Sorry man. I was stuck at my desk and I got on an odd tangent of listening to random SF movie soundtracks, and ST IV came up. My initial thought was "I don't recall anything about this except that one 'punk' song, I wonder if/how close it hews to the other film scores from the franchise."

I don't want to write that it is a laughably bad score... but I did laugh while listening and I didn't think it was good.

Re: Cranberries

I have only five "Cranberries" songs in my years-of-music playlist, this is one of them. Zombie is one of those songs that convinced me Matthew Perpetua (of Fluxblog) was going out of his way to be a bit of a pompous edgelord hipster, because his 1994 survey included Ode to My Family instead of Zombie. He would rationalize this sort of choice as not wanting to simply be a year's "greatest hits", but he doesn't follow this advice for other years (when he wasn't in his hipster 20s)... and occasionally his picks for certain years include a LOT of echoing of (for the year) contemporary social/political tones, so Zombies hard edge musically, lyrically seemed to be a huge miss IMO.

For that same year, he included The Day I Tried to Live over Black Hole Sun (Soundgarden), didn't include Lisa Loeb's Stay (which reminds me of Ode to My Family), but did include things like Weezer's Sweater Song (instead of Buddy Holly) so I think the guy was just trying to half-troll. David Byrne had a pretty good self-titled album that year, with no representation on Fluxblog's survey.

Intense that you remembered all that.

I'm gonna post two songs, one i'm listening to right now. It's an oldie and one of the best soul tunes of all time. Such groove should be illegal.

Shotgun - Jr. Walker & the All-Stars

This whole week I had an earworm of an early 80s new wave tune. It got to the point that I just had to listen to it and release the demons from my head. I love the bass part. it's not fancy, but it's very melodic.

Birds Fly (Whisper to a Scream) - Icicle Works

When I was in college in NW Ohio in the early 90s, a Detroit band named Big Block played one of the local bars, and they had a fantastic energy and they played the hell out of their music. I bought their album "Guardrail" and listened to it all the time. Of course, I think there are other, more famous bands named Big Block so they kinda didn't go anywhere (plus I think the band had some significant personal issues judging from the indie-record-store grapevine at the time).

Big Block: Guardrail is on Soundcloud and I couldn't be happier about it. The songs are pretty short so you can probably knock the whole album out in half an hour or so. I'm also excited to see there's a whole second album that I've never heard.

I will also add a couple of songs from big Toledo area band Gone Daddy Finch from around that time as well.

I DON'T HOPE FOR HER

PENTHOUSE COSMOPOLITAN

It is nearly entirely because I'm being petty about something a guy put a lot of effort into. The annual Fluxblog surveys were of a different time: they were a good resource to get exposed to a lot of different things, but for many of his surveys ended up being music that I wouldn't want to listen to twice. This made more sense IMO when he was being slightly contemporary, or at least was reflecting on music from an era where he himself had a collection of B-sides and 'deep cuts'... and was explicitly not picking 'hit' (or even 'popular') songs.

1994 was an odd year for me in terms of 'popular' music. I didn't have cable TV, so whatever phase MTV was in I didn't get exposed to whatever they were pushing. I was in the greater Chicago area, but I didn't listen to much commercial music radio. For me it was mostly picking up stuff from bars, local journos, 'college' radio, record shops, and the like.

BORN UNDER A BAD SIGN (Cream)




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