music
goodmath | November 17, 20061. **Trout Fishing in America, "I Get Ideas"**. Trout is a great band; they do both children's
music and adult music. This is one of their children's songs, but I love it anyway. What's
not to like about a song that features shampooing with peanut butter?
2. **Gordian Knot, "The Brook The Ocean"**. Gordian Knot is an instrumental progressive rock band consisting of bassist Sean Malone, and whoever else he feels like playing with. GK has included Bill Bruford, Adrian Belew, Trey Gunn, Steve Hackett, Mike Portnoy, and a ton of other amazing people. This is a spectacular track, a…
goodmath | November 13, 2006By way of PZ, I just found [the website of Jonathan Coulton](http://www.jonathancoulton.com/songs/), a musician who seems to specialize in humorous and geeky songs. The music is good; the lyrics are absolutely fantastic.
Here's an example that he gives away, called "Mandelbrot Set". (For embedding it here, I drastically stripped it from 160K stereo sample to just 16K mono; go to his homepage to get the real, full-quality version.)
Just to give you an idea, here's the lyrics for the first verse:
Pathological monsters! cried the terrified mathematician
Every one of them is a splinter in my…
oracknows | November 12, 2006It's Frank Zappa, of course, with what is arguably the best (or at least one of the best) songs celebrating skepticism ever written (and it has a killer guitar solo in the middle, too!):
I used to love that song when I was a teenager. (I still do.) I wonder if it affected me...
oracknows | November 11, 2006It sounds like casting genius, even if it's only a small role:
LAS VEGAS, Nov. 6, 2006 -- Hide the Bats! Christopher Walken has agreed to play the ultimate bad-boy rocker -- Ozzy Osbourne..
Motley Crue lead singer Vince Neil told ABC News Radio in an exclusive interview that the 63-year-old Oscar-winning actor will make a cameo appearance as Osbourne in "The Dirt," a movie based on the band's controversial 2001 autobiography.
"How funny is that going to be," Neil told ABC's Al Mancini at the Opening of Vince Neil Ink, the singer's new tattoo parlor in Las Vegas.
Walken's press representatives…
oracknows | November 10, 2006On November 10, 1975, the most famous maritime disaster in Great Lakes history occurred, when the freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior while trying to make it to Whitefish Bay in a gale, with the loss of 29 lives. Having grown up in the Detroit area, I still remember it almost as though it were yesterday. Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot memorialized the crew and the loss in his famous song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Here's a tribute video incorporating the song:
And here are the lyrics:
The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot
The legend lives on…
goodmath | November 10, 20061. **Porcupine Tree, "Prepare Yourself"**. Porcupine Tree is a strange bad, which started out as an elaborate joke. This is off of their most progressive album, "The Sky Moves Sideways". It's a brilliant piece of work.
2. **Dream Thater, "Blind Faith"**
3. **Dirty Three, "Dream Evie"**. Ah, Dirty Three, one of my favorite post-rock ensembles. Very classical sounding group, wonderful.
4. **Tortoise, "By Dawn"**. More post-rock; unfortunately, I find Tortoise rather dull.
5. **Harry Bradley, "Miss Thornton's". Traditional Irish music played in exquisite style by one of the great masters of the…
oracknows | November 7, 2006The polls are now open where I live. Don't forget to get out there and vote!
Too bad we don't have a candidate like the one in the video to vote for. At least he's honest. Heck, if any candidate ran a campaign like the one in the video above, I might even vote for him! As it is now, for Senate I have the choice between a Republican tool and a totally corrupt Democrat.
oracknows | November 5, 2006I've been talking up My Chemical Romance's Welcome to the Black Parade as an album that takes punk, glam, Goth, and sprinkles in a touch of Queen here and there like seasoning to produce an irresistable, sometimes over-the-top, album full of theatricality, bombast, and anthemic choruses that make you want to sing along. Check out an example:
oracknows | October 31, 2006No Alice Cooper this time. Instead, given that this is the blog that conceived of the Hitler Zombie, how could I not post a clip involving an actual cinematic brain-eating zombie on Halloween? (Warning: In the interest of full disclosure, this clip contains a brief and poorly lit topless shot and a couple of uses of the F-word.)
Intelligent talking zombies who understand how to use pulleys. Now that's scary! Maybe this'll assuage PZ's disappointment that the Halloween edition of The Synapse didn't have any jokes about brain-eating zombies.
I mean, what's Halloween without brain eating…
oracknows | October 31, 2006More Halloween-appropriate mania from Alice Cooper, this time with Vincent Price!
And more:
More to come, but not necessarily Alice Cooper...
oracknows | October 30, 2006it's Halloween, and I thought I'd celebrate by posting a few appropriate YouTube! videos. And what says Halloween quite like Alice Cooper?
oracknows | October 29, 2006Remembering two rather frivolous posts that I made last weekend, you might have an idea of what this costume might be.
Yes, you too can Be The Hoff.
Of course, if The Hoff is not your style, you can also Be The Magnum.
(Via Attu World.)
oracknows | October 27, 2006It's Friday, and I haven't done this for a long time; so here we go. I fired up iTunes, set it to Shuffle Play, and awaited with baited breath for what came out. See how this stuff compares to Mark's list today:
1. My Chemical Romance, Welcome to the Black Parade (from The Black Parade). OK, I admit it. I engineered this list so that MCR would be first on the list before the randomness follows. This album deserves it. I just got this CD a few days ago, and it hasn't left my car or the top of my playlist. MCR takes punk, glam, Goth, and sprinkles in a touch of Queen here and there like…
goodmath | October 27, 2006It's friday, so it's time for more of my highly warped taste in music.
1. **Tempest, "Turn of the Wheel"**. Tempest is a really cool band. They're a cross between an electrified folk band and a neo-progressive rock band. Strong Irish and Swedish influences on the folky side, and a vaguely ELP-ish sound on the rock side.
2. **Mel Brooks, "In Old Bavaria" from the Producers**.
3. **The National, "Baby We'll Be Fine"**. Probably my favorite track from this album by the National.
4. **Hamster Theatre, "The Quasi Day Room Ceremonila Quadrille"**. HT is an offshoot of Thinking Plague. Every bit as…
oracknows | October 25, 2006One problem with getting old is that you start to see bands that you admired in your youth start to betray what you perceived as their ideals. The Baby Boomers were the first to start experiencing the disillusionment that comes with that, and songs from the rock gods of the 1960's have become ubiquitous in ads for everything from clothes to Cadillacs. Of course, bands that I idolized when I was in high school and college are no different. Sometimes, however, something happens to members of such a band that is just plain bizarre.
For example, could you believe that a member of The Clash is now…
oracknows | October 22, 2006Yesterday I was in a strange mood; so I posted a couple of David Hasselhoff videos, asking the question: Why is this guy such a big pop star in Germany? Fellow ScienceBlogger Mike the Mad Biologist then informed me that the videos that I posted (the Hoff doing Rhinestone Cowboy and Secret Agent Man) aren't necessarily the "best" the Hoff has to offer. And I have to admit that he's right. See if you agree:
What's with the Hoff and flying in videos? He was flying in the Secret Agent Man video, and he's flying here.
But, with all due respect to Mike, I'm not sure if even the above video is…
oracknows | October 21, 2006...OK, no you didn't. But I found it amusing, anyway.
Can anyone explain to me why David Hasselhoff is such a phenomenon in Germany and other parts of Europe? Or why the video below ever got made:
It's a question I've asked before.
oracknows | October 16, 2006Last night, Patti Smith performed the final concert (see here as well) at punk rock Mecca CBGB. Today, they are planning on beginning to dismantle the club. The club's demise was the result of a prolonged landlord-tenant dispute, and the landlord declined to renew the lease.
Many bands that I grew up to love, like Talking Heads, Blondie, the Ramones, and the Patti Smith Group got exposure there and grew into national acts.
It is truly a sad day in music history, and owner Hilly Krystal's solution just won't be the same:
Kristal plans to move the club far from its roots with a new CBGB's in…
terrasig | October 13, 2006Modern Skirts, the musical darlings of the Athens, GA, music scene, will be making their New York City live debut this evening at the legendary Mercury Cafe. They'll be playing with tremendous Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter, Jennifer O'Connor, and indie stalwarts, Portostatic.
Modern Skirts are an intelligent piano- and guitar-based band with impeccable focus on interesting and intoxicatingly infectious song structures centered around tremendous vocal abilities, most often from the fresh tenor of Jay Gulley, but all of the guys can sing...I mean, really sing! They list as their primary…