{"id":755,"date":"2009-03-20T16:56:04","date_gmt":"2009-03-20T16:56:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scientopia.org\/blogs\/goodmath\/2009\/03\/20\/friday-random-10-320\/"},"modified":"2009-03-20T16:56:04","modified_gmt":"2009-03-20T16:56:04","slug":"friday-random-10-320","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/2009\/03\/20\/friday-random-10-320\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday Random 10, 3\/20"},"content":{"rendered":"
    \n
  1. Valley of the Giants, “Back to God’s Country”<\/b>: I mentioned Valley of the Giants a few weeks ago, as one of my favorite post-rock bands. A few weeks of listening to them incessantly hasn’t changed that. They’re absolutely brilliant. This track is very typical
    \nof them; it’s got a slow start, with an almost droning main melody. And they take that,
    \nand develop it, through rhythm and harmony, until it’s almost unrecognizable. And then
    \neverything changes.<\/li>\n
  2. Hawkwind, “World of Tiers”<\/b>: typical Hawkwind. If you like them, you’ll like
    \nthis. If you don’t, you won’t.<\/li>\n
  3. The Flower Kings, “Rumble Fish Twist”<\/b>: a live track by the Flower Kings. Every time I go for a while without listening to tFK, I’m amazed when I turn them on. Roine Stolt and company are just so incredible. To me, there’s a kind of near perfection about the Flower Kings work that no one else comes close to.<\/li>\n
  4. Kruzenshtern and Parahod, “Focus Pocus”<\/b>: Some of the strangest stuff I’ve ever
    \nlistened to. K&P are somewhere between progressive Klezmer, Jazz, and noise… They’re really amazing, but hard to describe or classify. If you can find a copy of one of their CDs, I highly recommend it, but they’re very hard to find.<\/li>\n
  5. Gong, “Infinitea”<\/b>: This band is yet another example of the “How did I not know about these guys?” phenomenon. They’ve been around for quite a while, coming out of
    \nthe Manchester scene. They’re basically a spinoff of sorts from Soft Machine. They are
    \na really amazing progressive band, from the Jazzy side of things. They’ve been doing stuff
    \nsince the 70s, and are still making new albums now.<\/li>\n
  6. The Reasoning, “Dark Angel”<\/b>: This is a band that I can’t make up my mind about. They’re neo-prog. They’ve got brilliant moments, and they’ve got a lot of moments that are rather dull. I can’t quite decide what I think on balance; I need to listen to them a bit more. On the good side, they’ve got three members with good (but very<\/em> different) voices, and do a lot of really nice vocal harmony work, which is unusual.<\/li>\n
  7. Uriah Heep, “What Kind of God?”<\/b>: A great disappointment. I’ve heard about
    \nUriah Heep for the longest time, and I finally got around to buying one of their albums. I find it just intolerably dull. Really profoundly mediocre music.<\/li>\n
  8. Sonic Youth, “Silver Rocker (live)”<\/b>: old Sonic Youth. I really love SY, and I
    \nthink that their songwriter has gotten stronger over the years. But there’s still a raw
    \nenergy to their early stuff which the new can’t match. It’s still the same sound, and the
    \nolder songs can sometimes tend towards being a bit on the simple side, but there’s still
    \nsomething really special in their older material.<\/li>\n
  9. Sylvan, “Strange Emotion”<\/b>: And another mixed bag. I was looking at other reviews of Sylvan, and someone described them as “Emo Prog”. Not a bad description. It’s definitely neo-prog, with the kinds of sound and structure that you’d expect; but it’s got that mopey, self-absorbed feeling of emo-dreck.<\/li>\n
  10. The Wishing Tree, “Ostara”<\/b>: And still another mixed one. This is Steve Rothery’s band. (Rothery is the guitarist from Marillion.) I’m a huge Rothery fan – he’s got both
    \nfantastic technical chops, and also fantastic musical taste. He’s not just a loud fancy
    \nguitarist; he’s a very musical<\/em> guitarist. He’s got an extremely distinctive style,
    \nand yet also manages to fit himself into whatever’s going on around him. This album has
    \nsome absolutely wonderful<\/em> material; but it’s also got a lot of really dull
    \nderivative stuff. The singer (Hannah Stobart) has a really beautiful voice, but she
    \ndoesn’t have her own style. She always sounds like she’s trying to be someone else. Mostly that’s Kate Bush, but at times, she sounds like she’s trying to be Tori Amos, or
    \nMelissa Etheridge. But you can almost always listen to her and say “She’s trying to
    \nsound like X”. On the whole, I like them, but think they’d be much better if Ms. Stobart
    \njust figured out how to sound like herself<\/em>. <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Valley of the Giants, “Back to God’s Country”: I mentioned Valley of the Giants a few weeks ago, as one of my favorite post-rock bands. A few weeks of listening to them incessantly hasn’t changed that. They’re absolutely brilliant. This track is very typical of them; it’s got a slow start, with an almost droning […]<\/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-755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-cb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755","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=755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}