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JPS

a sporadic presence

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web discoveries

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Audio

  • Jurassic 5 - Concrete Schoolyard It’s possible that for me, J5 were the last truly special band, before the internet came along and made everything ubiquitous. Remember that there was a time when you got into a band, and it felt like they were your band, and you wanted to tell everyone you knew about your band, but now by the time the first single is recorded, Diplo has already done a mash-up of the ringtone and P4K has christened and subsequently bashed the new sub-genre it spawned.
    2 plays
  • American Analog Set - Weather Report A nice song for a late-night post blizzard whiskey.
    97 plays
  • Silver Jews - Random Rules Every other line in this song could be the best line any other band has ever written: “In 1984 I was hospitalized for approaching perfection, slowly screwing my way across Europe, they had to make a correction…” “I asked the painter why the roads are colored black./ He said, “Steve, it’s because people leave and no highway will bring them back…” “So if you don’t want me I promise not to linger/ But before I go I gotta ask you dear about that tan line on your ring finger…” “I know that a lot of what I say has been lifted off of men’s room walls…” The rest of the album is just as good. Absolute classic.
    8 plays
  • Eric Matthews - Fanfare I won’t lie, this is the only Eric Matthews track that I really got into, but it still pops up in my head when I least expect… must be those trumpets.
    8 plays
  • Avail - Tuning “I think I misunderstood the magic of this town…” Back in ‘94, I spent my freshman year NYE at an Avail show and it remains one of the best New Year’s nights I can remember. The best anthemic hardcore band ever? Probably. The best emo band ever? Maybe. (Emo hadn’t been appropriated by mascara-wearing teeny-boppers and wasn’t a bad word back then.) (With apologies to Rites of Spring)
    23 plays
  • Gorilla Biscuits - Start Today Nothing like a little straight edge to nurse a hangover -
    2 plays
  • Desmond Dekker - Rudy Got Soul Great song for a rainy Thursday evening and worth posting for that album cover alone.
    130 plays
  • Luna - Crazy People Great song. This is the album that first brought me to Dean Wareham’s music, including Galaxie 500.
    7 plays
  • Magnetic Fields - All The Umbrellas in London “All the umbrellas in London couldn’t stop this rain and all the dope in New York couldn’t kill this pain…”
    27 plays
  • LL Cool J - Around The Way Girl “I had to dedicate at least one rhyme to all the cuties in the neighborhood…”
    32 plays
  • Spinanes - Noel, Jonah And Me For some time back in the mid ’90s this album was on the back cover of every zine in print. (via whitneymcn:newspeedwayboogie)
    90 plays
  • Sonic Youth - The Diamond Sea (edit) The Diamond Sea is probably Sonic Youth’s prettiest song and one of the many I’d listen to on repeat during college. (This version comes from the CD Single — sadly the full album version is too long to post on tumblr.)
    149 plays
  • Elastica - Connection Why hasn’t there been an Elastica rehash band for the late ’00s? The time seems right.
    14 plays
  • Helium - Pat’s Trick This is always the track I think of first when I remember Helium, great song.
    49 plays
  • Morphine - Cure for Pain “Someday there’ll be a cure for pain, that’s the day I throw my drugs away…”
    26 plays
  • Drive Like Jehu - If It Kills You I went to school in San Diego, what do you expect? Let it build… classic, legendary even.
    38 plays
  • Jane’s Addiction - Three Days It might be a little hard to believe now but there was a moment when this was the only band that mattered.
    16 plays
  • Modest Mouse - Polar Opposites “I’m trying to drink away the part of the day I cannot sleep away…”
    7 plays
  • OMD - Enola Gay (long version) Was surprised to hear this pop-up in Waltz with Bashir today — great movie and great song but an odd pairing, though it works in the context of the scene.
    226 plays
  • Camper Van Beethoven - Take the Skinheads Bowling “Every day, I get up and pray to Jah and he decreases the number of clocks by exactly one…”
    11 plays
  • Rancid - Detroit Matt is such an amazing player — the bass line here is so melodic you can actually hum along.
    13 plays
  • Dramarama - Anything, Anything (I’ll Give You) Like mosts songs in my early musical consciousness, this was a KROQ staple
    10 plays
  • Nas - The Message If rap is poetry, Nas is proof. Illmatic is an absolutely essential classic but It Was Written had some great tracks as well, like this one which samples Sting and still manages to diss Biggie.
    5 plays
  • Stan Getz - Four A good pace for the first day of the new year.
    6 plays
  • Bauhaus - All We Ever Wanted Was Everything The title says it all — one of my favorite song quotes. I love the way Peter Murphy utters “Factory Town” -
    6 plays
  • Love and Rockets - So Alive I wish I still had my old Love and Rockets shirt, and a bunch of other shirts from HS for that matter.
    14 plays
  • Depeche Mode - Just Can’t Get Enough Most of the DM catalog hasn’t aged too well for me, but not so with this song — definitely their most infectious.
    37 plays
  • Bob Marley & The Wailers - Simmer Down Before Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer and Bob Marley grew dreads and became legends, they were skinhead rudeboys turning out some great ska records. This was the track that started it all.
    20 plays
  • Jawbox - Static “I sunk my eyes in static…”
    11 plays
  • Pulp - Do You Remember the First Time? There are days when I can listen to Pulp on repeat non-stop.
    12 plays
  • The Charlatans (UK) - White Shirt Still the only Charlatans album you need - great from start to finish.
    11 plays
  • American Music Club - If I Had a Hammer I must have listened to this a thousand times back in college… still one of my favorite AMC songs.
    9 plays
  • Cibo Matto - Beef Jerky How can you not like an album all about food, especially as delivered by a duo of hipster Japanese girls.
    18 plays
  • Rites of Spring - Nudes Fugazi rose from the ashes of Minor Threat (as everyone knows) and Rites of Spring (which almost everyone knows). You can get all their songs on one essential compilation.
    82 plays
  • Curve - Horror Head Sometimes the toughest part about running this site is choosing just one song from a band.
    17 plays
  • Groove Theory - Tell Me Groove Theory only lasted for one album but fortunately Amel Larrieux is still turning out some great (and sorely underappreciated) solo records.
    27 plays
  • The Rolling Stones - Ruby Tuesday I enjoyed the deliciously underrated Triple Prime Burger at Ruby Tuesday today and while it would be silly to call anything by The Stones “forgotten,” this isn’t played nearly as often as their major hits and is one of their more delicate songs (and I mean that in a good way).
    34 plays
  • Suicidal Tendencies - Institutionalized “All I wanted was a Pepsi…”
    34 plays
  • Shudder to Think - X-French Tee Shirt I hated this song the first 10 times I heard it and then something clicked and I couldn’t stop listening.
    17 plays
  • The (English) Beat - Tears of a Clown (Smokey Robinson cover) Covers Friday edition: I think I wore through two copies of this record during school. There’s something about ska that causes periods of obsession and mania amongst so many.
    35 plays
  • John Coltrane - Alabama If Art Blakey introduced me to Jazz, Alabama made me fall in love. Coltrane composed this elegy in reaction to the Birmingham Church Bombing of 1963. I first heard this recording in a pop music class my freshman year of college and it proved to be more useful than my diploma.
    17 plays
  • Grant Lee Buffalo - Mockingbirds I’ve failed to fully explore Grant Lee’s other albums because I always end up reaching for Mighty Joe Moon, it’s so consistently good. With all the Ryan Adams fans on Tumblr, I assume there’s a lot of love for Grant Lee Buffalo as well.
    18 plays
  • Muffs - On and On Sorry for the hiatus, I needed a comedown from the election I guess. The first half of this album is pretty infectious… love the screams.
    13 plays
  • Yazoo - Only You Don’t Go and Situation are clearly the more popular tracks on the album, and they’re great, but this is just as good and a bit more reflective.
    20 plays
  • Girls Against Boys - Super-fire GVSB was the sort of band that was always cooler than you knew you would ever be, but you didn’t care, you liked them anyway.
    13 plays
  • Soup Dragons - Hang-Ten! They didn’t reach the peak of their popularity until much later when their sound had changed drastically, but it was this first album that was actually any good: infectious power-pop without a hint of pretense. The first three tracks are a great opening combo.
    18 plays
  • A Tribe Called Quest - Excursions “Back in the days when I was a teenager, before I had status and before I had a pager…”
    23 plays
  • Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers - Moanin’ Growing up, I always knew I should like Jazz, I knew I would like Jazz, but it wasn’t until high school when I heard this track playing at Poobah’s in L.A. that I actually started to like Jazz. I demanded the clerk sell me the store’s only copy (the one they were playing) and listened to that CD over and over for weeks. It was the perfect balance of cool, swing and technical virtuosity to hook in a neophyte, and it sounds just as good now as it did then.
    28 plays
  • Spiritualized - You Know It’s True The album title describes this track well: Lazer Guided Melodies. Grab some headphones and float away.
    32 plays
  • Aretha Franklin - Sweet Bitter Love I confess, I wasn’t introduced to Sweet Bitter Love until 1999 when Handsome Boy Modeling School sampled the intro on Metaphysical, and damn am I glad they did because I still may not have heard this amazing song otherwise.
    52 plays
forgotten favorite
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