I don’t think this song is underrated; I think it’s rated right where it belongs. It’s a fairly forgettable track with a chorus that sounds like a 14 year old girl still enamored of unicorns wrote it as poetry just before she enters her goth phase. The chimey guitar is at least 6 years out of date for when it was recorded, the drums are largely cardboard and the bass line is, amazingly, boring. It might be the best track off Roll The Bones, but it isn’t by any measure I use a great song. Rush has and still can do better than this (my cite is the title track off their last album, for one).
Babymetal is so weird and manufactured that the metal community is having a hard time dealing with it, except as a humorous novelty act. Frankly, I’m not sure that most of the world is ready for the kind of suppressed pedophilia that passes for a lot of Jpop, and putting it in the metal context is a bold marketing move but little else. The song itself isn’t terrible but the chorus gets old before the 2nd time thru and musically the producer/songwriter has pulled out all the tricks just for this one 5 minute song: siren guitar, loud/soft dynamic, blastbeats, etc. It’s the only way to keep anyone interested I guess: keep throwing stuff at them. As a novelty act, for me, this wears thin about as fast as Steel Panther.
I liked the Yelle song. A simple pop/dance song, but very pleasant and the arrangement, particularly the drums, helped make it a much better song than it might have been. A little creativity in the right place can go a long way and this song exhibited that, I thought.
The Family Crest is an interesting project and this track is awesome. I don’t know that I’d want to listen to the album over and over and over, but just hearing this song once I was impressed by the songwriting, the performances and the production. A big, big sound that didn’t compromise any instrument is a huge plus and the vocal performance, along with that cello, really stood out and benefitted from the engineering and production. Terrific track.
Veruca Salt was terrific. As noted, a perfect example of pop-rock. And yeah, Bob Rock is good at what he does, but he also sucks all the passion out of performers and performances. What he leaves behind is very, very good white bread, if you get my meaning.
Toadies are a very good live band. This song was okay but for me didn’t really get interesting until the last :40 or so, when it turned into a repeating/drone thing. That ratcheted up the tension nicely.
Weezer is terrible. Sorry, sittinlab; they’ve just never been my cuppa. I tried to give it an open ear, even tho I’m pretty sure I’d heard this song before, but it just didn’t impress me. Everything I’ve ever heard by them sounds like something that a 15 year old would have written in his bedroom; I often think of them as a whole band of Weird Pauls without his sense of humor and an utter conviction of their own brilliance.
My pick this time is one that I’ve been waiting to throw down; this is one of my two favorite songs by this artist. Typified by wrecking ball beats, phat fucking bass lines and some of the craziest verbiage ever laid down, he’s one of my favorite rappers. His new album is almost 2 hours of music, most of it excellent; none of it sucks. This is an old song, tho, recorded about 15 years ago for his Black Elvis/Lost In Space album; turn it up, yo: Kool Keith - Supergalactic Lover.