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Miami Buckeye's Monday Music Medley #4

+7 HS
MiamiBuckeye's picture
January 9, 2017 at 10:52am
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What's up people? New semester beginning for me and I have three courses on my plate, including my first ever Literature Class (which I am beyond excited to teach), but that doesn't mean I don't have time for y'all. There's still unbelievable amounts of music out there in the world to listen to and appreciate. Only four songs instead of the usual five this week, but they're all punching above their weight. :)

We'll start out as we always do with our daily injection of metal straight into our ears. The band I'm introducing to you now is (or rather, was, unfortunately) called Agalloch. Named for a rare (and valuable) fruiting body that infects certain trees in the Pacific Northwest, producing a hideous black mold that can be used as the base for precious and fragrant perfumes (an ingenious metaphor for what Agalloch does with their music, producing beauty from the guttural), Agalloch formed in 1995 in Portland, Oregon, and put out five excellent albums before their recent breakup. They can best be described as Blackened Folk Metal, and I'd rate them as probably the best American folk metal band ever, and among the best American metal bands period, one of the few that can compare to the best from Europe. A brief anecdote before we get into the song: I once had the pleasure of seeing Agalloch live in New Orleans. It was a fantastic show where plenty of incense was used and at one point the guitarist/lead singer used a severed deer's hoof as a guitar pick. The most memorable part of the show was my brother and I waiting outside of the venue before the concert, while a pair of metalheads had a deep conversation about the history of folk metal. Neither of us knew what the band members looked like in person, as they kept a low profile, and it was only an hour or two later when the band took the stage that we realized we'd been standing mere feet away from Agalloch's lead singer/guitarist and their drummer for about twenty minutes. Talk about a missed opportunity. Anyway, here's "Ghosts of the Midwinter Fires," from Agalloch's best album, Marrow of the Spirit.

Next up is a song that was briefly made sort of famous by the indie film Garden State. This song was part of an excellent soundtrack handpicked by the movie's star Zach Braff (of Scrubs fame), which also included tracks by The Shins and other Indie mainstays. The duo Frou Frou no longer exists, though its leading woman, Imogen Heap has since released some rather popular hits of her own. A story I once heard about Imogen Heap is that she taught herself to play multiple instruments when her overbearing and cruel music teacher would lock her in the music room overnight. I'm not sure if it's true, but it's a great story nonetheless. Listen to this song, and I think you'll agree that there's beauty in the breakdown. Here's Let Go by Frou Frou.

Next up is a fantastic single from the one-off crossover collaboration Big Grams (rapper Big Boi and electronica duo Phantogram). This song is short, simple, and sweet, and has such a catchy, hypnotic beat that I just had to make it my ringtone. The song, Fell In the Sun, is about the glory of music and what it means to make it big as a musical star. Favorite lines: "Once upon a time there was a boy named Daddy Fat/ heard he grew into a man and put his family on his back."

Now let's take a sudden turn, and go back to a simpler place and a simpler time. Picture a tractor in a fallow field. Picture a farmhouse next to that field. Picture a happy, loving couple inside that farmhouse. This is the sort of pastoral that must follow up the declaration of love in John Michael Montgomery's "I Swear." This song is probably better known by the All-4-One R&B cover version that came out within the same year (a fantastic song in its own right with its own charms). There is only one difference in the lyrics between the two versions. In this version, John Michael Montgomery sings "And when/ there's silver in your hair/you won't have to ask if I still care" whereas All-4-One sing "And when/just the two of us are there/you won't have to ask if I still care." I tend to prefer Montgomery's lyrics there, as they're both more descriptive and more meaningful.

 

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