Tag: The Mighty Mighty Bosstones

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Playlists

Playlist: 75 tunes from 1991

Here’s a good long Apple Music playlist that could get you through an afternoon of chores, painting, or cooking. Perhaps a road trip from Toronto to Montreal. Or keep you company on a flight from North America to Europe.

I’ve done a few playlists over the years on this blog but never any that focused on the music of a particular year in the past. I’ve chosen to start with 1991 because it was particularly pivotal year for me in terms of musical discovery. It was the year that I started to dip my toes into alternative rock, a brave new world for me, a wave of music that included a huge variety of styles, very little of which sounded like the music of my parents. So even though I wasn’t listening to all of these songs at the time, I’d say that the majority are old friends, intimate acquaintances.

There’s seventy-five great tracks, representative of how I saw 1991. It’s not a ‘best of’. I’ve already done the list of my top thirty favourite tracks on this blog here. Some of the songs in that list appear on this playlist but there’s plenty others here and some that are much deeper cuts. I know that there are those of you out there who might catch some obvious omissions. Some of these might have been because they were not to my tastes but there are others, like My Bloody Valentine’s “Soon” or The Real People’s “Open up your mind (let me in)”, that were not available to be added due to music rights and Apple Music or whatever. Still, there’s so many other gems that show the wide range of music that was coming out in those years just before Grunge exploded and changed everything for alternative rock.

For those who don’t use Apple Music, here is the entire playlist, with links to YouTube videos for each song:

  1. Primal Scream “Loaded”
  2. Vic Reeves & The Wonder Stuff “Dizzy”
  3. Blur “Sing”
  4. Teenage Fanclub “Star Sign”
  5. Lowest of the Low “Subversives”
  6. Electronic “Getting Away With It”
  7. Throwing Muses “Not Too Soon”
  8. Red Hot Chili Peppers “Under the Bridge”
  9. James “Sit Down”
  10. Chapterhouse “Mesmerise”
  11. R.E.M. “Belong”
  12. Spacemen 3 “I Love You”
  13. Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians “So You Think You’re In Love”
  14. EMF “Unbelievable”
  15. Crash Test Dummies “Androgynous”
  16. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones “Where’d You Go”
  17. Pixies “Alec Eiffel”
  18. Levellers “Liberty Song”
  19. Big Audio Dynamite II “The Globe”
  20. Spin Doctors “Two Princes”
  21. Depeche Mode “Death’s Door”
  22. Slowdive “Catch The Breeze”
  23. Rheostatics “Record Body Count”
  24. Siouxsie & The Banshees “Kiss Them For Me”
  25. Jesus Jones “Right Here, Right Now”
  26. Northside “My Rising Star”
  27. Primus “Tommy the Cat”
  28. Morrissey “Sing Your Life”
  29. Pearl Jam “Jeremy”
  30. Ned’s Atomic Dustbin “Grey Cell Green”
  31. Big Audio Dynamite II “Rush”
  32. Ministry “Jesus Built My Hotrod”
  33. Paris Angels “Perfume (Loved Up)”
  34. Barenaked Ladies “Lovers In A Dangerous Time”
  35. Saint Etienne “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”
  36. Primal Scream “Come Together”
  37. Teenage Fanclub “The Concept”
  38. Billy Bragg “Everywhere”
  39. The Farm “All Together Now”
  40. Crash Test Dummies “The Ghosts That Haunt Me”
  41. Inspiral Carpets “Caravan”
  42. Morrissey “Mute Witness”
  43. The Tragically Hip “Little Bones”
  44. R.E.M. “Me In Honey”
  45. Meat Puppets “Sam”
  46. The Wonder Stuff “Welcome To The Cheap Seats”
  47. U2 “One”
  48. The Charlatans “Over Rising”
  49. Erasure “Chorus”
  50. Lowest of the Low “Henry Needs a New Pair of Shoes”
  51. Violent Femmes “American Music”
  52. Spirit of the West “D For Democracy”
  53. Blur “She’s So High”
  54. Spirea X “Chlorine Dream”
  55. Chapterhouse “Pearl”
  56. The Grapes Of Wrath “You May Be Right”
  57. The Dylans “Godlike”
  58. Lenny Kravitz “It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over”
  59. Levellers “One Way”
  60. Revolver “Heaven Sent an Angel”
  61. Barenaked Ladies “If I Had $1,000,000”
  62. Swervedriver “Rave Down”
  63. Rheostatics “Aliens (Christmas 1988)”
  64. Billy Bragg “Accident Waiting To Happen”
  65. The Farm “Hearts & Minds”
  66. Spirit Of The West “Far Too Canadian”
  67. Ned’s Atomic Dustbin “Kill Your Television”
  68. Odds “Love Is The Subject”
  69. R.E.M. “Losing My Religion”
  70. Pixies “Head On”
  71. Northside “Take Five”
  72. U2 “Until the End of the World”
  73. Blur “There’s No Other Way”
  74. Lowest of the Low “Rosy and Grey”
  75. Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

And here is the promised link to the Apple Music playlist. I hope you enjoy.

If you’re interested in checking out any of the other playlists I’ve created and shared on these pages, you can peruse them here.

Categories
Tunes

Best tunes of 1993: #19 The Mighty Mighty Bosstones “Someday I suppose”

<< #20    |    #18 >>

I’ve already written on these pages about how I got a job at my small town’s 7-Eleven in the spring of 1993 and how working there was part of the reason why that summer was one of the best of my life. I worked as many shifts as I could that summer and many of them would be of the overnight kind and I often found myself work with either Tori, Heather, or Michelle, the other new employees at store. I always had a blast on these shifts because these three young women were close to me in age and like me, they loved to have a laugh.

It was on one of these midnight shifts that I first heard this song on CFNY, the radio station to which we always had it tuned. It was this swirling, rocking number that mixed horns with racing guitars and a bopping, staccato rhythm and the vocalist rapped and spoke and shouted in a deep and dark voice. It always got my head bouncing and my feet tapping as I counted the bags of chips and packs of gum during our evening inventory counts. The problem was that I always seemed to be away from the radio, serving a customer or in the back, stocking the milk shelves, when the radio announcer came on to supply us with the name of the song and who it was that sung it. It got to the point where it became an ongoing joke: we would dance frantically around the empty store when the song came on and then laugh hysterically when we realized that we once again missed the 5 Ws. It was like the musical version of the Polkaroo*.

Finally, during one night shift right at the end of summer, I came out from the back after changing the syrup for one of the slurpee machines and Michelle excitedly put a slip of paper in my hands with the biggest smile on her face. She had scrawled on the paper in big looping script the words “Someday I suppose. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones.” I knew exactly what the words meant immediately and if I wasn’t so shy and awkward at the time, I would’ve given her a big hug.

Starting pretty much the very next day, the search was on. I went to our town’s only music store and didn’t find anything by the band. A few days later, I joined my parents on a shopping trip to the Oshawa Centre and hit the chain music stores (HMV, Sunrise, and Sam the Record Man) and likewise came up empty. Finally, I planned a solo trip back in to Oshawa to hit some of the independent stores downtown, specifically, the renowned Star Records**, and there found a copy of the Bosstones’ third album, “Don’t know how to party”, on CD. This album, along with Spirit of the West’s “Faithlift”, might have been the two CDs I listened to the most that fall, both for very different moods and reasons.

“Don’t know how to party” is really a misnomer because it really does party and it parties hard, especially track four of twelve. The song that introduced me to the band on all those midnight shifts is still my favourite by the Boston-based octet. “Someday I suppose” riffs hard on the ska punk theme, a pogo with a chainsaw, a plaid suit jacket with the arms ripped off and the tie tied around the head, Rambo-style. It’s an explosion of good vibes, of not giving a shit, of living in the moment and putting off the heavy lifting and the heavy thoughts for later.

“There was a verse
That I was gonna write
I haven’t yet
But there’s still a chance I might
An open book
That I still wanna close
I’ll find the time
Someday I suppose”

The horns, the bassline, Dicky Barrett roaring, and the image of Ben Carr hopping around like a man possessed. It all just makes me smile.

*Those who know, know.

**I’ve already written words about this trip and this particular store when I posted about Primus’s “My name is mud” for this very same list and series.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 1993 list, click here.

Categories
Playlists

Playlist: New tunes from 2021, part two

…And I’m back. Did you miss me?

Don’t worry. If you didn’t even notice that was gone, I won’t be too hurt. I’ve had a great couple of weeks off from work and it was definitely nice to step away from posting to these pages during that same time. Some of my fellow bloggers may have observed that I was still reading and commenting on some of their own pieces so I wasn’t completely absent. And I will admit that I did spend a bit of time stringing together some words on music for this and some future posts.

But now I’m back and I’m ready to go, starting things off with part two of my New tunes of 2021 playlist. I’ve been doing these playlists for a few years now and they’re like a running diary of the new music that has been released during each quarter of the year and that has caught my ear. You can go back and have a listen to part one for this year here.

Months four, five, and six of 2021 have been, without a question, a more positive experience than the previous three were. Sure, we’ve had a third wave of this pandemic to contend with and here in Ontario, Canada, the government upped the ante on the lockdown and issued a stay at home order at the beginning of April. Since then, though, things have looked up. The roll out of the mass vaccination campaign has been going quite well. (Yours truly received his first dose of Pfizer in mid-June and is scheduled for dose number two on Friday.) Of course, the warmer weather has meant more outdoor activities and some semblance of normalcy. My wife and I have been out on walks, out weekly to the farmers markets, and have been getting out on the bikes pretty regularly. We also accidentally found ourselves at the Ottawa tulip festival back in May (see photo above) and we’ve already been out on patios to support some of our favourite local restaurant businesses.

And through all of this, I’ve also been purchasing, streaming, and listening to as much new music as I can. The twenty five songs below are just an example of the many tunes that have been brightening up my spring. Highlights include:

  • “I’m glad that we broke up”, a trashy, glam rock, firebomb of single by Du Blonde in a raucous duet with one of my discoveries from last year, Ezra Furman
  • Ex-Pains of Being Pure at Heart frontman Kip Berman stepped away from the reverb-drenched indie pop of his old band in favour of more stripped-down and rootsy indie folk as The Natvral and the track “New Year’s night” is just brilliant
  • The introspective and honest jangly retro pop of “I hope I never fall in love” is just one of the many great tracks off the new album by one of my favourite new discoveries of the year, The Reds, Pinks and Purples
  • “I don’t believe in anything” served to remind me of the pure joy and energy infused in the music of The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, a ska-punk band that I just loved back in the 90s
  • I’ve known for quite some time that comedian/actor Matt Berry was also a musician but it took fellow blogger, Steve for the Deaf to turn me on to just how good he is and yeah, “Summer sun” is pure sunshine psychedelic bliss
  • “Paprika”, a happy little ear worm off Japanese Breakfast‘s third album, “Jubilee”
  • And last but definitely not least is “In the rain”, the nearly eight minute lazy sunday folk-rocker by another cool project by Ripley Johnson (Wooden Shjips, Moon Duo), this one called Rose City Band

For those who don’t use Spotify or if the embedded playlist below doesn’t work for you, here is the entire playlist as I’ve created it, complete with links to YouTube videos:

1. “Down the river” Ratboys (from the album Happy birthday, Ratboy)

2. “I’m glad that we broke up (feat. Ezra Furman)” Du Blonde (from the album Homecoming)

3. “New year’s night” The Natvral (from the album Tethers)

4. “Price of blue” Flock of Dimes (from the album Head of roses)

5. “Everyone’s a winner” Flyte (from the album This is really going to hurt)

6. “I hope I never fall in love” The Reds, Pinks and Purples (from the album Uncommon weather)

7. “Can’t talk, won’t” Coach Party (from the EP After party)

8. “Desires” Art d’Ecco (from the album In standard definition)

9. “Change your mind” The Coral (from the album Coral island)

10. “The sun won’t shine on me” Teenage Fanclub (from the album Endless arcade)

11. “Shelter song” Iceage (from the album Seek shelter)

12. “Yoru ni” Teke::Teke (from the album Shirushi)

13. “I don’t believe in anything” The Mighty Mighty Bosstones (from the album When god was great)

14. “Hologram love” Linn Koch-Emmery (from the album Being the girl)

15. “Summer sun” Matt Berry (from the album The blue elephant)

16. “C’mon be cool” fanclubwallet (from the EP Hurt is boring)

17. “Poor boy a long way from home” The Black Keys (from the album Delta kream)

18. “Stay in the car” Bachelor (from the album Doomin’ sun)

19. “Paprika” Japanese Breakfast (from the album Jubilee)

20. “Smile” Wolf Alice (from the album Blue weekend)

21. “Beautiful beaches” James (from the album All the colours of you)

22. “Primrose hill at midnight (feat. Flyte)” Dizzy (from the EP Separate places)

23. “Already written” Azure Ray (from the album Remedy)

24. “Hot & heavy” Lucy Dacus (from the album Home video)

25. “In the rain” Rose City Band (from the album Earth trip)

As always, wherever you are in the world, I hope you are safe, continue to be well, and well, enjoy the tunes.

If you’re interested in checking out any of the other playlists I’ve created and shared on these pages, you can peruse them here.