What I’ve Been Listening to #2

A list of one selected song from fifteen artists that I think you guys should check out. Not in any particular order. More song, less talk.

1. Richard Cheese: If you’re a fan of Weird Al Yankovic’s parody songs, you’ll probably love Richard Cheese and his band Lounge Against The Machine’s jazz covers of contemporary rock songs. Without having the change the lyrics, Richard Cheese conjures hilarity simply by changing the genre of the song! Here’s their cover of Nirvana’s Rape Me.
   
2. Amon Tobin: I can never work on my netbook without being plugged in listening to something. Amon Tobin’s ambient beat are perfect for this purpose; I can always leave these albums on loop when I don’t want to listen to music with lyrics. My favourite? Four Ton Mantis.
   
3. The Blue Van: I first heard of them after they were featured in the ‘Meet the iPad‘ commercial. I won’t say all their music is on the mark, but they have a couple of their blues-y tunes are nice to listen to – like Product of DK and There Goes My Love (the song in the iPad ad). Even though the latter’s music video isn’t anything special, I quite like the blend of a photo slideshow and concert videos.
   
4. Renato Carosone: Yolanda Be Cool vrs D’Cup’s We Speak No Americano is nicely done remix; again, the music video with its faux retro look and cute little storyline made me enjoy the song more. Nothing holds a candle to Renato Carosone’s original Tu Vuo Fa L’Americano.
   
5. The Used: I came across the song Pretty Handsome Awkward by The Used in this fan-made Transformers short clip by Alex Semenov. (It’s the last song that is used in that clip. Astonishing how an amateur animator could go and create something that good!) It’s a laughable song and I wouldn’t have given it much credence, but that Transformers film just made the song 100x cooler. 🙂
   
6. Lo Fidelity Allstars: Battleflag sort of grew on me at my work last year, as it was a test video for a video rendering project at my part-time work. Catchy electronica tune.
   
7. The Submarines: Modern Inventions isn’t their best known song by a long shot. The Apple connection shows up again as one of their songs was used in the iPhone 3G / 3GS commercials. I swear I didn’t know this until I started writing this post! How coincidental to have two such songs (the other being from The Blue Van) is the same list. This couple band’s sweetness brims through in a way few others do.
   
8. Infadels: I’m not a fan of their biggest hit Love Like Semtex, butStories From The Baris a passably-okay song that I don’t mind listening to multiple times when it comes up on shuffle.
   
9. Ambulance LTD: This would be a fresh sound to most readers of my blog, if I may be bold enough to say so. Ambulance LTD belongs to the shoegazing genre, which I’m sure most of you won’t have heard of. I absolutely love their EP New English to bits. The dreamy nature of their songs totally hooks me in.
   
10. Eddie Vedder with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: Not an artist that you can check out per se as I believe The Long Road was a one-off collaboration. This one’s from the film Dead Man Walking. (Thanks to Pony for sharing this with me on Spotify.)
    
11. Nancy Sinatra: Frank Sinatra’s daughter. See Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down).
    
12. Girl In A Coma: For What It’s Worth, is mentioning two artists featured in Kill Bill in succession a giveaway?
    
13. The Dandy Warhols: Choosing just one song out of their collection to showcase is so hard! Bohemian Like You is my choice, their most popular track by far, but The Last High and We Used To Be Friends are worth a listen too! In fact, there’s a fair chance you’d have heard them in TV or films earlier.
    
14. Barenaked Ladies: You’d have heard the Barenaked Ladies without hearing of them if you follow the sitcom The Big Bang Theory; this is the band featured in the TBBT theme song. Wind It Up isn’t one of their typical sounding tracks, inasmuch as it isn’t as humourous (not in the Weird Al sense though) as many of their other songs.
    
15. Rachid Taha: I tend to discover a lot of artists from film OSTs. Rachid Taha’s Barra Barra, which I first heard in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (IMO, one of the best battle movies of the 20th century), is a fusion of Western rock with Algerian raï. Exotic!
    

Do explore more tracks by the above artists and tell me what you think if any particularly catch your fancy. Fire away in the comments you’ve any recommendations of yours to make too!