A Million Miles Away - the Plimsouls

A classic, very hard rocking new wave song from 1983. The verse builds a slow hook that leads into the multi hook of the verse. '83 was pretty close to the peak diversity of 80s pop.  A lot of great stuff was going on at the time...

Low Tide of the Night - Everything But the Girl

[link] I really like the housey stuff that this duo has done.  Very easy down tempo groove with the maudlin chords and amazing vocals of Tracey Thorn.  Some of the best atmosphere among music I heard in its time.

Set is shaping up

The set for my April 19 Earthstock performance is shaping up pretty well.  I definitely have 30 min worth of new songs, with most of them different from what I played last year.

Never as Good as the First Time - Sade

[link] I'm a huge fan of all the Sade classics. Coolness distilled.  This song has so much good stuff going on in both the top and bottom of the mix.  The breaks before the verses.  The vocal harmonies are extremely penetrating.  The bass and synth rhythm lines are really cutting.  But all within a very controlled and essentially single bass root groove (there are a couple of chords underneath the chorus, but still...).  Everything fits together perfectly in this song...

cool wizard hat for performing

Found this on eBay and just bought it.  Should be fun (hope it fits) to wear on stage.

Masquerade - Berlin

[link] I've always like this 1982 song. Perhaps captures a cliche about the Euro scene of the time (in both the band name overall and the song title), but it is a slice of the zeitgeist of the time.  And both the songwriting and the instrumentation are a tribute to early Euro synth pop/alt...

Linda Linda - Blue Heart

There is a lot to this, even if the song is really simple.

I would love

to be Dave Stewart to someone's Annie Lennox.

Modern Love is Automatic - A Flock of Seagulls

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztFdyL63RiI]  Probably because of the hair, these guys got a lot more criticism than they deserved.  These guys were on the early vanguard of synth pop as it went global and into the top 40 lists.  Their songs are layered, moody, and atmospheric.  And they haven't lost anything in 30 years.

A Thousand Stars - Pale Saints

[link] One of the original 4AD bands that kicked off Shoegaze.  All about the atmosphere.  90s college radio was full of this sound.  Possibly the last truly formative time for me, musically...

Cosplay

It's one of the coolest phenomena in the universe.  It just makes me happy, even thought I don't know half of the movies/comics/manga/anime/video games these people are dressing up as.
I'm bummed that there was no I-Con this year.  I've only been once but I like being on campus when it's going on.  I was once an avid D&Der.  These are my people.

The Last of the Famous International Playboys - Morrissey

[link] This is a great great song.  Reflects Morrisseys apparent fascination with 1960s London gangster/club owners Reggie and Ronnie Crayne.  A two chord hook with M's epic lilt over the top - perfect.

Don't Wanna Fall In Love - Jane Child

I really like this 1990 hit. Really all about the chorus hook.

Turn to You - the Go-Gos

[link] They were great. The 80s were great precisely because acts with this kind of freshness were all over the place.

Winning the War - Til Tuesday

[link] One of my favorites of theirs.  Just really fantastic pop song writing.

Red Ball 1, 2, 3 (Vintage Sesame Street)

[link] I loved this on Sesame Street, although I think it was a different version.  In the end there was no little girl eating a sundae with the ball as a cherry.  Instead, it became powder.  The synthesized soundtrack (which is like the Moog album I listed to a lot as a kid) seemed to really go with the film, providing a sort of atmosphere for this highly abstracted setting.  Cool stuff.

Hit - The Sugarcubes

[link] One of the freshest sounds of the early 90s era.  These guys did so many things right, starting with Bjork's look, attitude, and amazing vocal style.  And the rhythm tracks were always rock solid.  Songs like this will never grow old...

Kiss on My List - Hall & Oates

From 1980.  Heard it on the radio in the car today.  It's supreme pop.  Terrific keyboards, bass line, and vocal harmonies.  It's sing song happy pop, but a really sophisticated version.  These guys have just a ton of really great pop songs.  They are masters.

Answers to Nothing - Midge Ure

[link] I really like the rhythm track to this song. Up-tempo and with the keyboards sets a really nice atmosphere.  The lyrics and vocal track are just OK, but as a composition it works really well.  The song got some good airplay on alternative stations in 1988 when it came out.  Seems to have aged pretty well.

Pepper - Butthole Surfers

An alt-rock classic from the 90s.  The chorus is a pop-rock hook.  Yeah, it's sort of about heroin.  So are a lot of things in rock...

Kidney Bingos - Wire

I love this song, although I have to idea what it's about.  Great chord progression in the guitar and really good sounding bass runs.  This live in-studio version is interesting.

set

Starting to think about my set for Earthstock in a few weeks.  So far: Evangeline, Layla, Thousands are Sailing, Southern Cross, Girl Like Jesus, Folson Prison Blues, Ring of Fire, New Years Day, After the Gold Rush.  The last two I have to work on memorizing...

The Toadlickers - Thomas Dolby

[link] Hadn't seen this before.  Dolby arrives about 30 years late at a (hopefully) fascination with rural Americana. Not much here.

867-5309/Jenny - Tommy Tutone

There's a reason why this song was such a huge hit.  It's the hooky chord progression, predominantly.  Everything else in the song serves it.  The lyrics are clear and tell a story everybody gets.  The B part is pretty good too, ending in the break back into the intro/progression and then the instrumental.  It all works.  Seamless pop.

The Chauffeur - Duran Duran

[link]  Probably came across as a bit of an outlier amongst their huge pop hits of the time.  But songs like this grow on you and bear the test of time.  A simultaneously atmospheric and joyously bouncy (once the rhythm kicks in) song.

Laughing Man - Red Rider

Great song off their 1981 "As Far As Siam" album.  Hooky little verse makes it.  Nice integration of keyboard and guitar sounds.  They were much more of a band in those days than a vehicle for Tom Cochrane's vocals, although that component has always been a crucial component of the band's sound.

what to use

On my FaceBook page, there's a bit of a discussion between R users and Python users about which is better, but neither of these groups does what I want to do: population genetic simulations.  So for the moment I'm sticking with BASIC and studying sorting protocols and seeing how fast they are on various sized arrays.

Money's Too Tight to Mention - Simply Red

[link] A classic of the 80s. Hadn't seen the video before.  I guess the setting is meant to be realistic; rough. Vocally, you pretty can't be more sort of quietly powerful than Mick Hucknall.  The A part is a great simple chord progression groove. I wonder if the whole social class thing is why the Brits have always understood and had the chops for real blues and soul.

first success in R

R is pretty opaque, looking at the code and all the argument names, from what I'm used to.  But I successfully input a starting data matrix for population genetic simulations (1000 individuals with genotype/phenotype data at two loci).  Baby steps...

R

In my insomina hour overnight I read a tutorial on R (programing language implementation of S++ statistical software), which all the kool kidz in my field are using now.  Looks like I can use it for population genetic simulations. I have always used BASIC, and still "think in" that language, and I never learned a compilable language (I took a Pascal course in college and have read part of a book on object oriented C but neither of those stuck with me).  R speeds up and simplifies a lot of array/matrix stuff (like sorting), that are key to the way I write individual based simulations.  If I get some time, I'll try to write the Converse Antagonistic Pleiotropy model simulations in R; it will be a good excuse to learn the language.

King in a Catholic Style - China Crisis

[from 1985] Was a bit into these guys back in the early 90s.  They have a unique, light sound but with some deep lyrical topics.  At least in America, they were alternative.  But still very poppy.

Miss Gradenko - The Police

One of the gems on the Synchronicity album. Chant-like and abstract; a distillation of a situation that allows the song to expand as sort of a mood, able to be the background of other, somehow similar stories.  Just a short thing, but really fascinating...

Til Tuesday - You Know the Rest

The 1985 album Voices Carry was an American pop classic.  The pity is that most people only know it from the smash hit title song.  But just about every other song is even more amazing than that one.  This song is just one.  I really like Aimee Mann's voice coupled with the synth oriented pop/rock backing that the band provided.  It's probably a bit of production, but I prefer this sound to Mann's later, more singer songwriter stuff.
The best part of this song is the rally back into the chorus after the quiet verse toward the end of the song.  Luscious.

Think I'm in Love - Eddie Money

[link] Eddie Money has had his problems and is lately into self-parody.  But his 1982 "No Control" album is really good; hard hitting hooky rock.  Especially this song and "Shakin'", the other single.

Copperhead Road - Steve Earle

I've always liked this song. Colorful, sad, paints a picture about rural life and social class. Always more complex than any politics can capture.

If I get a chance

to actually write an individual based model for the converse pleiotropy idea, I'll be programming in BASIC like I always have.  I never really learned another language.  20 years ago, one would have needed to learn a compilable language to have any hope of running bulk simulations with realistic parameters (e.g. population sizes in the thousands or higher).  But in recent years with PCs getting faster and faster, this is much less of an issue.  I really love BASIC.  It's intuitive to me and the simple programming methods are all straightforward.  Except that I don't know a fast sorting algorithm, which would be really useful for population genetic models involving selection.

Our Song - Yes

A hidden gem on an iconic rock album of the 80s. Yes, probably moreso than Rush and Genesis (whose popular stuff was not as proggy), introduced progressive rock ideas into the mainstream of pop, at least briefly with this album.  I don't think this has been replicated since.

Nowhere Girl - B-Movie

From1980. An early and truly excellent specimen of synth pop. I didn't discover this until recent years, listening to Flashback Alternatives and, lately, Soma FM's station Underground 80s, which is also excellent.

On Our Own - Bobby Brown

This was the main theme for the 1989 movie Ghostbusters II. Watched (most of) this on cable this afternoon.  It's not a bad movie song.  It's hooky.  The movie didn't do as well as the first one, but there is no way it could have.  It relied on many of the gags that were used in the first movie.  But it hasn't aged too badly, mostly because all of the actors are there and we don't see them too much these days.

A model

I've been moving closer to being able to model the converse pleiotopy idea using an individual based simulation.  Since the question is interwoven with the evolution of parental care, I'll probably model that first, and then impose a phenotype of the offspring that "uses up" the investment by the parent.  I should be able to use a two gene model.  One gene will control parental care.  The other gene will control the offspring phenotype, which will be a twofold, pleiotropic phenotype, one will be adult fitness and the other will be the juvenile fitness cost of the parent to rear it.

Stone Cold - Rainbow

From 1982.  This was the end of the album rock radio era in Rochester, NY where I grew up.  Ritchie Blackmoor and Ronnie James Dio have and had top hard rock/heavy metal credentials but songs like this (which is in the same subgenre as Foreigner, who was king at this time) have huge pop instincts.  The hard rock elements are reined in and the pop formula is served.  The B part even has a funk feel (Chicago was also huge at this time).  The early 80s were a time of hybridization and overlap among genres in rock.  The chord progression in the chorus is really nice. There was certainly a lot of pursuit of the hit and subjugation of creativity, but I think the successes are still very listenable.  And the pop formulae are distilled and therefore easier to decipher.

Ventura Highway - America

I'm very wistful about this song and America's sound. It came out in 1972 and was played heavily on AM top 40 radio throughout the rest of the 70s.  I fell in love with pop music at this time.  The song seems injected with 70s ambivalence.  I still think the 70s are the least understood decade of the past several.  This sound brings both nostalgia and mystery...

This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) - Talking Heads

Watched (most of) the sequel to Wall Street this evening. This song was in both movies.  The introduction and instrumental parts have huge narrative content.  The song was one of the things that really made me like the first movie.  The second movie references a lot of the specific little details of the first.  I guess I didn't expect that.  It was an OK movie.

Gate and Garden - Stevie Nicks

I really liked this ballad, which is not one of her radio hits, in high school.  It hasn't aged incredibly well. The verse is rather uneventful.  The chorus is better.  The progression is a speeded up version of the Fleetwood Mac mega hit Sara.  It was good to hear this song after a lot of years...

My Head's in Mississippi - ZZTop

[link] One of my favorite songs of theirs.  Silly, like most of their stuff.  But the guitar lines are so juicy, and the chords are minor (I think).  So... gotta love it. Also, eye candy aside, visually, Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill, especially in their prime in the 80s, had such perfect visual, living-cartoon images going, they are really hard to dislike .

Aqua Teen Hunger Force

I was sort of amused by this show about ten years ago.  The intro theme is fun.  But this show and everything on [adult swim] from Cartoon Network became so nihilistic, I became not only uninterested, but actually saddened by it.  Haven't watched it in years.  The best show, which actually had a point (nostaligia for comics and SF) was Venture Brothers.  Very funny and very intelligent.

Duel - Propaganda

From 1985. By the mid 80s over-production and homogenization was taking the life out of a lot of British pop (see e.g. Rick Astley, Johnny Hates Hazz, and many others). Unfortunately Propaganda fell into this pattern as well. "Duel" is an example of a song with only one good idea, the chorus, and that is over used and has its impact squelched by the production.

I'm Not Perfect (But I'm Perfect For You) - Grace Jones

A great, bouncy little dance song.  Grace has both vocal chops and a theatrical flare.  She is stunning to look at in all ways. She co-wrote this (1986) song with Bruce Woolley of the Buggles (another of my faves).  Produced by Nile Rodgers, who perfected disco with Chic and >50% invented Madonna.

fun lunch

Had a burger and a beer off campus today with Steve S, former member of Megachild from back in the day.  We reminisced a lot.  Those were fun times...

gigs

I probably won't do the department post-retreat party like Megachild has done for a while.  So the only upcoming gig will be SBU Earthstock in April.  That went pretty well last year and I think I can do a better job this year.

East of Eden - Big Country

[link]1984's "Steeltown" is one of my all time favorite albums and one of the hidden gems of the 80s, since it did not have any US hits.  The songs are intense, the playing and vocals are really good.  I listened the hell out my cassette of this album back in the day.

Escape - Journey

Title song from my favorite album of theirs.  Powerful hard rock.  Perry's pipes were the best among all rock vocalists of the time, in my opinion.  And they could really play their instruments.  This song, like a lot of their stuff, has multiple profound hooks.  They can go on one hooky structure for half the song and switch to entirely different hook for the rest of the song.  Rock/pop songwriting at its highest level.

Not much time

for uke work lately.  Some quick practice or jamming here and there; that's all.  Parenting has been pretty intensive.  Going OK.  Work is pretty demanding these days as well.

Little By Little - Robert Plant

[link] Plant's first three solo albums are among my very favorite of anything in rock.  This was one of the radio hits from Shaken 'n' Stirred.  Love the tempo.  And the guitar work (Robbie Blunt).

Another way to think about it

Antagonistic pleiotropy in senescence is "good first"; "bad later". What I was thinking about in the previous post is the opposite: "bad first"; "good later" (but still before/during reproduction).  Generally, the bad aspects of juveniles during development are made up for by parenting.  The parental contribution masks what would otherwise be an essentially lethal fitness defect in the developing offspring.  But that parenting can go easy or hard.  The parents want to maximize the efficiency of their contribution, so the best offspring to have are "easy" offspring that don't cost a lot of effort.  The "bad" in the converse antagonistic pleiotropy would be aspects that run up against the maximum threshold of effort the parents are willing/able to give.  Still more thinking to be done on this...

Sole Survivor - Asia

My best friend in junior high/high  school Scott was a huge Asia fan.  Their radio hits were mostly pretty good.  This is my favorite of theirs.  (I also loved their album covers - and the Yes ones that are in the same vein).

Antagonistic Pleiotropy

Pleiotropy is when one gene has multiple functions and is very common in development, physiology, and life history of multicellular organisms.  Antagonistic pleiotropy describes situations in evolution when an allele has function(s) that are advantageous as well as function(s) that are disadvantageous.  Two conceptually well known types of antagonistic pleiotropy are in loci thought to be responsible for aging (senescence) and in loci that are advantageous in one sex and disadvantageous in the other sex (sexually antagonistic pleiotropy).  The reasons why these genes/alleles increase to fixation (100%) in populations is that the advantage of their "good" function outweighs the disadvantage of their "bad" function.  For example, many alleles thought to be responsible for senescence are thought to have been selected for their advantages earlier in life, such as in increased juvenile fitness or increased fertility and fecundity.  Since reproduction occurs before aging, then evolution cannot "see" the disadvantages that accrue later in life from alleles that are really good to have earlier in life, so those alleles increase to fixation in populations.  Today I thought about a converse kind of potential antagonistic pleiotropy: genes that are disadvantageous (at least mildly so) early in life and turn out to be advantageous later in life (but not too late, so still before or during reproductive maturity).  I don't know what to call this yet, but of course what inspired me are the many traits of small children that are so hard to deal with but are the by-products of a developing brain that when mature yields tons of advantages later on in life.  I need to do more thinking about this concept and relate to the evolution of neoteny and parental care.  Perhaps more on this down the road...

Not much time

For uke playing lately. Parenting and running the household.

Stand Back - Stevie Nicks

[link] I grew up singing along with Stevie Nicks.  She and I love the same chord progressions (really just one progression).  This was a time when people did not shun synthesizers.  So she was perfect for me as a keyboardist.  The enchantress imagery was also cool, but not the main draw for me.

Life of Surprises - Prefab Sprout

Another great one by them.  This one is all about the big chord progression hook in the verse.  Love it.

Golden Calf - Prefab Sprout

[link] Here's an earlier one with a more conventional pop structure than most of their stuff.  Clearly they are soul influenced but they take it in a different pop direction than say Style Council, which was roughly contemporary.  The instrumental production is really atmospheric.

Appetite - Prefab Sprout

[link] One of my favorite bands.  The Thomas Dolby production is a clear connection to my tastes.  The vocals are great.  Some of their stuff is a bit too on the jazzy side for me, and they have a tendency to sacrifice pop structure for composition and concept (and concept albums), but they have some brilliant songs.  This is one.

Rhythm of the Night - Corona

Staying with this vein - this song is also total candy.  The verse is a very nice cascading vocal.  The chorus is the main hook, of course.  The bouncing synth line as a counterpoint to the chorus vocal is another nice touch.  It's totally understandable why songs like this are so accessible to people on dance floor.  Hooks rule.  It's kind of what this blog has always been about.

Be My Lover - La Bouche

[link] There is something to be said for this pure candy dance music from the 90s.  It has my chord progression throughout.  And is pretty good with the atmosphere.  I can do without the rap part.  But the rest of it is pretty damn good...

Down in the Park - Gary Numan

[link] No one sounded like Numan.  It's a pure embrace of the future, of techno/synth sounds.  His voice becomes another synthetic thing, willingly.  It's not an optimistic vision, but it is a total atmosphere.  It's there for escape.

Silver Rainbow - Genesis

[link] I always liked the trippiness of the opening of this song.  It then becomes a more conventional rock song.  One of the less noticed songs on probably the last quality album from Genesis.  Takes me right back to 1983.

Straight Into Darkness - Tom Petty

Great great song.

Small Talk - Scritti Politti

From 1985. One of the staples from my early college days.

Feels So Good - Chuck Mangione

[link] Growing up in school bands in the Rochester, NY area meant that you idolized Chuck Mangione. My older brother was a trumpet player at the time, so we had Chuck's popular albums of that era and played them quite a bit. I only now realized looking at his Wikipedia page that Chuck is about the same age as my parents. I always imagined him as younger than that.

Adult Education - Hall & Oates

[link] From 1984. One of my favorites of theirs.  The rhythm section groove makes it; love the strumming guitar.  The cadence of the lyrics is perfect.  Really just one three chord progression through the whole song.  I don't really get the video.  It doesn't seem to fit the lyrics (which I think a lot of people actually got).

Comic Book Men

Have been enjoying this reality series on Netflix.  I used to hang out with dudes like these guys back home.

Emotion in Motion - Naked Eyes

[link] A sweeping synth pop song.  Majestic.  The descending vocal line in the verse catches me and holds me through the whole thing...

Middlemarch

Started reading it (free from iBooks) on recommendation from Atrios. Haven't read Victorian fiction before but I've enjoyed a couple of Edwardian (I think they're called) movie versions ( A Room With a View and Howard's End), which are later but seem to have some similar themes. Commenters on Eschaton seem to think MM is difficult compared with say Pride and Prejudice, which I've seen parts of carious movie versions of . We'll see.

couple of themes I've been jamming on lately

Theme 1

Theme 2

Played through my Roland micro Cube with some pretty good on board distortion (using an amp model), flange, and chorus.

Flying North - Thomas Dolby

[link] One of my favorites.  From "The Golden Age of Wireless", his first and I still think, his best, album.  Trenchant.

I Wanna Be a Flinstone - Screaming Blue Messiahs

[link] Just silly fun.  This band has some really good songs.  This is sort of one of them.

double chin genetics

This might be an interesting topic of study (provided cases of benign double chins could be distinguished from cases of goiter).  I appear to be homozygous for double-chin promoting alleles at many double chin QTL loci.  Men in both sides of my family have had this trait.

Sabotage - Beastie Boys

Really great video.  Which vastly helps the song, which is also great, sink in.

Money 80s songs

I used to (very amateurly) DJ parties with iTunes on my computer and a small PA setup.  I actually did a wedding reception once.  There are several songs from the 80s (and some 70s) that always got people out dancing.  Here are some of the ones that I can remember:

Rock Me Amadeus - Falco
99 Luftballoons - Nena Hagen
Dancing Queen - Abba
One Night in Bangkok - Murray Head
Whip It - Devo
Tainted Love - Soft Cell
Don't You Love Me - Human League
Rock Lobster - the B52s
Love Shack - the B52s
Sabotage - Beastie Boys
Word Up - Cameo
I Feel For You - Chaka Khan
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
Come On Eileen - Dexy's Midnight Runners
Brick House - The Commodores

this will have to be Volume I; I'll get back to this list in a later post...

Little Fluffy Clouds - Orb

Hard to fathom this song is 23 years old.  This was a core ambient house song in the high time of raves. It's incredibly atmospheric and the use of the audio sample (Ricki Lee Jones from an interview) is mesmerizing.  The adding and subtracting of tracks, a staple of house, is really effective in adding to the ambiance and narrative quality.  The most trenchant passages are when the tracks are reduced down two one or a few rhythm tracks.

One Night in Bangkok - Murray Head

[link] Never saw the musical but I've always loved this iconic 80s song.  Right into the mid 80s, pop had a lot of different types of music in it (although still probably not as diverse as the late 70s, when country was regularly in the top 40), including what were essentially novelty songs like this.

Kiss You (When It's Dangerous) - Eight Seconds

Another gem from the 80s (1986) found on Flashback Alternatives.  The rhythm section sets up a very nice tempo and guitar rhythm.  Then the big title hook is the chorus.  The verse and bridge parts are just OK.  This is one of the only Fixx-sounding bands that I've ever come across.  These guys are from Canada and this song was produced by Rupert Hine in the UK.  Hine recorded With One Look with Cy Curnin of the Fixx, the ending title song of the 1985 movie Better Off Dead (great flick), so the connection is there. Hine produced the Fixx as well.  So the sound similarity makes sense.

Review of The Hobbit

From io9.  This is a very positive review that I mostly agree with.  I enjoyed the movie a lot, especially the concentration on the backstory of the dwarves.  I always played dwarf characters in D&D because I was inspired by the Hobbit and Gimli in LOTR (although the dwarf portrayals in the Rankin Bass cartoon version of The Hobbit, which also massively influenced me, were rather weak and hapless).

Young and Proud - Ace of Bass

I loved the early stuff from this band.  More the less well known tracks than the ones that were played incessantly on the radio. Good dance pop.  This is one of my favorites from the first album.  The anime stills are cute.  Also into anime a bit these days.  Perhaps more on that in the future...

Images of Heaven - Peter Godwin

From 1982. Have heard this song quite a bit on Flashback Alternatives.  It's all about the chord progression and the Bryan Ferry-inspired (weren't all those turn of the decade post-punk bands) vocal. I love the 60s fashion video clip that were put with the song in this youtube video.
Godwin was in the band Metro and wrote the song "Criminal World", which Bowie covered on his Let's Dance album (a favorite of mine, indicating to true Bowie fans that I am not one of them). Here is Metro's version of "Criminal World."

Ship of Fools - Erasure

From 1988. These guys were huge on college radio, dance club scene, and a little bit into the US mainstream invthe late 80s. I've always liked this song and learned it the other day. I have to sing it an octave down but the soaring vocal above the slower changing chord hooks is the key to the song.

Strange Fruit - Catherine Wheel

[link] I think I blogged about this song in the early days of onsongs.  Doesn't matter.  This song always pays going back to.  It moves.  It entrances.  It penetrates.  A miasmic syringe of trenchant-ness.

Weakness - Inspiral Carpets

[link] These guys have been around since the 80s and were part of the college/alt rock scene that I didn't have a chance to explore.  Heard this song today in the lab on Flashback Alternatives internet radio.  Chord progression driven.  Can certainly here the punk roots, also ska.  Powerful vocal.

Something For You - Dillon Fence

These guys were beginning to be huge in the Triangle when I was in Durham but I never caught them live.  They are apparently still going.  Good to see.  Their first album, of which this is the only track I can find online, was 100% sweet, bouncy pop songs.

Him - Rupert Holmes

From 1980. One of those somewhat odd little pop songs characteristic of that diverse musical time. Got played a lot on the radio that year then seemingly vanished.

Pitch the Baby - Cocteau Twins

[link] Don't know what the title means and haven't tried to decipher the lyrics, but it doesn't much matter. This is yet another hugely formative slice of the 90s for me.  I listened to Heaven or Las Vegas a lot on drives between Durham and Raleigh (over to NC State for a class); great driving music.  Some of the most beautiful pop in history was made by CT.  The atmospherics are perfect.  Their sound helped spawn the genre of Shoegaze.

Take Me Back - Single Gun Theory

This song in fact does take me back.  Again to my grad school days.  Really like the sample from "Splendor in the Grass" (because I love Natalie Wood).  It's a really cool mid-tempo song.  Love the vocal.  This band has more recent stuff that I have not explored at all.

The Hobbit

Saw the new movie today (part I of a trilogy).  It was well made and entertaining.  Some stuff was embellished and the story was supplemented with important background stuff from Lost Tales and/or The Silmarillion (have not fully read either).  I ended up really liking the Radagast part.  My Tralfaz persona owes a bit to that sort of character, in addition to Gandalf.
I've always like the dwarves and always played dwarves in D&D. I grew up on the Rankin Bass cartoon version, which is simplified and kid friendly.  But I think that version captured some of the real essences of the story, including Bilbo, Gandalf (the John Huston voice was excellent), and Gollum.

Reptile - The Church

Another one from the soundtrack of my grad school days.  One of their best (and most up tempo).  They are masters of desolate atmosphere.  I drank a lot of Rolling Rock to this album.  1989-1990.  It was a brooding time.

Surreal Reebok commercial

I remember this ad from the 90s.  The song is "Surfin' Bird" by The Trashmen. The ad is one of the weirder things I saw in that decade (didn't watch much TV so there was probably a lot weirder stuff that I didn't see).

SCMF news

Our local Chinese take out place, The Great Wall, in Sound Beach, is making some very excellent Singapore rice noodles these days.

Chihuahua - The Sugarcubes

[link] Great percussion (again).  A bouncy fun song.  Bjork's vocals, which I can only describe here as juicy, also make this song.  This is almost an instrumental.  A jam on a riff.  Amazing...

Deus - The Sugarcubes

Love this song too.  Nice mid tempo groove - their drummer is truly excellent.  The B part really rallies the song - great chord progression.  Another perfect song from a perfect band.  Definitely on the soundtrack of my graduate school years.

Motorcrash - The Sugarcubes

Bjork's best work was with the Sugarcubes.  Nobody sounded like this band.  Nobody looks like Bjork or sings like her.  And this was one of several songs of theirs that was just perfect.  They don't make bands or music like this anymore.

One of Our Submarines - Thomas Dolby

[link]  This is Dolby's essence.  Retro, tech, gloomy, atmospheric, yet weaving a huge and vibrant emotional tapestry.  This was one of the most played songs on The Golden Age of Wireless (1982), one of the first albums that became part of the core of my musical being.