175 Songs

Boredoms in the Bathroom

Portishead have a very different approach to sampling especially when it came to the drums on Dummy.

There is a distinctive boom to the drums that was achieved in a number of ways. They would record the drums (or other instruments/Beth), press that recording to vinyl then rerecord from the vinyl. This gave an old school hip hop feel to the samples without having to find old beats that fitted perfectly. This also often resulted in surface noise on the sample, adding another intricacy to the rhythms.

The other technique is to slow down what are presumably stock breakbeats as they are quite explicit about the samples they used on the album.

For Mysterons, Clive Dreamer is credited as the drummer so I assume the first technique was used.

Very strangely, I first saw Trencher at a dance music festival. This was my first year at Glade. Most of the stages were psy-trance or generally down-tempo house music plus the known acts and bands on the main stage. Then there was the Overkill stage playing Wrong Music. This consisted of gabba, glitch, unhappy hardcore and even more odd things.

Trencher were billed as ‘the UK’s Lightning Bolt’, I thought it would be best to go along since I had already missed Lightning Bolt on several occasions.

I was introduced to The Decemberists in the lead up to Sleater-Kinney’s day at All Tomorrow’s Parties. Which isn’t surprising as both bands originate from Portland.

First time I saw Rolo Tomassi was in the Barn at Truck Festival.

I have never been so enchanted by a screaming teenage girl. I could not believe the noise that was coming out of this girl who was aggressively throwing herself around the stage. And it’s not just all about Eva Spence, the rest of the band are really impressive. Instant tempo and time signature changes, even complete changes of style out of nowhere. It’s all a bit too clever for me really.

I'd always had a casual fancy for System of a Down from hearing songs at various rock nights.

This should be the Pink Floyd version but they don't seem to have played it live and EMI don't want us to listen to their music on You Tube. So instead we have a version by Low.

This song was a snap pick for the Pink Floyd tribute night. It's a bit awkward because I wanted to integrate You'll Never Walk Alone into the song. Changing to it at the end would have been a pain in the ass so I decided to rearrange it a bit. The idea was to start the song with You'll Never Walk Alone and then at the climax, start playing Fearless.

I had hoped for some audience participation, maybe I could encourage everyone to sing along at the climax for a rousing lead into Fearless - I was not prepared for what happened. It turns out that a lot of people know You'll Never Walk Alone, a lot better than I do. I'd got as far as "When you walk..." And half the room was already singing along, I was so stunned I instantly forgot all the words and the chords. I had no idea what I was doing, the crowd generally quietened as I was standing there doing nothing. I was so relieved after the chorus so I could start playing a song I knew how to play. The rest of Fearless went pretty well. Not exactly my finest moment at a gig.

My favourite song off Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. It's such an epic and diverse album - I especially like the brutality of this song.

Evil Nine are the only foray into breakbeat on this playlist and my cd collection for that matter. The introduction to them came at Glade Festival in 2006, I think. I don’t know much about Evil Nine, but they were two chaps playing tunes, headlining the main stage. Powered by caffeine tablets and some disgusting guarana elixir, we danced through the whole set.

I started listening to Silverchair as an angsty teen in the 90s. I saw them play at Reading festival in 1999 where they obviously opened with Israel’s Son. But the most significant thing about this song is the tuning.

This song is in dropped D tuning which isn’t anything terribly significant and fairly common for 90s alternative bands. That just means you tune the low E down a tone making your three lower strings an open chord.

Whilst looking for the most boring undescriptive song titles imaginable Labradford went with my name. Have to agree that it is a pretty boring non-descriptive name. Maybe this is the root of why I’m anti-populist, by having such an obvious and common name. Oh well, better than having a weird name and trying to be normal I guess.

The part of High Fidelity where John Cusack says "I will now sell five copies of The Three EPs by The Beta Band" then plays Dry the Rain is brilliant. I can see this actually happening because it is a cracking song. I do wonder what those five people thought of the whole album, it gets a bit weird.

At the Drive-In make music that is equally beautiful and chaotic. Take the video above for example, there are better things to do than play the proper guitar parts or sing all the lyrics. You can feel the song, you know what it sounds like on the record, why do they need to recreate that?

Omar Rodríguez-López's complete disregard for guitar playing is something I wish I could pull off. But unfortunately you have to be a really talented technical guitarist to play in such a excitingly haphazard way.

To be specific this is the first untitled track off ( ). Luckily the band does have actual names for these songs when they play them live so finding the right video wasn't too hard.

I've already used Sigur Rós as a comparison of guitar techniques and the ( ) album really emphasises the guitar, organs and manipulation of Jonsi's voice. For this reason, I don't really care for albums that came after this as there is more emphasis on string quartets which has so much less appeal.

New Path to Helicon Pt 1 was one of Mogwai’s very first singles and subsequently one of their most played songs live. The original version is on the Ten Rapid album but my playlist version comes from the Government Commissions compilation, which in their own words ‘pisses all over the original’.

Before seeing Joanna Newsom at All Tomorrow’s Parties I had heard her first album. I really liked her style and the harp but the album itself gets a bit grating. I was excited to learn that her forthcoming album Ys was in part recorded by Steve Albini and included an orchestra.

The first I heard of Ys was songs that she played at the festival. The problem with playing a harp at a festival is that it’s quite hard to effectively mic up and considering there was only Joanna Newsom’s voice to accompany it, the volume wasn’t exactly high. The general murmur of a crowd or the rustle of a bar I can cope with but shushing is a really cutting and distracting noise. Shushers aside, you can easily get lost in listening to Joanna Newsom’s songs.