Episode 49 – “I’ve been sinking in the horoscope, and love is never optional.”

Welcome to Songs That Don’t Suck, with your host Mark Bradbourne.

Welcome to Episode 49 of Songs That Don’t Suck. Thank you for checking out the episode as always. If you missed the last episode, head to songsthatdontsuck.net and see and vote for the nominees of the 2023 Don’t Sucky Awards. Next week, during episode 50, I will announce the winners of the 2023 Don’t Sucky Awards. Be sure and tune in. It’s going to be a great time.

Alright, before we get into music this week, there are a couple of things that I want to talk about. First and things that I did not have on my musical bingo card, there’s going to be a sequel to the cult mockumentary Spinal Tap. Confirmed to appear are all of the original cast, Elton John, Paul McCartney, and Garth Brooks. Wow. So I remember, I think I was in high school the first time I saw spinal tap and I immediately became a huge fan of it. It is probably the most quotable movie, especially among musicians and big music fans. And I remember when Break Like the Wind came out, which was just an album that they put out, had no movie behind it or anything. And my friends and I, we all loved it. We thought it was fantastic. There’s a great song on there called The Majesty of Rock, which is, I think it’s a great song. But I had the opportunity to actually see them live back in 2014. The three main stars, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer, were doing basically an unplugged tour, doing unplugged Spinal Tap songs, as well as they did songs from their other movie, A Mighty Wind. And the show was phenomenal. It was fantastic. And I assumed that that would be the last time that I’d get to have a Spinal Tap moment, right? There’s never going to be another movie, there’s never going to be another album. That was kind of the swan song. But this week, we got news that there is a sequel. The movie’s going to come out next year in 2024. And I have some ideas of the storyline, apparently it’s going to be their final farewell tour. And I feel like just because of the state of mind I’m in with some of these older artists, it’s going to lean heavily into that and I think it’s going to be hilarious. And a lot of times when sequels happen like this, especially long after the fact, it feels a bit of a money grab and you get the sinking suspicion that it’s going to suck. But Rob Reiner is not someone who puts out crap. Like he is an amazing creative and the cast are like they’re not going to cheapen it. Like I really don’t think they are and they’re going to treat this sequel with such respect. There’s part of me that feels like this will be just as good as the original, if not better.

Now, speaking of things that will not be as good as the original or even close is the news that got announced at the end of Kiss’s final concert in New York City over the weekend. Kiss are becoming digital avatars and appear to have the plan basically for the band to perform for all eternity. They’ve put on like motion capture suits and they’ve captured themselves and they’ve become digital avatars. Now to me, this is the natural evolution of Kiss. I’ve been seeing Kiss live for the last 10 or 15 years and the amount of backing tracks that they perform to, why not just completely fabricate the whole concert experience? Now there’s part of me that wishes the fans would raise both middle fingers to Gene and Paul and tell them where to go. But sadly there is a population of fans and probably some curious newbies who never got a chance to see them who will shell out money to go see whatever this abomination is going to be called. I’m not going to call it a concert because it’s not that. I will compare it to back in the 90s there was this trend of laser light shows where people would get baked out of their minds and go stare at lasers for 90 minutes while listening to Dark Side of the Moon. It’s ridiculous and honestly I wish I was shocked but I expect nothing less from Gene and Paul. Gene has repeatedly said in interviews like Rock is dead and I hate to really break it to him but I think he’s one of the prime suspects in the murder of Rock.

Alright, let’s get into something a little more pleasant shall we? Music. Real music. Let’s start with the cover for this week. This comes from a new release that came out from Zac Brown Band. It is a cover of the Allman Brothers Band classic whipping post. I was introduced to the Allman Brothers Band in my early college years when I was spending summers in western New York. I was taking drum lessons at the local music store and the drum teacher who I was taking lessons from was also playing in a local cover band. He asked me if I would be interested in being a drum tech. So basically I would set up his drums, I would have a bar tab and then I would tear down his drums and he’d throw me 20-30 bucks at the end of the night. For a summer gig, for a college student who was underage, it was fantastic. The band played a lot of Southern Rock, a lot of classic rock and whipping post was on their set list, it’s where I was introduced to it and quickly became one of my favorite songs from the Allman Brothers. Now I became a fan of Zac Brown Band a while back and I saw them live very early on and at that show they did a cover of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb and I was absolutely blown away by it, right? To have the musical cojones to cover something as classic as Comfortably Numb, you’ve got to have musical guts and they do, plus they have musical chops to spare. The band as a whole are some of the best musicians that I have ever seen live and I’ve seen a lot of musicians. When the live album came out I was looking through the track listing and I saw a whipping post and I was like, that’s going to be incredible and it was, did not disappoint at all. If you’re not familiar with the Allman Brothers band, in a live setting they are very much a jam band, probably more of a jam band than they are actually a southern rock band if you ask me. And Zac Brown Band did an absolutely killer rendition of this, I think it’s a seven or eight minute song, tempo wise it is a touch faster than the original which honestly I kind of like and it’s important to note for me that the Allman Brothers band have two drummers on stage who kind of play off of each other, Zac Brown Band just has the one guy, he is a beast and he absolutely crushes this performance, fantastic cover of a classic song.

Alright, let’s get into new music for the week shall we? If this is your first time listening to songs that don’t suck, welcome. To give you the quick rundown of how I do this, each week I listen to anywhere between two and five hundred songs, most of them suck. It’s kind of the truth, I try to find the gems that are hidden in all of the crap. I pull those onto a set list, a set list, a playlist and I review them, I pick out the best ones and then I present them here each week for you to add to your playlists. So let’s get into it.

The first song this week is Go from SuperLove. Sometimes songs like this completely miss for me. The drums are triggered and if you don’t know what that means, it’s not that they’re upset about something that was said to them, they have a digital trigger on them so that when the drummer hits the drum, it produces an electronic signal that picks up a sound that is actually recorded rather than the actual acoustic drum. The vocal jumps back and forth between being over-processed and the natural vocal and those two things for me sometimes just are a turn off. On the plus side, the guitar riff is killer and when you put all of these elements together, the whole song is just a killer groove. The drum line is amazing, even though it is triggered, it just fits. The song is self-produced and they did a great job. SuperLove has a great sense of their sound and who they want to be and it truly shows on this track. They describe themselves as UK noise pop and I think it’s a very accurate description. I went and checked some of their other tracks out and they are all heavy guitar riff, little bit of processed vocal, you know, driving drums. So if you happen to dig this track from SuperLove, you probably might want to check out the rest of their stuff because it’s going to be right up your alley.

The second song this week is Heart On My Sleeve by The K’s. I am a person of British heritage. My parents are British, all of my aunts and uncles are British, my grandparents are British and I love hearing British accents. And with British acts, a lot of times you can’t tell when they’re singing. The vocals kind of hide the accent for whatever reason. Take Adele. She’s a great example. If you hear her sing, there is a zero indication of her accent, but when she’s talking in an interview, it is like a British sitcom. Her accent is very thick. Now when I find a musical artist and I can hear the accent in their vocal, there’s something that I really enjoy about it. It just feels very authentic to me. This track from The K’s has that and it is just a straight ahead rocker. Real high energy and the vocalist is just cramming every word possible in that musical phrase to the point where I’m not sure where he’s breathing. I checked out some of the other discography and a lot of it is in the same vein. Very guitar driven, high energy, just musical bops. Good stuff.

The third song this week is Low Light from Fwango. It’s not very often you find a song or a band that is completely driven by the baseline. This one from Fwango is just that. The bassist is busy and the rest of the band just seems to be along for the ride but in a very, very good way. Low Light is a really catchy indie rock song. There’s nothing fancy in the way of the production because honestly it doesn’t need it. It kind of stands on its own. Fwango is from LA and in checking out some of their other songs, the bass seems to be front and center and very active and honestly that is a very unique thing in comparison to anything else I’ve listened to this year. The first band that pops to mind that is very bass driven is honestly Primus and they’re not Primus, so it’s really interesting to hear it in a genre like indie rock. I was reading their bio just trying to figure out what makes them tick and there are two band members who are listed as playing guitar and bass and it made me wonder if they are bass players who are just covering guitar parts or if they are guitar players covering bass parts. Everyone starts somewhere on an instrument and player tendencies make me think that they are both guitar players first and then they are writing these killer really active bass lines because that is their nature as musicians. Really good stuff from Fwango, I really enjoyed this one.

The fourth song this week is the live version of The Way from Manchester Orchestra. This song was originally released back in March of 2023 and I have to say that I love the live version more than the studio version but I have that tendency with bands as long as the live band doesn’t have a ton of backing tracks and stuff to make it sound like the studio version. I don’t want it to sound like the studio version. I want it to sound like live musicians on stage. If I wanted it to sound like the studio version, guess what? I wouldn’t have spent money on a concert ticket and I would have stayed at home and listened to the studio recording. I want the creativity that it takes to translate what you did in the studio into something that the people on stage can produce. Manchester Orchestra does that. I love the vocalist. There are points here where he’s holding out really long notes in kind of the top of his range and you can hear his natural battle to hold that pitch and damn, friggin love it. I love when he slips in and out of pitch. It’s really minor but it makes it real and real is honestly what’s missing in music today. I love the fact the band did not correct it in the studio. A lot of times artists when they release live albums, they go into the studio and make corrections so that they sound really good live. But guess what? Beauty of art is in the imperfection. The creation and the performance in a live setting is magical and I don’t want perfect. I want passion. I want to feel it. In the way, you absolutely do with this track.

The fifth song this week is something of a first for the podcast. The track’s called It’s a Walk in Dir El Assad from Shay Hazan. Shay Hazan is a composer, bassist, and band leader from Tel Aviv, Israel. His music is a mix of Moroccan guana and jazz and hip hop. I found this track, I don’t even know where I found it honestly, but it has almost this hypnotic effect when I’m listening to it. I love the play with the rhythm and the phrasing, the drums. It’s just got a really cool groove to it and then the horns sit and kind of just swing all over the place and not what you expect from kind of a melody line, right? It’s just, it’s sparse, but it’s still repeatable, which is just, it’s fascinating to me. I mentioned a couple of episodes ago that I love world music, so this was a really special find for me. I really appreciated this track from Shay Hazan.

All right, that is it for episode 49. Next week, the season one finale, episode 50, the 2023 Don’t Sucky Awards. You don’t want to miss it. I’m going to recap the year, I’m going to hand out some trophies, and everyone is going to have a great time. As always, spread the word to your fellow music fans, share the podcast with them, follow the show on social media, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Threads. Check out the website at songsthatdontsuck.net and…

Thanks for listening, and until next week, keep searching for and listening to songs that don’t suck.