I'm Going Radiohead Crazy: Get Your B-Sides Here + Take Two Update

You know that period of time after you see a band live where basically all you listen to is their stuff? Yeah, that happens to me really badly whenever I see a show. It's happened for The Hives, Interpol, Daphne Loves Derby, and most recently Radiohead. Last year, right after the release of In Rainbows, I tracked down a ton of Radiohead b-sides over at The Good, the Bad, & the Unknown. I think in light of my recent Radiohead binge I'd like to point people on over there to listen to the two b-side "albums" he made over there: Caisson Disease and Photographic Memory. My favorite things about his b-side collections are that the titles that are inverses of actual releases (e.g. Photographic Memory instead of Amnesiac) and the awesome custom album covers. Check them out, these tracks are just fantastic and are really hard to track down one by one.

And in the spirit of there being some "unofficial" albums of b-sides, I'll update my Take Two from yesterday.


Caisson Disease

"Maquiladora" - That guitar riff, man does that just epitomize the sound of the 90s to me. Hearing Yorke wailing over those dueling guitars is magnificent. I find myself wondering why some of these tracks didn't make the album, but then I remember that the albums are pretty much perfectly sequenced and pared down so there's no filler. These songs work as a b-side collection, but I wouldn't ever really want one of them messing up the images I have of the albums as they are.

"Coke Babies" - That fuzzed out ending is pretty sweet, and I love the semi-floating feeling of the guitar and the drums up until the fuzzing of the chorus. For a gruesome song title, its a pretty sweet sounding track, which is all the more sinister. Considering the amount of material Radiohead releases and the number of songs they hold over from session to session, they really do have an amazing back catalogue of b-sides from over the years. To be able to get multiple collections out of the b-sides is intense, especially when they form albums that dwarf other bands' actual recording output in terms of quality.


Photographic Memory

"Lull" - The shortest song I put on the whole list of Radiohead songs, but I love the guitar work here. All of these songs are culled from different sessions so it's a little hard to place these thematically with one record or another. Caisson is from The Bends-era, and Photographic Memory is from Ok Computer until after Amnesiac, so I'm not really sure where to place this song amongst the records, but I really like it on its own. After a couple more re-listens, the drums are fantastic as well. Short, sweet, simple, altogether not really the kind of track that Radiohead releases, but still awesome. It shows how well they'd do if they were just playing straightforward rock, but we know they're capable of much, much more.

"Talk Show Host" - In a list of my favorite songs of all time it's a all-out-brawl between this song and "2+2=5" for the Radiohead slot (I limit myself to one song per artist). The atmosphere, the guitar, the vocals, the lyrics, the Romeo + Juliet connection, everything just fits for me. The first time I listened to the song outside the film, my jaw dropped I was in so much awe of its beauty.


Okay, now I'm going to stop with the Radiohead overload and try to write something else for once. Just give me a few days or something.

Mid-Week Special: Bloc Party b-side

After releasing their sophomore album A Weekend in the City in February, English alt/dance/rock outfit Bloc Party released 11 stellar b-sides, which became known (at least to me and the friends I told) as Another Weekend in the City. However, that entire album worth of b-sides wasn't enough for Kele and the rest of Bloc Party, expressed by the b-side "Cavaliers and Roundheads" that accompanied the release of the "Hunting for Witches" single.

It's a pretty good track, but I don't think it was as good as the other b-sides that were available on the different versions of the album back in February. Still, it's worth checking out.


Bloc Party - Cavaliers and Roundheads


Just as a side note: I've finally gotten myself moved in and settled down at college. It's pretty amazing, but I don't have a lot of time to post stuff this week, what with...registering for classes, and...figuring out the campus, and...other fun activities for college-age Americans.

Mid-Week Special: Vinyl Only Built to Spill

After the last day of school my junior year of high school, I spent the afternoon with my friends in the classroom of one of my favorite teachers, who was leaving the next year to do graduate work at UNC-Chapel Hill. He did two things that afternoon: made all of us participate in a "Worst Poem Ever" competition, and gave me a vinyl single from the band Built to Spill that he had received from Doug Marsch himself at a concert in the late 90s as a gift for helping lug the band's gear into a venue for a gig.

He had been my sophomore English teacher and Journalism teacher for two years, and his taste in rock from the early 90s really got me started in exploring indie music from before my high school years. This vynil single and a record player happened to be in his classroom one day; I put it on while we were editing an edition of our school newspaper, and I've been hooked on the band ever since. It was a single for "Strange," which was the lead single from their album Ancient Melodies of the Future (a roundabout way of saying the album was a melody for today...), and contained an instrumental b-side that I've spent countless hours trying to find online to no avail.

Luckily, another one of my friends had the equipment to digitize a vinyl record, and thus was able to make me a digital copy of the b-side, titled Intrumental #2 on the insert for the single. It was the track that got me started on Built to Spill, and it was a great soundtrack for editing a newspaper. Enjoy.

Built to Spill - Instrumental #2

Mid-week Special: Covers, Live Tracks, & B-sides

Okay, so after a little difficulty in figuring out how to actually upload mp3 files so people can download them (if they read this...), I've actually gotten this site up and running.

I got into reading mp3 blogs about a year ago, when a friend of mine introduced me to the hype machine, which you have to be familiar with if you read an mp3 blog. in keeping with some of my favorite blogs, I'm going to start posting some covers, live tracks, or b-sides from my favorite artists that a lot of people don't have.

So, for the first installment of this, I figured I'd kick it off with a doozy, and one of my all-time favorite covers:
Dashboard Confessional's cover of Weezer's unreleased song "Jamie"

This sort of satisfies two parts of the ideas behind these posts, so it makes me happy. This song was recorded by Weezer during the sessions for The Blue Album back in '94, but sadly never made the album. It saw a cd release when The Blue Album deluxe edition came out, but sadly i don't know when the Dashboard cover was recorded. It's a great acoustic cover by Chris, complete with female backing vocal "ooo-ing" in the background. Classic Weezer. Great cover.


Weezer - Jaime
Dashboard Confessional - Jaime(Weezer Cover)