Skummy

It was fine.

I've used the PS4 to purchase AEW PPVs, and assume they would no longer be available either, which is a shame. It was more reliable than hoping Fite TV would cast to my TV properly and not buffer ever few minutes.

They also did the soundtrack to Tron: Legacy, which I think is brilliant while very different to a lot of their other work - I think you might dig it. I used to own an album called "Discovered", that was just a compilation of the original songs that Daft Punk sampled; some lovely funk and disco tracks on there.

I have a friend who's obsessed with Ryan Adams - goes to see him on every tour, has travelled far and wide to see him live as often as possible, owns everything he's ever released including all the weird stuff under pseudonyms. Her partner passed away a couple of years ago, and I always associate Ryan Adams' music with them, far more than with any of the allegations of him being a wrong'un. It means I'm rarely in the mood to listen to him, but when I do chance upon one of his songs I tend to allow it a lot of time and attention. This one was fine, he's done better. I love Frontier Psychiatrist, though it does lean far too heavily into novelty record territory. Nothing wrong with novelty records per sé, there's some I adore, but it limits its appeal and versatility, whereas Since I Left You is a better all-round song, and absolutely gorgeous with it. The Avalanches are great, though. But they do have the unfortunate problem of sharing their name with another band, which means my Spotify gets confused sometimes. Luckily the other band are also responsible for a daft novelty record, so it balances out. I'm not a big fan of Eminem, though I like the use of the Dido sample in this song. I think I just got very jaded by the "silly one/serious one" schedule of Eminem single releases, and found it tended to make them all blend together in my head. "One More Time" is a banger, and obviously a very timely inclusion now.

just to clarify, we didn't live next door to the drummer from Napalm Death, just that's one of the bands that my dad would have become aware of through that set-up. When I was a kid, my half-brother was in a bunch of bands, and the drummer for most of them was (then) one of his best mates, who lived next door to my grandparents. He went on to be the drummer in Gorerotted, who at one point were described as "the heaviest band in Britain". I bumped into him at a gig a couple of years back, don't think he really does any music any more, but Gorerotted's old singer is in Extreme Noise Terror now. The other constant member of my brother's bands ended up playing bass for a successful U2 tribute act.

My dad used to make decent money buying CDs at carboot sales and charity shops, then selling them on eBay. Sometimes if he was curious he'd listen to them in the car before selling them. One time he was giving me a lift somewhere and he had a Slipknot live album playing. It's at that point that I decided that I wouldn't countenance any suggestion from heavy metal fans that metal was in any way anti-establishment or dangerous, because a middle aged business studies lecturer listened to them on the way to the shops. He did think they were shit, though. His main comments were that he thought it was really childish how much the singer swore at people who had paid money to see him, and how, and I quote, "there's nothing they're doing here that you wouldn't have heard Napalm Death doing twenty years ago". They're nothing like Napalm Death, but it's a nice frame of reference for my dad to have. In some ways, my grandparents living next door to a death metal drummer broadened our horizons. Anyway, yeah, they're shit. Maybe one or two halfway decent songs later in their run, but that would be very generous of me. Mostly just asinine "my parents want me to clean my room" undirected angst rubbish wrapped up in lazy metal and horror tropes. I always find it a genuine surprise when I still see teenagers in Slipknot t-shirts in this day and age. I don't like the Chilli Peppers, but Californication is a good album for what they do, and Scar Tissue is probably their best song, for all the reasons metalman said. It's a real showcase of Frusciante at his best.

It might be worth a revisit, it just felt a bit of a slog at the time, and a lower energy version of what he was doing with Grinderman, whereas I absolutely loved the previous double album (or, at least, there was a great single album in there).

"Broken Heart" is very good, but I think that album functions so well as a whole that I'd struggle to pick out a single track as the essential listen. It's a composite work. I love "Into My Arms", it might be my favourite Nick Cave song. Like you said, it's a gorgeous love song, but mostly it plays with Cave's spirituality, which is an essential part of his best work for me. Many years ago, there used to be a late night music show - either BBC or Channel 4? - that looked at artists and faith; the only two I remember watching were Nick Cave and Tori Amos. I'd never knowingly heard Nick Cave before, but he closed on a performance of "God Is In The House", and I loved it, and bought the album (And No More Shall We Part) the next day. So that was always my baseline for what Nick Cave "should" sound like - moody piano ballads, grappling with questions of faith and love - and "Into My Arms" is his masterpiece in that area. I soured on him for quite a long time - I thought Dig! Lazarus! Dig! and Push The Sky Away were completely forgettable, and his last novel was god-awful, while Grinderman were just very patchy. Skeleton Tree was a masterpiece, though, and part of what made it work for me was the shock of hearing lyrics about, effectively, losing faith - "they told us our Gods would outlive us, but they lied", and about calling out and not getting an answer. I'm not remotely religious, but it's always been part of Nick Cave's lyrical toolkit that I've appreciated, and hearing really bleak, stark songs about that just wasn't there any more was incredibly moving.

I'm almost sad I don't do this any more, because I don't have the patience to really obsess over create modes that I used to. I created a character on WWF Attitude who basically became my go-to CAW for every game, but I tweaked him more and more as I went on, so it felt like a natural character progression, and he got older and changed his style slightly with each game. He started out as "Angel" in Attitude - it was one of the preset names - doing basically the gimmick Mordecai would eventually do, but as I worked through the Smackdown games he ended up gradually shed that gimmick and became more of a Raven-like character, then by the early 2k games was into grizzled veteran Terry Funk mode. When the Legends of Wrestling games had a bunch of preset first and last names the announcers could use, he ended up dropping "Angel" as his gimmick name and adopted a "real name" to wrestle under, and I had a bunch of other CAWs that intersected with his story. It was fun! I think what's put me off on other WWE games is that I'll tend to make a CAW for career mode, but then the gimmick I want him to have doesn't reflect how he's booked in the in-game story mode. So my last guy in 2k19 was a caveman gimmick, but then in the story he's just some wisecracking WWE babyface, and it was hard to invest in any idea of the character in my head then. I might give creating stuff in Fire Pro a go - I've always found it extremely daunting!

a friend of mine does a very good Gamesmaster retrospective podcast, and he's said it's not as much of a done deal as it's being reported - the wording on their website is more of an "exploring our options" thing than any commitment to producing it, and they've said it will be a "social first" show; presumably meaning that it's looking to get some social media content out there under the Gamesmaster brand, rather than any particular effort toward a full-blown TV product. Also, Future Publishing still own the name, so they would need to be involved. Using the brand to integrate a TV product with YouTube and Twitch content could be interesting, and I think there are still ways to grow outside of that bubble - celebrity challenges with celebs you won't see on Twitch or YouTube, or challenges that require a more physical element than what you can manage on Twitch, would probably be key to it. But I don't think there's much scope for a youth audience - it might actually be better served focused more on retro gaming and leaning heavily into nostalgia than trying to compete with Twitch streamers and YouTubers. I wonder if Dominic Diamond's own Twitch stuff during lockdown has influenced this.

That sounds brilliant! Now that I've ordered a new laptop, and will have reliable internet for the first time in 4 years, I'm contemplating getting Fire Pro again - I have it on the PS4, but the extent of how moddable it is on Steam is tempting me to go down that route.

Yeah, there are wrestlers I haven't downloaded because I don't like how their name is formatted. 😆 I hadn't played this in probably over a year, but had been meaning to check out Fire Promoter mode after I guested on someone's Twitch stream. I was self-isolating over Christmas, so figured it was as good a time as any. I completely restarted my game - deleted my save, unsubscribed to all my CAWs, and rebuilt from scratch. I found some of the Promoter stuff either clunky or difficult to follow, but some of the matches were ridiculous fun. I was way too ambitious, though, and generally went bankrupt after 2 or 3 shows. My first attempt was a Lucha promotion, in which Cain Velasquez won my World Title and then was just completely unbeatable because he was doing MMA stuff and none of my wrestlers had any defence for it. My trios champions were Maki Itoh, Pagano and The Fiend, in a never-ending feud with L.A. Park, El Hijo del L.A. Park and whoever else they drafted in to help. Clowns vs. Skeletons, all day long. I had a Giant Haystacks/Big Daddy match on my first show that went nearly thirty minutes, mostly because they both kept going for corner splashes but falling over exhausted every time they tried to run.

I've been getting really into Orville Peck lately, and my love of his work has been book-ended by two cover version. The first, that made me curious enough to check out the rest of his work, was his cover of Bronski Beat's "Smalltown Boy": It's tremendous, putting his own spin on it without losing the intended spirit of the original. Though changing "cry boy cry" to "cowboy cry" is a bit on the nose. The cover that I've been playing almost non-stop since hearing it, though, is his version of "Fancy" by Bobbie Gentry. It's a masterpiece.

Phenomenal list. Eels are fantastic, and just really mix "depressing" content with jaunty tunes and are consistently interesting and offbeat without ever sounding gimmicky. "Ready Or Not" might be one of my favourite songs ever, just an absolute masterpiece. Lauryn Hill carries a lot of it, but it's still an ensemble piece, and I love it. I've never been the biggest Prodigy fan, but can't deny the importance of "Firestarter" at all. Tori Amos was a really teen angst artist of mine, so this version of Professional Widow never really fit in with my experience of music, though I grew to love it beyond the context I normally listened to her music in. I was once in an awful generic pop dance music club many years ago, and absolutely lost my shit when it unexpectedly came on. It's great. Speaking of teen angst, here's Placebo. A lot of their stuff is almost embarrassingly on the nose, but they had a run of absolutely fantastic singles, and Nancy Boy is one of them. Back when we were allowed in pubs, I'd quite often put Placebo on for the drunken walk home, and it made me feel like I was a 16 year old goth kid again.

"Common People" is on my list of probably fewer than ten karaoke songs too, and the only one I've done twice. I once did it as a duet, and it turned out to be the extended album version, so the person I was duetting with didn't know half of it. It's great. It's one of those songs that almost suffers for being a hit, because it was so ubiquitous that you tend to overlook that it's clever, funny, and has a nice touch of venom to it. I never really got into Britpop at all - hate Oasis, have only a passing familiarity with Blur - but I adore Pulp, even though I didn't get into them until far too late. Similarly, I prefer Disco 2000 - it's a superb song, played less often, and makes me genuinely nostalgic for the sort of childhood it describes, which very few things manage for me.

this series has been fine - Johnny Vegas carries a lot of it for me, because it's pretty much guaranteed brilliance with him. I've still not warmed to Daisy May Cooper, though - I just don't find her particularly funny, so how she performs at tasks is almost immaterial. Mawaan has been delightful, though. I am slightly disappointed by Richard Herring - I'm a huge fan of his, and he hasn't delivered at quite the level I was hoping from him, but he was great fun in the acting task. Katherine is just sort of "there" a lot of the time - never egregiously bad, but never the stand-out of either show. There's been series I've preferred, but I definitely prefer this one to series 6 or 8 at the very least.

if anyone's still watching Rifftrax, Battle For The Lost Planet is one of the most ridiculous cheap sci-fi movies they've done in a long time, and great fun

yeah, Krishnan could be a sleeper hit out of that group

"Everybody Here Wants You" was off the unfinished second album - I think some of the production was cleaned up before release, but not as much as it would have been had Buckley survived, for sure. My favourite off that album is "Morning Theft", though, which I think is just gorgeous - though, again, tied up with a lot of personal history. Buckley is another one somewhat like Cobain, in that him no longer being around really lead to a certain perception of his work taking precedence, when he could be a surprisingly diverse performer. A lot of his live stuff was starting to move in an angrier, punkier direction, and I think much more of that would have started to makes its way on record. Even if it he hadn't explored that side of his work more, he's someone who was prepared to release a cover of Corpus Christi Carol on his debut album, so there was a lot going on beyond the fey singer-songwriter type he's been cast as.

Yeah, it feels like the '90s are really just going for hits/obvious choices, rather than the "must hear before you die" idea, and I'd have gone with Lover as well. I don't know if I could categorically say that it was Buckley's best song, but it's certainly his most mature, creatively and emotionally, for such a young artist. I grew up on Soundgarden - my half-brother is nine years older than me, and was a teenager at the height of grunge, so most of my earliest musical memories come from him, and Soundgarden were his number one band. We had a pet cockatiel that whistled Black Hole Sun. That said, as a song, this one doesn't do that much for me. It's interesting in parts, but I agree with metalman that it sort of loses its way and becomes a bit of a dirge. Aside, but when my brother's flat was broken into, they stole his entire CD collection except "Euphoria Morning" by Chris Cornell. I don't like Stone Temple Pilots. I associate them too much with the post-Pearl Jam arse end of grunge stuff that begat Creed, Puddle of Mudd et al. Yarl Farm. Waterfalls is brilliant, I love TLC. I never had a "pop music" or R&B phase as a kid, so TLC were a group I knew from occasional radio play but mostly came to as an adult when my cousin got big into them. They're the obvious ones, but this and No Scrubs are both superb. I love Tori Amos, she was part of my teenage goth kid awakening to genres outside of hard rock/metal, and I have a lot of affection for her music because of that. I don't know if I'd consider Cornflake Girl one of her best, necessarily, but it always makes me smile when I hear it. God, Jeff Buckley and Hallelujah. I could talk for hours about this one. I was doing work experience in an HMV stockroom in September 2001, and was at work the day after 9/11. Mark Radcliffe was on Radio 1, talking about how he had to find a song to play under those circumstances, and the only thing he felt appropriate was to offer a moment of quiet reflection, and played Jeff Buckley's version of Hallelujah. It was the first time I ever heard it, and the room fell silent until it finished. I fell utterly in love with Jeff Buckley from then on. He was the first artist I felt like I really arrived at on my own terms, rather than through family or friends recommending them, and no one else I knew being into him made him feel like he was mine. I bought everything I could get my hands on - the albums, the bootlegs, the live DVD, the biography. I bought Tim Buckley records, I started listening to Nina Simone and Leonard Cohen because Jeff Buckley covered them and spoke highly of them, bought Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan because Jeff said he was the greatest, got into Captain Beefheart because Buckley collaborated with Gary Lucas, got into Bad Brains & The MC5 after I heard Buckley cover them on live recordings, and into The Smiths (who I'd previously been pretty resistant to) after hearing his version of "I Know It's Over". He probably shaped my tastes more than any other single artist, other than maybe Bowie or Tom Waits - but in terms of opening doors to other artists, and other genres, I'd still put him at number one. Back to Hallelujah...it's neither my favourite Jeff Buckley song, or my favourite Leonard Cohen song. Some of that is because of over-exposure, some because it just doesn't hit all the spots that other songs of theirs manage. In spite of that, I have repeatedly argued for it being the best pop song ever written. That started after a prolonged drunken conversation with an old bandmate years ago, and eventually found its way into a magazine I used to write for. Basically, my point was that Cohen's version is sleazy, predatory, and a little world-weary, while Buckley's is breathless, angelic, and contains none of the sleaze or menace or grit of Cohen's version. Cale's version is more hymnal. But it's also been able to work as an X-Factor finalist power ballad, and as a cheesy open mic night number. All of those elements exist within the song, no version feels incongruous or forced, yet there isn't a single version that manages to contain all of those elements. And I think it's that inability to grasp a "perfect" interpretation that makes it the best pop song ever. All that said, I could probably gladly go the rest of my life never hearing it again.

I don't know if I've remembered this correctly, but my understanding is that Nirvana Unplugged was a bit of a non-event - MTV were pissed off that Nirvana were being difficult by refusing to play the hits, and doing all these weird Meat Puppets and Vaselines covers instead, so didn't really plug it that hard or play it on repeat as often as other episodes. After Cobain died, it was pretty much never off the air, and it was released posthumously as an album basically because people were hungry for Nirvana material - that it was Nirvana material that also cast Kurt Cobain in the role of troubled folkster only added to it. The performance of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" is, for Kurt's vocals, admittedly brilliant, but it's really functionally identical to Mark Lanegan's version. And that's the thing with the covers, or even the reinterpretations of Nirvana material - they're not really doing anything special with it, just playing it quieter. Overall, it's just the posthumous reimagining of Nirvana as The Kurt Cobain Show that bugs me. They always fought against that during his lifetime, and if you listen to live recordings they were an absolute force - because they were a tight band, and because they were noisy and loud, and had a great rhythm section. They weren't just Kurt Cobain + Two Others, but outside of Everett True's excellent biography of the band, you'd never know that from the discourse around Kurt Cobain after the fact.

yeah, I like "Hurt", and seeing NIN play it live on the With Teeth tour will always stand out as a spine-tingling memory for me, but I don't recall anyone really talking about it as a great Nine Inch Nails song before Johnny Cash did his version. "Closer", "Terrible Lie", "Piggy" or "Head Like A Hole" feel more fitting. "All Apologies" is a great song, but I grow wearier and wearier of the MTV Unplugged session as I get older. It's not indicative of who Nirvana were, and really feels like a conscious effort to try and shape the band even more as "Kurt Cobain + Friends", with Kurt in the role of a singer-songwriter more than a frontman. It's telling that it wasn't really seen as anything special until after his death. I absolutely can't stand Oasis. Never could.

I really like Your Ghost; its neither's standout track, but it just quietly worms its way into my brain, it feels atmospheric without trying too hard to be. Confide In Me is great; there's this weird mid-90s trend for pop stars to try and get a bit indie and serious, and start trying to become a bit more Britpop, a bit more grunge, or a bit more trip-hop. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, but this really did. Doll Parts is probably my favourite Hole song, except maybe Olympia. Nothing particularly to say about it beyond that, though, it's just a good track.

I bloody love The Breeders. One of the best live acts I've ever seen. But there's a lot of other tosh in these lists now, aside from the emergence of hip-hop and R&B as a genuine force. I actually quite like Natalie Merchant, but that 10,000 Maniacs track making the list is a headscratcher.

I'm 100% Team Fade Into You when it comes to Mazzy Star, it's just impossibly gorgeous. An all-time favourite of mine. Stereolab are a band I've liked everything I've ever heard from, but never known where to start. They have a lot of albums, and without ever really had a big iconic hit, it's hard to know where to dive in. I worked in a record shop once, and the owner was a major influence on my tastes for a long time - he was big into psychedelia, and a lot of jangly '80s indie pop, and had some really rare Syd Barrett stuff, but above all else he was (and is) the biggest Stereolab fan I've ever met. 50% of the time I go in there, chances are he's listening to a Stereolab bootleg or side-project. He'd go and see them every time they were on tour. They always struck me as an odd band to inspire that kind of passion, but they are lovely.