Friday random Ten, Feb 2

  1. Marillion, "Ocean Cloud": Long, wonderful piece of neo-prog rock from my favorite prog band.
  2. Mogwai, "Acid Food": Mogwai is a brilliant post-rock group, leaning more towards
    the rock than the classical. This is a slow track with vocals, with a very dark sound
    to it. Very cool.
  3. Trey Gunn Band, "Sozzle": Eh. Trey Gunn is a brilliant touch guitar player, but
    as a composer, he's really pretty dull.
  4. Pain of Salvation, "Lilium Cruentus (Deus Nova)": Another bit of neo-prog; PoS is a spinoff of the Flower Kings. This is off of a very strange album... It's a very
    pretentious piece of work. I don't think it's as profound as it was intended to be. But I do like it.
  5. Dirty Three, "I Really Should've Gone Out Last Night": Dirty Three is one of the
    more-classical leaning post-rock ensembles; I've yet to find anything that they're recorded that I think is less then brilliant.
  6. Igor Stravinsky, "Praeludium" from the Shadow Dances: A very short piece; very distinctly Stravinsky. Beautiful, and haunting.
  7. King Crimson, "People": King Crimson from the double-trio days. Brilliant.
  8. New Grange, "Goin' to Boston": New Grange is a sort of accidental super-band. They're a group of artists that all record on Alison Brown's Compass label. For
    an anniversary of Compass, they got together to do a concert, and ended up
    forming into a band for this album. Darol Anger, Alison Brown, Mike Marshall,
    Tim O'Brien. This is a thoroughly weird track. Basically, it starts
    off as a traditional old-time tune; then it goes off into a sort of almost rap
    about the city of Boston, done against the backdrop of Darol fiddling around with the old tune.
  9. Tan Dun and the Kronos Quartet, "Earth Dance" from the Ghost Opera: Tan Dun is
    one of my favorite composers. He's a Chinese composer, and a victim of the
    cultural revolution. His music tends to have strong influences from Chinese
    folk music blended with modern Western music. The Ghost Opera is based on
    a Chinese folk tradition where villages actually have mourning teams: when a wealthy person dies, the actually hire people to cry and scream in mourning. Villages compete to have the best mourning team.
  10. Hugh Blumenfield, "Shoot the Moon": Hugh is an English professor from Connecticut, who does folk music on the side. He's a fantastic song-writer, and this is one of my favorites of his songs. I've met Hugh in person a couple of times, and I have to say that he is a thoroughly pleasant guy.
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Someone recommended Pain of Salvation to me on the basis of my prog metal collection. I got their album "The Perfect Element I" and found it to be completely unlistenable prog wankery with absolutely no redeeming qualities. They earned a metal classification, I believe, solely on the basis of their ridiculously over-the-top angst, which only pushed them closer to the apex of utter mediocrity. It's one of the worst CDs in my collection.

Have you heard any Fates Warning? Their newest is very good IMO, in the genre that PoS would be in if they were actually making music.