Keith Pille's Weekly Shuffle
1.23.06

Every week, I will fire up the Shuffle Songs option on my iPod; the first song to come up, no matter what it is, will get an instant, unvarnished review. We're at the mercy of random chance and the limits of my digital music collection. Let's see where this takes us.

Shooting Star
Golden Smog, On Golden Smog

In their later incarnations, the Golden Smog are at the very top of my list of favorite bands. Weird Tales was hands-down the best album of 1998 (Jesus, it was that long ago?), and I'm positively salivating for the new one that's supposed to be out this year. There's something beautiful about a bunch of guys this talented working on a low-stakes side project away from their main gigs (Wilco, the Jayhawks, Soul Asylum, Iffy, and a rotating drummer position which has featured representatives from the Replacements, the Honeydogs, and Big Star); the Smog seems to bring out the best in all of its constituent parts, and their albums often generally laid-back rock and roll masterpieces.

The magic wasn't quite there for the first EP, On Golden Smog. I'm not sure why; could be the absence of Tweedy, could be Chris Mars sucking the fun out of the room (no one whose paintings look so Bosch-y can be that much fun to hang out with), could be (and probably is) just that everyone involved was a lot younger and less developed musically. At any rate, On Golden Smog has only one track that reaches the heights of the later Smog stuff: their smoking-hot awesome cover of Thin Lizzy's "The Cowboy Song." The rest of it, including "Shooting Star" are pretty good but not great.

"Shooting Star," really sounds more like what you'd expect if given a generic description of the Golden Smog*a technically proficient, perfectly acceptable cover version of a BadCo song that everyone in the band listened to growing up. You could hear this on a classic rock station and think nothing of it. I guess that sounds like damning with faint praise, but well, them's the breaks.

I think it goes without saying that you wouldn't hear anything from Weird Tales on a classic rock station.

Weekly Shuffle Scoreboard (Best to Worst):

1. "Rock N Roll Radio V2," Derailleur
2. "Back from Somewhere (live)," Husker Du
3. "The Ride of the Valkyries," Richard Wagner
4. "Powderfinger," Neil Young
5. "Sliver (live)," Nirvana
6. "Whiskey Bottle," Uncle Tupelo
7. "Don't Be Afraid of the Robot," Electric Six
8. "Gassed & Stoked," Lou Reed
9. "Shooting Star," Golden Smog
10. "You Are the Everything," R.E.M.
11. "Nicotine & Gravy," Beck
12. "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (live)," Wilco
13. "The Calming Sea," Beachwood Sparks
14. "John, I'm Only Dancing," David Bowie
15. "Take It or Leave it," The Strokes
16. "Is It Too Late?", World Party
17. "Monkey Dot," Money Mark
18. "I Wanted to Tell You," Matthew Sweet
19. "Soldier's Joy," Mark O'Connor
20. "Masoko Tanga," The Police
21. "Scenery," Neil Young and Pearl Jam
22. "We Got The," The Beastie Boys
23. "The Big Foist," The Minutemen
24. "Climbing up the Walls," Radiohead
25. "That's When I Reach for My Revolver," Mission of Burma