{"id":665,"date":"2008-08-01T13:14:41","date_gmt":"2008-08-01T13:14:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scientopia.org\/blogs\/goodmath\/2008\/08\/01\/friday-random-ten-august-1st\/"},"modified":"2008-08-01T13:14:41","modified_gmt":"2008-08-01T13:14:41","slug":"friday-random-ten-august-1st","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/2008\/08\/01\/friday-random-ten-august-1st\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday Random Ten, August 1st"},"content":{"rendered":"
    \n
  1. Kansas, “Byzantium”<\/b>: an example of why Kansas fans waited so long for
    \nKerry Lofgren to return to the band. The guy’s a brilliant songwriter. Even with
    \nWalsh’s voice clearly aging and suffering from abuse, this is fantanstic stuff.<\/li>\n
  2. Isis, “Wrists of Kings”<\/b>: Fairly hard post-rock. I like Isis a lot, but one thing
    \nabout them that takes some getting used to is the “lead singer”. In general, Isis has a sound
    \na lot like Mogwai, but they do use vocals. And their vocals consist of a guy screaming
    \nhoarsely in the background. This track doesn’t have the really awful vocals; in fact, the
    \nsinging here is pretty reasonable.<\/li>\n
  3. Genesis, “Squonk”<\/b>: I’ve been going back and listening to old Genesis lately. And
    \nit’s really amazing to listen to. You can see why so many of the neo-progressives start
    \nout by trying to sound like Genesis – it’s such<\/em> an amazing, unique, engaging sound.
    \nThis is off of the first Genesis album after Peter Gabriel left, so it’s a pretty dramatic
    \nchange from what preceeded it. But it’s still distinctly Genesis<\/em> – listening to
    \n“The Lamb Lays Down on Broadway” followed by this, it’s clearly the same band.<\/li>\n
  4. Marillion, “How Can it Hurt?”<\/b>: a bit off of the worst album Marillion ever made. Considering the album that it came off of, this isn’t a bad song; but for Marillion, this
    \nis crap.<\/li>\n
  5. Sonic Youth, “Rats”<\/b>: typical Sonic Youth. That means that it’s fantastic,
    \nstrange, full of odd tonalities and controlled noise. It somehow manages to be smooth
    \nand mellow and noisy and dark all at the same time.<\/li>\n
  6. Godspeed You! Black Emperor, “Static: Terrible Canyons of Static”<\/b>: The deities of
    \npost-rock. No one can do this kind of music like Godspeed. I dearly wish they’d get back
    \ninto the studio and do some more music. Their spinoff “A Silver Mt. Zion” is really good,
    \nbut it’s not Godspeed.<\/li>\n
  7. King Crimson, “Indiscipline”<\/b>: Brilliantly goofy song from King Crimson. This consists
    \nof wonderfully improvised dark noisy guitar and spectacular drumming, interspersed with
    \nAdrian Belew talking about some thing<\/em>, without ever saying what the thing is.<\/li>\n
  8. Kruzenshtern and Parahod, “March”<\/b>: progressive klezmer. Wow. This is strange,
    \nand wonderful, and amazing, and really<\/em> strange. I’d kill to be able to play
    \nmy clarinet like that!<\/li>\n
  9. Naftule’s Dream, “The Aimless Path”<\/b>: In a wonderful coincidence of iTunes
    \nshuffle randomness, another<\/em> bit of progressive klezmer. Naftule’s Dream is
    \na spinoff of the Shirim Klezmer orchestra. Shirim is fantastic, mostly traditional Klezmer.
    \nNaftule’s Dream is the stuff that really pushes the boundaries of the genre. Highly recommended, and a lot easier to find than K&P.<\/li>\n
  10. The Flower Kings, “Man Overboard”<\/b>: The Flower Kings are, probably, my favorite band. They started off as a blatant Genesis ripoff (see my comment above on “Squonk”), but they’ve evolved into a really amazing band with a real distinctive sound. You can’t mistake the Flower Kings for anyone else – just a couple of seconds of any of their songs, and you know that it’s them. This is one
    \nof my favorite of their shorter tracks – only 3 1\/2 minutes! But it’s got the most amazing twisted rhythm and chords in the chorus, connected by a highly contrasting smooth melodic bridge. It’s amazing.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Kansas, “Byzantium”: an example of why Kansas fans waited so long for Kerry Lofgren to return to the band. The guy’s a brilliant songwriter. Even with Walsh’s voice clearly aging and suffering from abuse, this is fantanstic stuff. Isis, “Wrists of Kings”: Fairly hard post-rock. I like Isis a lot, but one thing about them […]<\/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-665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-aJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665","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=665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}