Five songs

[shermarama]

As a result of a meme via gobserver , here are my five favourite songs beginning with M. This is remarkably hard, principally due to a lack of Clutch songs beginning with M. How can I have a top five of songs that doesn't have any Clutch in it? But Milk Of Human Kindness ain't making it in, it's off their first album and it don't really cut it. Mice And Gods is also cool but not a winner. Muchas Veces if anything; a song about chasing mystery women around the world including waking up in a royal tomb under an altar to the east of Machu Pichu.

Oh, go on then:

1.  Clutch - Muchas Veces
   A song about chasing mystery women around the world, including waking up in a royal tomb under an altar to the east of Machu Pichu. It's classic Clutch; the time signature is erratic but it swings like a bastard, and the lyrics are detailed, mystical and basically nonsense. I could dance to this all day. In a long skirt and big boots, pounding on the ground like a peasant woman at the harvest dance, reeling and hollering. Yeah. 
2. Queens of the Stone Age - Mexicola
   People, people, listen to that bloody bass sound. Oh, most of you can't because you only have the later QuotSA albums, if you have any at all, that is. *squints at editor *. And the dream-like vocals over the wide wall of drums, and the angularity, and everything, and climb up on top of a broken world to sing it. I also want to dance to this, but not where anyone can see me. 
3. Kyuss - Mudfly
   I couldn't ever claim this was my favourite Kyuss song and it's not like I listen to them much any more but this is one of those that reminds me of a really specific time; after I'd broken up with Jake and was starting out playing in my first ever band and the guitarist had got me listening to stoner (her name was Alice) and I remember trying again and again to play along with this cleanly. The thing is, what you don't know when you're a beginner and something sounds cool, this isn't an easy bassline. Also I was trying to play this on a bass with a massively high action, mostly with it not plugged in to anything either, which makes this damn near impossible. With a nice smooth bass, not like the ones I have played, and with it properly amplified so you can do decent hammer-ons, I could play this. I still only really own basses for wrestling with, though. No wonder I switched to drums. 
4. The Bloodhound Gang - Mama Say
   I'm remarkably easy to please, musically, you know. Some silly lyrics and an irresistible beat usually does it. And I am a sucker for the Bloodhound Gang. Crude, you say? Childish, you say? Yeah, go on then, but littered with pop-culture in-jokes of the sort that are still funny a dozen years later. 
5. Flanders & Swann - Maderia M'Dear
   What? What? Chris takes the piss out of me for liking this kind of thing, associating it with Oxbridge and rahs, but that's not where I got it from. I picked up my Flanders & Swann habit, along with subsidiary Tom Lehrer, from James, a friend who took six years to get a degree from Brighton Poly, who worked part-time in an off-licence and tended to still owe them money at the end of the month, who I would go and eat late-night breakfasts with at the Market Diner with after drinking heroic quantities of cider and watching Withnail & I for the fiftieth time. It doesn't say rah to me, as a result. James is a probation officer, has two kids and runs a tae kwon do club these days, y'know. 

Honourable mentions for:

Helmet's Milquetoast, a song which I'm sure I had a remix of, taped off the radio way back in the early 90s, which I loved madly, so that for years I never liked the version on the album, but then it's so many years since I've heard that other version I loved that I can't remember it and now I like the album version. Therefore I feel like I don't love this as much as I could, even though I do. Paradoxical.

Corduroy's Motorhead, a cover of Motorhead, by Motorhead, off the album Motorhead, in a slinky acid-jazz style. It RULES. But it can't make a list like this because if I put any version of Motorhead in a list of songs starting with M it would have to be Motorhead, by Motorhead, off Motorhead, and I like Corduroy's version more.

King Missile's Metanoia, which is everything that's good about King Missile, with urgent jazz-rock drums and the pseudo-stream-of-consciousness lyrics they do that result in the coining of the term 'polyunsaturated cinemaplexiglass cathedrals.' But I bought this album so long ago on tape, ordered carefully from the music shop in Wigan for an extortionate amount of money, and now I don't think I have the tape any more, and a friend sent me a CD copy of it that he'd seen on a second-hand stall because he's a nice man, and then that was one of the CDs that was stolen from my car a couple of years ago and now I only own an empty box and a not-very-good-quality rip. It feels like a song I can never keep hold of.

So, folks, if you fancy, comment and I'll give you a letter and you can tell people people about your favourite five songs starting with it.

(Somewhere eventually I might answer the questions from the last round of the five questions meme too. )

Comments

[yiskah.livejournal.com]

Ooh, me please!

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Go on! Sure I can't narrow it down to just 5 though.

[ironlord.livejournal.com]

I'll give it a go, provided I remember to look at this post again.

[gobserver.livejournal.com]

Flanders & Swann and The Bloodhound Gang, all basses covered there I think.

[shermarama]

Have an A!

[shermarama]

The random letter generator says: S!

[shermarama]

For you, sir, an R.

[shermarama]

You knows it.

[adamw]

Narrowing down to five could be fun, but I'd like a letter, please.

(Corduroy? Jesus, that takes me back)

[editor.livejournal.com]

Not sure I've ever been squinted at in prose before. How should I take it? (Badly, I presume?)

[shermarama]

Sorry, just remembering it emerging somewhere that you weren't familiar with QuotSA's Songs For The Deaf, not even No-One Knows if I remember right, and me being a bit flabbergasted about that. I sort of take it for granted that people know and like this, certainly anyone I know with any involvement in guitar-based music.

The textual squint could be also described as looking askance at you.

[shermarama]

I can't even remember where I got Corduroy from now.

Meanwhile, have a W.

[editor.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, I do remember now. I do actually know (and like) No-One Knows, and also The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret and Feel Good Hit of the Summer. But I may not necessarily have known who they were by...

[shermarama]

Right, right, I remember. And as I may have said at the time, get Songs For The Deaf, then, or maybe even better, Rated R, the one with the other two you know on. Really.

[editor.livejournal.com]

You probably did. I regret I have repressed much of that period though, as I am too sad about the way it ended. Sniff.