Feels a Bit Stuffy: Blindfold Test #12

This may hold the distinction of being the most “mid” batch of blind items yet, as the kids might say. Well, I’m not sure they’d say “batch,” but you get the idea — No grades above 7.5. or below 5, and seven ranked at either 5 or 5.5. Still, I’ll try my best not to…

A Comicattle World: Blindfold Test #5

Thanks to the playlist that this fifth blindfold test just like its four predecessors is culled from, which playlist I have taken to playing in the background through the day, and which playlist as of this writing totals 4150 tracks adding up to 260 hours and 34 minutes, I now feel the need to confess…

Walkman Ist Kaputt: Blindfold Test #4

Astute observers and/or regular readers will note that, just like on my previous blindfold test, my favorite song on this one is also the oldest song here. You could blame that on my own impending dotage, I suppose, except that this installment’s song in question was recorded in 1935, 25 years before I was born,…

Bible of Being Average: Blindfold Test #3

Quite a relief to learn the person singing my favorite song below, which embarrassingly turns out to be not only by far the oldest (that’s not the embarrassing part) but the one with by far the most problematic lyrics (that is), is of not the ethnicity I feared but rather the ethnicity he refers to…

I Like Cows: Blindfold Test #2

In the initial installment of this sonic experiment and/or semi-educated guessing game, I blindly played myself 25 songs out of a random shuffled playlist of 1699 I was curious about, and people kept joking that 1699 is an awful long time ago to pick 25 songs from har har. But more importantly, four different bands…

Confusingly Named Background Gloom Licks, 2003

RAPTURE, Songs for the Withering The Rapture that Williamsburgers don’t know are a heavy-hearted quintet of Helsinki codeine-metal fops who quote Emily Brontë and Sophocles on their lyric sheet and gorgeously balance light croons with heavy grumbles about cold years and hangings and maggots (“our only friends”) and “bad dreams, hollow sleep of dark rooms,…

150 Best Albums of 1981

First to address the pachyderm in the parlor (mastodon in the master bedroom?), yes it is obviously true that “Waiting for a Girl Like You” and “Waiting on a Friend” are, functionally, the exact same power ballad. But that doesn’t mean Foreigner’s 4 is as good as the Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You, even if “Emotional”…