tunequest

From the album Beaucoup Fish (1999) Life, kid, suck, drink from the box, the juice kicks up. yeah. bruce lee. High energy and repetitive, Bruce Lee basically sounds like it was recorded on a manufacturing line. With one verse repeated again and again, Underworld performs an exercise in rhythm and variations on a theme. Using brute force, this thing will pound its way into your head, but for a form ...

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From the remix album Things Falling Apart (2000) Trent Reznor is no stranger to cover tunes, having turned in notable studio versions of songs by Soft Cell, Pigface, Queen and Joy Division, as well as performing a number of live covers at concerts. On the remix album that accompanied The Fragile, Nine Inch Nails added Gary Numan to that list, with a surprising faithful rendition of Metal. To ...

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From the album Rock Action (2001) Free Download I can't begin the to describe how awesome this song is, but it's worth noting that it made me completely fall in love with Mogwai. Clocking in a 9-and-a-half minutes, this song is epic. Not for any story it tells, but for how it makes you feel. This mostly instrumental piece of slow-burning segments of ...

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From the album Sarah Shannon (2002) It's been more than a decade since the rock band Velocity Girl broke up, putting an end to one of my favorite high school-era ensembles and effectively ending my exposure to the group's vocalist, Sarah Shannon. Her post-VG work, a band called Starry Eyes, was short-lived and VG's online fan base wasn't large or cohesive enough to adequately maintain updates of ...

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From the album Dial M for Monkey (2003) Bonobo, the simian pseudonym of UK producer Simon Green has been a downtempo-lounge favorite for a while around these parts. In addition to his excellent production values, he's notable for his distinctive infusion (though not pervasively) of eastern (mostly Indian) influences into what could be called "intelligent chill-out music." With a danceably faster tempo usual, Flutter is actually a bit ...

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From the album Nothing's Lost (2004) Belgian composer Styrfoam is a consummate bedroom auteur, accomplished in the so-called "indietronic" genre, effectively wielding his laptop to weave a kind of downtempo electronic pop music. His early work is more ambient in nature, peppered with influences of 8-bit game-style accents. As his music has progress, however, he's become ever more audacious in his compositions, fleshing out his sound with ...

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From the album The Sunset Tree (2005) This song is about escapism. With poignancy and daft lyrical narration, John Darnielle (aka The Mountain Goats) weaves a tale of domestic violence and a troubled life on the skids. The only outlet for the song's protagonist is the volume knob on his stereo and the "dance music" it amplifies, which he uses to elude the strife in his life. The ...

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From the album Varcharz (2006) After creating some most infectious and "warm" electronic grooves that were both danceable and singable, Mouse on Mars returned with an album of "spatial free-jazz and cocaine-fried booty funk" on the largely structureless Varcharz. But don't take structureless to mean groundless. Beats are what MoM do best, and while the album has its share of dissonance, it's a noise symphony built on ...

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A long time ago, while expanding my cultural horizons and getting to know a distant branch of my family, I spent a good portion of the summer in the nation of France. It had the works: sight-seeing, landmarks, historical places, family gatherings, camping, Eurorail, and of course shopping and souvenirs. An excellent summer well spent. And it was made more excellent by a handful of hard-to-find ...

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