131 Van Halen Songs, Ranked

You can’t listen to “Dance the Night Away” without feeling good. This should be the hold music for suicide prevention hotlines.

On Vulture, Chuck Klosterman ranks all 131 recorded Van Halen songs. Overall I agree with many of these choices but there are a few I would argue with. “Dirty Movies” at 61, above anything on A Different Kind of Truth? “Right Now” at 58, above “Poundcake” at 35? Come on.

Date posted: September 5, 2018 | Filed under music, shortlinks | Leave a Comment »

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Interesting…

Drug Church, World Impact. The vocalist gargles with razor blades, the groove is sludgy but fast,  the chorus is killer and the lyrics are great. This shouldn’t work but it does. I found this band in an article about Turnstile and the future of hardcore, and it gives me hope. I want more of this to restore my faith in guitar-based rock.

Pitchfork did a quick piece on a band called Crushed, using touchpoints like the Sneaker Pimps, the Sundays, and Ivy, which is basically a Venn diagram of music I love. Their EP is pretty good; I can see some of the influences, and I think with a little more work and editing there’s something promising here. The first track is the one I’m replaying the most.

This week’s earworm: Sometimes, by My Bloody Valentine. I wasn’t ever a big fan of MBV back in the day; I heard several of their songs and just couldn’t get into it. When the movie Lost in Translation came out in 2003, they used several MBV songs in the movie, and the sequence with this song stuck out with me. It’s the best song on the album in my opinion, and it has all the things I like with nothing I don’t.

Long ago in 1995 I was watching MTV while making my dinner and saw a clip featuring a scruffy-looking Portland band playing a killer song. I just happened to have a copy of the City Paper and saw that they were playing the 8×10 on a weeknight, so naturally I roped my roommates into going down and seeing the show, where we all had a great time and I bought a copy of the CD and a T-shirt. Any resemblance to my dog’s current name is purely coincidental. But this song rips.

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My friend Rosie, who I hired at WRI and subsequently got hired away by the Wall Street Journal, had her very first byline last week, a story on coaching trees in the NFL. Yay Rosie!

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Here’s some new tasty font goodness from an old-school design/web hero of mine: Dan Cederholm put up a storefront with some excellent display fonts and design-nerd merch.

I’ve had this rattling around in my head for the last couple of days, after falling down an INXS rabbit hole—mostly reviewing their earlier hits:

It’s hard to overstate just how big this song was in the fall of ’87.

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