The Signal Music Weblog

The Signal: EP070 - A better way to spend your time than fighting giant octopi. If only slightly.

The mix is up for a limited time. Track list is in the id3 tags. Notes are below. So there's that.

Follow up:

1. A few ambient sounds and an opening cue from one of my favorite movies.

2. I got a few songs for this mix from an amazing multi-blog collaboration post that featured bands from around the world, this band from Iceland among them.

3. Same with this band from Scotland. I'm finding I'm quite fond of Scottish rock singers who don't mask their accents when they sing. And I love that the timing slides all over the place in this song. It's very organic and I have no idea how they all slide together through the shifts. This would be a terror on Rock Band.

4. The whole album by these folks is amazing. I do wish their production allowed them a deeper sound, as I feel like they could have gotten louder. Maybe that's not their style.

5. Reeeeee-mix! Ha! I don't have anything to say about this track, save that I'm aware that it should bore me, but it doesn't.

6. Holy catchy!

7. When the eeee-EEE-eee and the hand claps kick in, I get an instant mental picture of a crew cut kid from the 1950s furiously pedaling on a bike that's a bit too big for him. Don't know why.

8. Not the author, in case you were wondering. Harp player.

9. Turkish psychedelic rock. World needs more of this. I read this dude got stabbed once because he had long hair. Me? I would have gotten a hair cut.

10. Saw this band on NPR's Little Desk concerts and the female singer shows such joy when she sings that it's almost hard to watch. It seems like it should be a private moment. Look it up if you can.

...

Don't really have any notes for the rest of the mix.

No great themes or links this time out, just one song I like after another. Maybe that's enough?

Yesterday my brain played a cruel trick on my wannabe hipster self-image. Was looping a song mentally while I worked all morning and then, while making myself tea, realized it was a Coldplay song. Just had this immediate recoil--- UGH! Colplay!-- and then laughed at how stupid it was to suddenly dislike the song when I had been happily thinking about it for hours when I realized who it was.

Life's too short not to get over yourself. Music is one of the few things in this life that help me think that it is worth it to exist even in the face of eventual non-existence and the terror associated with that. So hooray for Coldplay and hooray for us, alive and clinging to a ball as it hurtles through an unfriendly void!

Seriously, take care of yourselves. Wear sunscreen. Hats. Don't talk shit to people you don't know.

Ha!