Also...... 400 weeks of music!!! That’s just amazing. Really awesome. Well done, Hubski!
If I have to hear another song from Hamilton... I’ve been hanging out with a guy that was the original drummer for Superchunk. I really like him and his family. But the truth is, I’ve never listened to them. I started this weekend. Some good stuff there. He’s a very nice guy. Smart and very kind. His wife is likewise. So here’s some Superchunk with him on drums:
I'm still grooving on the George Clinton album this thread introduced me to last week ("How Late Do U Have 2BB4UR Absent?"), and Prince's role in it. ("Paradigm" and "Bounce To This" are standout tracks.) And Kat Wright has made it into all my playlists. She's wonderful. But in my shop the other day, Spotify noticed I had a lot of Hungarian bands in my playlist (from when I lived there), and reminded me of how goddamn fantastic Tankcsapda is!! ("Tank Trap" in Hungarian, and pronounced 'TONK-chop-da') Basically, the bass player (Laszlo, pronounced "LAHZ-lo") idolizes Lemmy of Motorhead, and made himself a Hungarian version of Motorhead. Over the years he has been the center of the band, and has had some players come and go (like Lemmy), but they have kept the essential power and pure rock-n-roll drive and ethos. Here's a sample of some Tankcsapda for my fellow metalheads/motorheads/rock-n-rollers: "Tourist in Heaven": "I want nothing": "Every Friday": "This is the house": This last one is particularly heart-tugging for Hungarians. Laszlo is the biggest rock star Hungary has (possibly), but he's humble. A chill dude. In this song he literally walks you through his house - "this is the place / the place where I live / it's not luxury / but it is comfortable and home" - and at the end of the song it gets quiet, chill, and ends with the lyric, "this is it. I live here". Meaning his home. His country. His people. It's pretty touching, honestly.
That post the other day about country music with that Tanya Tucker song reminded me that she was the original artist of "Jamestown Ferry" which was covered/repurposed by Swedish singer Alf Robertson. The ferry and honky tonk bars were replaced with things more familiar to the dansband audiences at home in Robertson's rendition "Hon steg på Finlandsbåten". Robertson probably heard it in Nashville since he lived there around the time of her break-through, but I ended up making a playlist with songs Swedish artists (probably) heard on Radio Luxembourg and turned into Swedish hits. The short-and-sweetly named folk song "Monday Morning" popularized by Peter, Paul and Mary was picked up by Swedish-Dutch singer Cornelis Vreeswijk and given the ridiculously long name "Balladen om herr Fredrik Åkare och den söta fröken Cecilia Lind". At the moment it has 11.2 million plays on Spotify, compared to around 300 000 for the PP&M version. Tom Paxton's dreamy "I Give You the Morning" got the more straight-forward name "Jag ger dig min morgon" by Fred Åkerström. Paxton's version sits at around 600.000 plays, dwarfed by Fred Åkerström's 14 million plays. Dutch singer Anita Meyer's disco banger "Why Tell Me Why" was taken up by Carola and turned into "Säg mig var du står", which I posted an acid revival version of previously on Hubski. Both the original and Carola's version sits at around 10 million plays on Spotify.
Every so often, you find some music that's unlike anything else you've ever heard. Sometimes it's an odd mash up of a couple of styles or genres that you'd never think to place together. And sometimes it's a totally undiscovered exotic genre salad - with unusual spices and fruit, a lovely delicate assortment of bitter leaves. There are oils you can't quite identify mixed up with fruit and some sour notes. This week I stumbled upon Pixvae and as far as I know they only have 2 albums. • First is the eponymous Pixvae • Second is Cali, released last year some time I've worn out my copy of bandcamp listening to that first album. It just sets my brain on fire. Love at first sight but, you know, with your ears. It's rare these days for me to find music I'm genuinely excited about - there's plenty of great music out there, but not that entirely captivates me, but this is one of those rare times to cherish. For most bands I like to check how they are live so: