It’s friday again, which means I get to bore you with my bizarre taste in music.
\n1. **Spock’s Beard, “A Guy Named Sid”.** SB is a fantastic neo-prog band, one of my favorites. This is a track off the first album after their long-time lead singer\/songwriter left the band. It’s definitely a big change in sound for them, but they’re still excellent.
\n2. **King Crimson, “The King Crimson Barber Shop”**. A few years ago, my wife bought me a set of special KC reissues. The reissue of “Three of a Perfect Pair” included a bunch of extra tracks – remixes of “Sleepless”, extended versions of some of the instrumental stuff – and an *extremely* silly barbershop quartet sung by the guys.
\n3. **Marillion, “Berlin”**. Marillion is a progressive rock band that’s been around for quite a while. This is off of *their* first album after their long-time lyricist\/lead singer left. They didn’t do quite as well as SB did after the singer left: the first couple of albums with the new singer just didn’t stand up to the older stuff. (Although they did eventually find their feet again; they’re recent work is fantastic.) This is probably the best track off of the first album with the new lead singer.
\n4. **Scott Vestal and the BG’98 Band, “Home Sweet Home”**. Scott Vestal is one of the best banjoists in the world today. He plays everything from very traditional Scruggs-style bluegrass to incredibly out-there purely improvised jazz. In the late 90s, he recorded a series of yearly albums of mostly traditional instrumental bluegrass. It’s really pretty cool to see just what a bunch of really talented guys can do with even something as silly as this old folk song.
\n5. **Sonic Youth, “Jams Runs Free”.** A very typical Sonic Youth track off of their latest album. It’s a bit *smoother* than some of their older stuff, but it’s got the same sound to it – the semitones, dissonance, and other strangeness; it’s just more subtle.
\n6. **The Clogs, “Sticks and Nails”**. More post-rock. The Clogs are an excellent classical-leaning post-rock trio. This is a very dark, percussive, dissonant piece.
\n7. **Darol Anger’s Republic of Strings, “Father Adieu”**. A really wonderful track from of one of Darol Anger’s new projects.
\n8. **The National, “Friend of Mine”**. An alternate face for some members of the Clogs. The National is a very interesting band – you can definitely hear the connection to the Clogs, and yet it’s also very traditional country-rock style songwriting. Good stuff; not necessarily something that I’d want to listen to every day, but really great once in a while.
\n9. **Broadside Electric, “Seafood Invasion”**. An instrumental track from a really great Philadelphia area electric folk group. I learned to play the tin whistle from the whistle player in this group.
\n10. **Kaipa, “A Complex Work of Art”**. A *wonderful* track from the re-united Kaipa. Kaipa is the band where Roine Stolte of the Flower Kings got his start. It sounds like a cross between old Yes and the Flower Kings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s friday again, which means I get to bore you with my bizarre taste in music. 1. **Spock’s Beard, “A Guy Named Sid”.** SB is a fantastic neo-prog band, one of my favorites. This is a track off the first album after their long-time lead singer\/songwriter left the band. It’s definitely a big change in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-2S","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}