monstrous. It's not hard to deduce the book's target audience.

so many mothers sighing

The Apotheosis of War (1871) by Vasily Vereshchagin
Has it really been five years? Why it seems like only yesterday that the Powers-That-Be were promising to shock and awe their way to victory in Iraq, and that the road to Baghdad would be sprinkled with rose petals and lined with cheering throngs of the newly-liberated grateful.

It was supposed to be an easy and clean war, sanitized and vetted for all-ages consumption. Go in, collect a full suit of psuedo-comically nicknamed war criminals, secure Saddam's stash of death rays and other imaginary superweapons, change the nameplates on the government buildings, and convince the newly installed puppet democratic government to sign over the country's petroleum rights to western interests. After that, it would just be a matter of setting up a few permanent military bases before moving onto to the next chosen recipient of American largess from the barrel of a gun. The costs of rebuilding and occupation were to be paid with the gusher of petroleum revenues anticipated to flow once Iraq had been set on its neoconservatively correct course.

Five years, a half a trillion (a low-ball figure) dollars, and an immeasurable amount of human misery later, American forces are involved in an ugly guerrilla war with no end in sight, with the metrics of progress calibrated to resolve issues that we were assured would not arise. Even the vaunted "surge," with its widely trumpeted "success," is merely a bit of strategic sleight-of-hand to placate dissent on the homefront while failing to accomplish anything of lasting import, and amounts to nothing more than deploying a large bucket brigade to bail out a flooded neighborhood while ignoring the breaches in the levee.

The Iraq War has been such a colossal and unforgivable waste in so many ways, and I can't shake the feeling that future historians will point to the Bush cabal's misadventure in arrogance as the point of America's irreversible decline as a superpower -- a mad fling on borrowed money undertaken without regard for how many lives are wrecked, friendships damaged, and property ruined in the process.

I'd like to hope that the upcoming presidential elections will change things, but unless the Democrats take immediate steps to staunch their self-inflicted internal hemorrhaging, all signs point to a victory in November for John McCain, a man who, despite his (undeserved) reputation as a straight-shootin' maverick, combines the political ethics of Ulysses S. Grant and the geo-political subtlety of Douglas MacArthur.

David Bowie - Five Years (from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, 1972) - I suspect the coming apocalypse will be less literal and more existential in nature -- an endless cycle of degradation, humiliation, and petty cruelties committed simply because there will be nothing else left to do.

don't need to be a groundhog to know which way the wind blows

I popped my head of out my carefully-constructed bunker yesterday to try and forecast what's in store for us in the time that's coming. I saw nothing but shadows, long, dark, and ominous. All the roads lead to a single destination...

We have now crossed over into the Armagideon Time Zone...

Time Zone - World Destruction (from a 1984 single) - As Afrika Bambaataa and John Lydon have prophecied, so shall it come to pass. At least, that's what those who are in power or who are aspiring to claim that power this November are hell bent in making manifest. Despite the differences in packaging, it's all the same product...and it carries the bitter taste of ashes.

visual synergy: heavy concepts

I remember riding my bike down Forest Park Road in the spring of 1985, and finding a massive bundle of issues of Circus and Hit Parader put out with someone’s trash. It seemed like a fantastic score, until I had lugged the stack home and began to actually read the magazines. The band profiles, reviews, and whatnot seemed so utterly calculated, even to my thirteen year old self, to exploit the frustrations and yearnings of blue collar teenage boys. Dee’s dad wanted him to attend the voc-tech to earn a plumbing apprenticeship – but Dee wanted TO ROCK!

Confronted with the Tiger Beat-dressed-in-studded-wristband reality, my rockitude went into dormancy for almost half a decade, until it was briefly resuscitated by thrash metal’s promise of being the real, dangerous deal. Alas, it was a promise better fulfilled by punk rock, which, despite its own set of intrinsic paradoxes, placed a greater emphasis on outrage and sentiment than on the hollow artistic wizardry of the power ballad or the eight minute guitar solo. Metal’s confusion between technical proficiency and musical greatness is not far removed from the pop music notion that a great singer is someone who can hold a note through an entire Minnesota winter. The American Idol concept of greatness holds no place for Tom Waits.

My rocky relationship with the genre aside, I have a certain fascination with heavy metal culture, in so far as it clearly articulates a particular and common enough strain of adolescent maleness. The key word here is “adolescent.” In recent years, there has been a trend among critics, comedians, and other evangelists of the popcult zeitgeist towards redeeming and ennobling the concept of RAWK and metal, either as a facile camp touchstone or in a celebratory, unironic sense.

The former are easily enough understood, as there is no retro artifact so unassuming that it cannot be dusted off, polished, and sold at a premium to the self-consciously hip. The latter, however, apart from a handful of old fans who didn’t stop believing (Whoa-oh-oh!), seem to be of the arrested development school of contemporary masculinity where “manhood” is a chimera formed from equal parts teenager, frat boy, and film/game/music geek. Is that hypocritical, coming from a man creeping towards age forty who dwells in a state of retrological limbo? Maybe, but as I’ve said whenever friends bring up the notion of “wanting to go back,” if the passing of years has done nothing else for me, it has given me a sense of perspective and cleared any illusions that personal tastes equal inherent quality. There is a world of difference between deciding what to hold on to, and refusing to let go.

Wow, that was a long introduction to a lazy music video post, but sometimes one must follow where one’s muse leads them. Continuing the last week’s Apocalypse Rock theme, here are some pinnacles of the music video art form, heavy metal concept video subcategory, post-apocalypse silliness subset:


Krokus - Screaming in the Night - "Krokus," because Iris, Delphinium, and Portulaca were already taken.


Queensryche - Queen of the Reich - I think this sums up my assertions about the genre and its target demographic pretty well. Listen close you can hear the rolling of polyhedral dice and the crack of the Rifts manual's spine in the background.


Grim Reaper - Fear No Evil - While the song lacks the magnificent bombast and oh-so-quotable title line of the band's earlier "See You in Hell," the video more than makes up for it.

Honestly, though, if I want to watch art-directed, fyoo-cha-riss-tik music video excess, I'd go with this simultaneously ahead of its time and hoplessly dated gem:


Sigue Sigue Sputnik - Love Missile F1-11 - A testament to the power of one good gimmick, mesh fabric, and super-hold hairspray.

Sigue Sigue Sputnik - Love Missile F1-11 (from Flaunt It!, 1986) - Maura hates it. I love it. What more do you need to know?

visual synergy: accidents will happen

Hamm: All is…all is…all is what? (Violently.) All is what?

Clov: What all is? In a word? Is that what you want to know? Just a moment. (He turns the telescope on the without, looks, lowers the telescope, turns towards Hamm.) Corpsed. (Pause.) Well, content?

- Samuel Beckett, Endgame

Here's to a childhood spent in the clutches of apocalyptic dread and 80's pop music...


Nena - 99 Luftballons (English Version) - Andrew's Dating Do's and Dont's:

Do: find an activity that both you and your date enjoy
Don't: accidentally cause a nuclear war


Fishbone - Party at Ground Zero - Bunker parties are always chancy affairs. No matter how ausipicous a note they begin upon, the festivities will inevitably brought down by cyanide, self-inflicted gunshot wounds, or the spectre of radioactive death showing up unannounced.


Men at Work - It's a Mistake - What is this term "mistake?" Some sort of archaic nonsense word like "responsibility," "accountability," or "contrition?"


Ultravox - Dancing with Tears in My Eyes - Nuclear power doesn't kill people. Lethal doses of ionizing radiation let loose by mechanical or human error kill people. So have a bit of faith, people. Why shouldn't the same utility industries who can't resolve a simple billing inquiry be allowed to tamper with the fundamental forces of nature?

Supernova (well, one of the many acts using that name) recorded a techno/dance cover of this song a few years ago. I considered using it as the token music track for today's installment of "visual synergy," but why settle for a saccharine imitation?

Ultravox - Dancing with Tears in My Eyes (from The Collection, 1984)

The G.R.O.D.D. Initiative: Day 3 – but you’re so damned ugly

See that man in the picture on the right? That’s George Taylor (aka “Bright Eyes”), a representative of the human military-industrial-aerospace complex, and the embodiment of everything a decent simianocentric sentient abhors. Like a human serpent in ape Eden, Taylor’s arrival on the Planet of the Apes marked the end of its inhabitants’ previously carefree lifestyle…and of the planet itself.

Like many of his kind, Taylor could not accept that the world had changed, and the position of privilege he was used to holding was his no more. His response was to initiate a campaign of anti-ape aggression with horrible repercussions. Even the kind but misguided chimp couple who sought to help Taylor acclimate to life among the apes was not spared from the blowback caused by his actions, which allowed the less savory elements of monkey society to seize power under the pretext of “fighting humanist terrorism.”

Reports that Taylor’s anti-ape prejudices had begun to mellow (symbolized by a poignant interspecies kiss between Taylor and chimp scientist Zira) appear to have been premature. Taylor was last seen triggering a planet-wrecking doomsday device, a final act of spite all too typical of his brutish species.

UNKLE – Ape Shall Never Kill Ape (Original Mix) (from a 1998 single) – It’s open season on lemurs and Aye-ayes, though, the sneaky little bastards.

Adam and The Ants – Picasso Visita El Planeta De Los Simios (from Prince Charming, 1981) – Yes, that translates to “Picasso Visits the Planet of the Apes.” This wouldn’t be Adam’s only foray into simian-themed pop. A few years back he got it in his head to rework “Stand and Deliver” into the conservation benefit track “Save the Gorillas.”

I wish I was making that up. Here’s the video, for those brave (or crazy) enough to watch it:

Why, Adam, why?

in theatres today

This ain’t no Chatty Cathy art film, folks. AT:TM is an overbudgeted cinematic juggernaut jampacked with gratuitously implausible CGI effects and plot holes wide enough to accommodate a fleet of tricked out Hummers.

This film has it all:

Action!

Naz Nomad and The Nightmares – Action Woman (from Give Daddy the Knife, Cindy, 1984) – This is The Damned, posing as a forgotten sixties garage rock act for a one off album of period cover songs. The Litter, a Minneapolis garage band, first recorded this track in 1967, and Vanian, Scabies and company manage to pull off their own authentic sounding version that doesn’t simply clone the original.

Danger!

Rough Cut – Danger Boy (from a 1981 single) – Pretty good femvox punk out of Detroit. Have I mentioned that I'm a pushover for this kind of stuff?

Excitement!

Le Tigre – I’m So Excited (from This Island, 2004) – I’d lump This Island in with Fischerspooner’s Odyssey as examples of how certain bands can be too slickly produced for their own good. Both albums are entirely listenable and even enjoyable to a certain degree, but the sparks of genius that originally drew me to the acts’ earlier works have been blanched out in the mix. The end results are agreeable but fairly generic. This excellent Pointer Sisters’ cover was a welcome exception.

A killer movie deserves a killer theme song, and nothing beats “Bravely Folk Song,” the Cervantes Stage BGM from the 1996 fighting game, Soul Edge (Soul Blade in the States). This track, from Namco Sound Team’s Super Battle Attack Soul Edge, would be my choice of anthem should my dreams of world domination ever come to fruition. (This would be after my global purge of any and all snarky fanboys bold enough to point out where I lifted the theme from. Absolute power has its rewards.)

Edit: I almost forgot -- every blockbuster flick needs plenty of explosions....

Halloween Countdown: October 12 – I will eat your soul

Some good old-fashioned nightmare fuel today, in the form of Aphex Twin’s harrowing “Come To Daddy”. This track is relentless in its simplicity. No context or clarification is given for what one hears. There are no handles for the listener to grab onto and rationalize the proceedings, just a repeated two line verse and the sinister beckoning of the chorus, buried behind a wash of feedback and distortion.

Every night is game night for the post-nuclear family. Is that roast pork I smell?

Aphex Twin – Come to Daddy (Pappy Mix) (from the Come to Daddy EP, 1997) - My wife gave me this CD as a Christmas present. We are truly soulmates.

Hungry for more? Here’s Chris Cunningham’s warm and fuzzy video for the song: