It is difficult to exactly pin down the style of today’s song. A melancholy ballad from Rainer Fassbinder’s 1970 disaffected “noir” The American Soldier, it sounds nothing I can quite put my finger on. With over the top lyrics (especially when played over the ridiculously extended histrionics of the titular character’s effete brother), and the cyclical…

Despite picking up an odd baroque record every now and then when I’m at an antique mall, it’s been tough to find stuff that holds up to the handful of well-curated baroque albums in my dad’s otherwise largely free and/or improvised shelves of LPs. Today’s song comes from an unassuming Nonesuch LP from the 1960s…

Folk music comes in many forms and while most of them are a basically just that dude playing acoustic guitar in Animal House, it’s still one of my favorite styles when I’m not listening to beats of a heavy kind. My favorite folk uses simple acoustic guitar arrangements that sound nice and sparse, vocals with…

Dungeon Synth is the genre of music I’d like to think I’m better than, except I’m not. I mean, it’s basically the kind of music you make when you buy your first keyboard, click it over to “choral” and GO TO TOWN in the simplest manner possible. It’s naïve, repetitive, and somehow both half-baked and…

Today’s song isn’t the first song I discovered through a heavy metal cover. However, unlike Gamma Ray’s “It’s a Sin,” Sepultura’s version of “The Hunt” was NOT the standout on its album. Sepultura was a band that always had good riffs, but never quite had the songwriting to put them all together, so by the…

My Minor Key Monday picks mostly fall into three categories: weird shit I listened to as a kid, music used in movies, and youtube autoplay happy accidents. Today however I had a rare “heard on the radio” discovery when a 1960s folk family singing some medieval sounding shit happened to play on NPR while out…

As the years go on and I descend further into the depths of problematically unlistenable problematic black metal in the search for something that can make me feel, I do, thankfully have a few non metal escapes that always deliver without as much of a “wtf am I listening to” aftertaste. Goth music (a MKM…

Germs were a hardcore band that were probably best known (at least to those outside the punk scene) from their infamous appearance on The Decline of Western Civilization. In that documentary (covering the LA punk scene in the late 1970s), Germs turn in a couple of a frankly embarrassing (though, undeniably riveting) performances: Based on…

Goth, like black metal, went through a few waves on its journey from post-punk bands with bad hair to emo kids dancing under bridges (still with bad hair). Today’s band, Switchblade Symphony, comes from goth’s second wave (or maybe third?) and thus are by not means to be considered sonic originators. But, for my money,…