Random Rules

OK, so here's my attempt at starting a blog meme. Well, not really starting one, because I'm essentially ripping it off of the Onion's AV Club. But, good ideas are good ideas, so here goes:

The idea is that you load up your mp3 player or iPod or your Winamp playlist with whatever you want and shuffle it so that ten random tracks come up. (This tends to work better if you have TONS of music on your player. It also works better if you have forgotten what you've put on, like I have.) Then, you talk about those songs - how cool they are, or what they mean to you, or whatever pops into your head. The big rule, though, is NO CHEATING - no matter how embarassing to your hipster cred these songs might be, you can't skip over any.

Sounds like nerdy fun, right? So all six of you who read this blog, go ahead and do this on your own blog or Facebook or whatever. MEME POWER!

Here's the Sloth Random 10:

1) The Undertones - "Family Entertainment" - Off to a good start! Hooray for The Undertones! Sort of a forgotten band nowadays, The Undertones were famous for recording John Peel's favourite song, "Teenage Kicks". "Family Entertainment" is from that same album, and it's an effortlessly great two-chord pop song, until you listen closely to the lyrics and realize it might be about incest. Oh, those crazy punk rockers.

2) Dethklok - "Go Into The Water" - Awesome. If I'm not mistaken, this was originally from the album "Underwater", and was therefore never supposed to be heard by human ears. It's intended audience was the creatures who live on the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean, because they are the only ones who can handle music this heavy. How heavy is it? When they played this song live, the first twenty rows spontaneously exploded. Now that's heavy.

3) Von Spar - "KkljdsopizdoASlibgvdosndgvl" - OK, that's not really the name of the song, but it's something in German that I can't spell. Von Spar are this wacky dance-punk band from Germany, and this is from an early EP I think. It's nice and boppy with a cool piano bass line and a backup chick breathing "von schpaaaaaaaar!" every now and then. Weirdly, their album after this was like some crazy neo-tribal-prog-doom-metal thing with like twenty-minute long songs. If there's one thing crazier than punk rockers, it's German punk rockers.

4) The Cure - "Charlotte Sometimes" - Gosh, what were the odds a Cure song would come up? A classic from their early wrist-slitting depressive era, the lyrics are apparently the first paragraph of the book "Charlotte Sometimes", which I assume is about a girl with really big hair and smeary red lipstick.

5) Nomeansno - "More ICBMs" - From the odds-'n'-sods collection "Mr. Right and Mr. Wrong", this is like embryonic Nomeansno - drums, guitar and piano (?). This must have been recorded when they were still teenagers or something because they sound like demented chipmunks. Not exactly an essential Nomeansno track.

6) The Jesus & Mary Chain - "Down On Me" - Mmmmmmmm, more depression. It never ceases to amaze me how the JaMC have managed to take the same five songs and make a whole career out of them. This is from "Darklands", an album I was really down on when it came out because it didn't sound like "Psychocandy", but I recently went on a big re-listen kick to all of my JaMC stuff and I gotta say this album is a lot better than I remembered it being. It's just scruffy and rough enough to be awesome. I hope they paid Lou Reed some royalties, though.

7) Sugar - "Man On The Moon" - Fuck I love Bob Mould. Shorty had a great idea where she would get her favourite singer-songwriters together and do the "I Fucking Wrote This" tour, where each of the participants would introduce each song by saying: "Oh, by the way - I fucking wrote this". Bob Mould could headline that one, I think.

8) The Who - "Sea And Sand" - From "Quadrophenia". I know everybody loves "Tommy" and "Who's Next", but "Quadrophenia" is the tits: Pete's best guitar playing, Roger could still sing, and classic rock hasn't played the songs to fucking death. Too bad I was always too fat to pull of the mod look. Well, that and I'm a huge slob. Oh, and I can't dance. Fucking mods.

9) Jackson 5 - "Daddy's Home" - From the "Ultimate Collection", although I'm almost positive this isn't an actual Jackson 5 song. I think it's a Jermaine solo single. Whatever, it's still some awesome Motown sappiness - lots of strings and vibes. It sounds like Jermaine is multitracking his own backing vocals. This is the kind of thing I like a lot more than I probably should.

10) The Damned - "Help" - Wicked cover of the Beatles song that The Damned rip through in about a minute and a half. Hey, remember when punk rock was supposed to be fun?