1. **Marillion, “If My Heart Were a Ball It Would Roll Downhill”**: Very neat track from
\none of my favorite neo-progressive bands. Catchy, but with lots of layers.
\n2. **Mandelbrot Set, “Constellation of Rings”**: math-geek postrock. What’s not to love?
\n3. **The Police, ;Every Breath You Take”**: I’ve always been a fan of the Police. But
\nwhat I like most about this song is how often it’s been used by clueless people. I’ve
\nheard this at multiple weddings, where the couple thought it was a beautiful romantic
\nsong. If you listen to it, it’s anything but romantic. It’s actually a rather evil
\nlittle song about a stalker: “Every breath you take, every vow you break,
\nevery smile you fake, I’ll be watching you… Oh can’t you see, you belong to me?”
\nHow can anyone miss that?
\n4. **Naftule’s Dream, “Speed Klez”**: John Zorn-influenced klezmer mixed with
\na bit of thrash. Insane, but very very cool. Thrash with a trombone line!
\n5. **Jonathan Coulton, “Todd the T1000″**: Sci-fi geek pop. It’s a catchy little pop
\nsong about trading in your old robot for a new one which turns out to be a
\npsychopath.
\n6. **Hamster Theater, “Reddy”**: A short track from a great band. Hamster Theater
\nis a sort-of spin-off from Thought Plague. It’s a bit more traditional than
\nwhat you’d hear from TP; still very dissonant, sometimes atonal, but more often
\ncloser to traditional tonality and song structure. This track is a short instrumental
\nfeaturing an accordion solo.
\n7. **Transatlantic, “Mystery Train”**: great little song. It’s a track by one of
\nthose so-called supergroups; Transatlantic is a side-project formed by members of
\nMarillion (bassist Pete Travawas), Dream Theater (drummer Mike Portnoy), Spock’s Beard (singer Neil Morse), and the Flower Kings (guitarist Royne Stolt). In general, these
\nsupergroups have a sort of shaky sound. These guys are *great* together; it sounds
\nlike they’ve been playing together for years: they’re sharp, there’s a great interplay
\nbetween the different instruments, it’s all incredibly precise. I’ve heard that the
\nmusic was written in advance mainly by Morse, but even with polished music pre-written,
\nit’s got a great sound, and you can here the distinctive musical voices of each of the
\nmusicians.
\n8. **Godspeed You! Black Emperor, “Antennas To Heaven”**: It’s Godspeed – which means
\nthat it’s brilliant post-rock. This starts off with a very rough recording of a very
\nold-timey folkey tune, and uses it as a springboard into a very typical God-speed
\ntexture.
\n9. **The Flower Kings, “Devil’s Playground”**: more neo-progressive stuff. This is an
\nincredibly long piece (25 minutes), very typical of Roine Stolt’s writing. It’s not
\nthe sort of way-out-there kind of thing that you’d hear from, say, King Crimson; it’s
\nvery structured, very melodic, but put together more in the structure of a symphony
\n(theme, development, restatement) than the typical ABACAB structure of a rock song.
\n10. **Porcupine Tree, “Sleep Together”**: a brilliant song by yet another neo-prog
\nband. Very odd… a strange electronic pulse drives the entire song; but it starts
\noff as a very quiet song with this electronic pulse giving it a tense feel. Then
\nthe percussion comes in, and shifts your sense of the rhythm… And then it gets
\nto the chorus, which is big and loud, and features a full string section. Strange,
\nbut wonderful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
1. **Marillion, “If My Heart Were a Ball It Would Roll Downhill”**: Very neat track from one of my favorite neo-progressive bands. Catchy, but with lots of layers. 2. **Mandelbrot Set, “Constellation of Rings”**: math-geek postrock. What’s not to love? 3. **The Police, ;Every Breath You Take”**: I’ve always been a fan of the Police. […]<\/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-468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-7y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468","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=468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}