Some of My Favourite Songs Pt. 1
The blog has been receiving less attention from me recently due to some other creative projects (photography and my own music), but I didn't want it to die, so for now, I'll simply replace the Short and Quick column with this one, where I'll just ramble about some of my favourite songs. I'll try to keep it to roughly a hundred but I don't know if I'll even reach that number. There is no ranking and ordering to this; it's simple, back to the basics, me talking about music I love. The only "rule" I'll make for this is keeping it to one song per band, Enjoy !
This was perhaps the hardest choice I had to make for this column, since I could simply write a whole column titled Some of My Favourite Songs and fill it with songs made by Jason Molina, but in the end I decided this was my pick for my favourite Songs:Ohia (for more Songs:Ohia, check out my full discography discussion here) song. Ghost Tropic is Molina at his absolute darkest, the instrumentation is minimal, the atmosphere is thick and your only companions are the birds chirping outside in the forest while he performs this record inside a cabin in the woods. It's pitch black, and the humidity is making it hard to breathe. At least this is how I imagine him performing this record. On The Ocean's Nerves, Molina yearns for death as he sings: "And I jealously want the ocean's deep nerve / I am a red flame hanging low to be close to it / Hanging low to be close to you". The person he sings of has died, and he is contemplating joining her in death. It's a song that is so simple, especially lyrically, compared to a lot of his other material, but manages to convey its desolate atmosphere perfectly.
Don't get me wrong, I love all the dark, murky, taking itself way too seriously, harsh noise that digs into the unpleasant side of humanity and it's emotions, but I also love Kazumoto Endo's Itabashi Girl, and the whole while you were out record for that matter, which takes harsh noise and makes it as absurd as possible. Itabashi Girl is seriously one of the funniest songs of all time, at least to me. For three minutes, you are barraged by a disorientating mix of noise and some Japanese pop sample I can't identify only, for a voice to call out "Move Your Body !" at the end of that whole experience. I don't really have that much to say about this one, but it's simply a gem for taking harsh noise to in a totally different, absurd and humorous direction.
For a long time La Dispute's debut was my favourite record of all time and it still ranks quite highly for me. I am not exaggerating when I say that this record and The Last Lost Continent completely changed my perception of what music can make me feel. When I first listened to the record at the age of 16, it was completely overwhelming in its emotionality. Every single syllable out of Jordan Dreyer's mouth seemed to convey some new emotion, and I hung onto every word. I would become so absorbed into the story that I felt like I was almost there. It really sparked my obsession with lyrically dense music in general, and La Dispute in particular, that has still carried on to this day, even if my genre of choice has changed with time.
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