Music Friday: "Poison Years," "Sinners and Their Repentances," "Black Sheets of Rain," "Star Machine," & "The Descent"

Bob Mould's new album, Silver Age, came out this Tuesday, and I've been listening the hell out of it this week. It's an outstanding album, and I'm sure it'll be on my top ten/twenty list of albums of 2012, probably somewhere in the top ten. 

For a long time, I've owned Mould's duo of outstanding albums from 1989 and 1990: Workbook and Black Sheets of Rain. 

I listened to those works quite a bit over the years, and his songs that buffet between introspection and rage matched my moods and perspectives in my 20s and 30s. Heck, let's be honest. They still match 'em. 

So today in honor of Silver Age coming out, I'm featuring three songs from the older solo works and a couple of tunes from the new album. 

Here are "Poison Years" & "Sinners and Their Repentances" from Workbook.






Next is "Black Sheets of Rain." 



And now for the new stuff: "Star Machine" & "The Descent." 





The performance on Letterman reminds me of this Music Friday Post that featured Husker Du on a local Twin Cities talk show called Good Company.

Music Friday: "Makes No Sense at All"

Speaking of Husker Du, here's a video from the band, one of their more popular songs, "Makes No Sense at All." Click HERE to relive the pleasure of the 80s.

And if you want to watch the band scare an audience on a local, low budget, weekday talk show from the Twin Cities called "Good Company," you might get some giggles by clicking HERE.

"You know, ordinarily when we have music on our show, it's kind of middle of the road. That is ending now. You're about to hear a band that is a, what would would you call it, just a breakout, wild, full tilt sound. And they're called Husker Du."

Left of the Dial

Although I'm not a regular viewer of VH1 Classic, on occasion I like to check out what the channel is offering because of nostalgia. A while back they were running some documentary titled "The Ages of Rock" where they recounted the "seven ages" of rock-n-roll apparently. I didn't catch all seven, but I got a chance to view a bit of the Punk age and taped the Heavy Metal and Alternative ages.

The program that recounted Alternative Rock is titled "Left of the Dial," which is a reference to a song by one of my favorite bands of all time, The Replacements. That squad of musical hooligans, in my mind, are one of the scions of true alternative rock from the 80s and early 90s, so it was quite disappointing that the band wasn't even featured in the documentary that uses its song title to talk about the genre.

As you might imagine, the program delved deeply in the rise and fall of Nirvana and the success story of R.E.M., which was fine, but the focus on those two bands along with all the bleeding-heart stuff on Cobain burdened the documentary from reaching its full potential. Sure, VH1 gave The Pixies proper coverage, mentioned Sonic Youth, and provided strong detail about Black Flag, but there was no mention of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fishbone, Primus, 10,000 Maniacs, and many other bands that were quite influential at the time. Pearl Jam, in particular, got screwed with only a back-handed reference about how they had the misfortune of coming out with a great album after Nirvana's Nevermind made its impact on music scene.

And what about Husker Du, for God's sake?