February Playlist: Pray for the Rain

As I mentioned on Wednesday, I've had a bit of an odd month, musically speaking. Here, for illustrative purposes, is a ten-track digest of what I've been listening to this February...

Click here for January's playlist.

1. A Song for the Dead - Queens of the Stone Age
(from Songs for the Deaf)
If you actually decide to play the Songs for the Deaf drinking game that I devised last week, this is probably the song that will kill you. Kind of appropriate, given the title.

No Girls Allowed?

Here are two pictures:

The picture on the left shows the current line-up for Reading & Leeds 2015. The picture on the right is what that same line-up would look like if you got rid of every all-male act.

The latter image raised a lot of eyebrows when @crackintheroad posted it on Twitter last night. The notion that the music industry is heavily biased towards male performers is hardly novel, but it's a truth that's easy to forget when you're a white male who doesn't have to worry about this sort of thing.

Make 'Em Laugh, Megadeth

When I first heard Megadeth's seminal 1992 album Countdown to Extinction, I couldn't help but laugh. The record so dearly wanted to be dark and gritty and nightmarish (heck, just look at the cover), but many of its best efforts struck me as being more comical than scary. Take Sweating Bullets, for example:

I'm sorry, but I practically spat with laughter the first time I heard, "Hello me, meet the REAL me!" And this is just the tip of the iceberg; elsewhere on Countdown to Extinction, there are songs about killer robots (Psychotron), OTT orchestral intros (Symphony of Destruction) and, on Captive Honour, this exceptionally hammy spoken word section:

"I hereby sentence you to be incarcerated with no possibility of parole, for life."

"'Life'? Whaddaya mean, 'life'?! I ain't got a life!"

"Boy, your soul better belong to Jesus...'cause your ass belongs to me!"

Songs for the Deaf: The Drinking Game

Presenting SONGS FOR THE DRUNK, the Queens of the Stone Age drinking game! It's great fun for any number of players, and given that 'alcohol' is one of the many, many narcotics mentioned in Feel Good Hit of the Summer, I'd like to think that QOTSA themselves would approve.

You will need:

• Songs for the Deaf, the seminal 2002 album from Queens of the Stone Age
• A steady supply of your favourite alcoholic beverage
• A half-decent soundsystem that will allow everyone to hear the album properly

Water, Earth, Fire, Air

So I've been watching Avatar (the TV show with the bald child, not the movie with the blue people) a lot recently, and...well, if you've never seen it, here's a quick primer:

Another thing I've been addicted to recently is Okkervil River's second album, Down the River of Golden Dreams (you may remember it as 'that album that took fricking ages to show up'). I could show you another YouTube video at this point, but instead, here's an excerpt from Okkervil River mainman Will Sheff's account of making the album:

"By the end of our stay in that city [San Francisco] from which so many long-haul travelers first cast out onto the water, I felt like nothing so much as a sailor. The last week of mixing I had even slept every night in the back of our 150 Ford, throwing open the back doors every morning to gaze on a deep, wide pool of water left by a week-long series of torrential downpours. 

"I guess that’s part of the reason we decided to call the record Down the River of Golden Dreams. It’s the title of the piece Seth’s octogenarian great aunt Nila plays at the beginning of the record, but it’s also because - to be appropriately California - I think that, if Don’t Fall in Love with Everyone You See [Okkervil River's first album] was an earth record, this is a water record. Sailing away never to return, washing clean to start over, fishing and swimming and drowning and all that stuff is floating around in there somewhere.

"At least, that’s what I hear when I hear these songs."