Day 26: Black

Things began with the strangest sequence of artists yet: The Fiery Furnaces to Biz Markie, Bjork to The Dandy Warhols to Jay-Z, then a lone Kronos Quartet prelude to Depeche Mode. This slid me into the "black" albums that I have, including two simply called The Black Album (looks at Jay and Dandy), and Black Market Clash, among others. Try out Lucifer below:

I found Lucifer quite appealing. As some well-padded, 20-something, white, college guy, I'm not going to attempt any pretense of intelligent discussion about the content of this song. I will say I think it sounds awesome. There's some really effective atonal counterpoint about two-thirds of the way through the song, where he starts singing over the female lead.

Moving on, I thought I had already gotten my fill of Muse, especially in the pretentious waters of a post-The Resistance milieu. However, it would seem that I skipped over this little gem from Black Holes and Revelations, called Assassin:

The brutal opening sets the song off to a blistering pace, a violent tarantella exploding in full instrumentation. What's neat is the way they weave together a standard call/response structure over the top of this without deadening the intensity of the instrumentation. I'm sure somewhere in the lyrics Muse actually gets to making the title of the song relevant, but of course that's not why I enjoyed it. It seems to be a terrible struggle for any band - often the enjoyment from their work has nothing to do with the lyrical content so much as the tone and feel. However, people rarely go crazy for just pure instrumental work, or for wordless music. Their songs need the words even though  no one listens to the words themselves. They listen only to the fact of the song having words.

Music left: 153.32gb

Cheers, Bodhisvaha