“Midnight Sunburn” – Dog Ears
Big, crunchy, power pop for mid-summer.

“I Need Ya” – Somebody’s Child
If the Strokes were from Ireland, they would probably sound like this.

“Forgiving Ties” – Deer Tick
I had to triple check this wasn’t a lost Tom Petty demo that someone else had finished.

“The Spiral” – Body Maintenance
This is some proper-ass post punk from Down Under. Like all great post punk, it could be from 1983 or 2003 just as easily as be the brand new song it actually is.

“Crank” – Catherine Wheel
One of the music sites I follow posted this week about the 30th anniversary of the release of Catherine Wheel’s Chrome album. While I’m partial to Ferment, “Crank” is an awesome song, and likely how most people my age discovered the band.

“Seasons” – Chris Cornell
I just listened to the Temple of the Dog/Grunge episode of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s. The guest was professor and music critic Eric Harvey, who it turns out is from Indianapolis and went to Franklin College just south of the city. I looked up what he has written and came across his retrospective review of the Singles soundtrack for Pitchfork. It’s a great read about that entire era. Naturally I put on the soundtrack (I’m going to re-watch the movie at some point) and I remembered how this song totally blew me away the first time I heard it. I wasn’t a big Soundgarden fan yet, but I knew what their general aesthetic was. And this seemed to be the exact opposite. Such a great song by such a great artist. RIP.

“Little Bit of Sun” – Semisonic
It always makes me happy when Semisonic puts out another great, nearly perfect pop tune.

Two videos this week!


“Four Simple Words” – Frank Turner
I just bought tickets to see Frank in September, four days after I see Pearl Jam. That’s got to be some kind of record. This is a weird video as the audio morphs from live to album version to live to album again.


Next a total goofball track. I believe I shared this at some point before, but it doesn’t look like that original post survived one website move or another. So technically it is new to the blog archives.