Monday Morning Music Shuffle - A Mean Idea Mix

I hope everyone had a great weekend.  It's Monday, it's also Tax Day here in the USA.  Our goal of late, seems to be to cover as much musical ground as possible in the span of 7-10 songs or so.  I hope today's Pre-Shuffle and Shuffle Shuffle do not disappoint.

Let's get to it....

Pre-shuffle:  April Verch is a Berklee trained Bluegrass/Traditional music fiddle player and step-dancer.  She has a new sampler out of Noisetrade, so there is no excuse not to check her music out.  We listened to two selections from the release this morning.

We also heard more music from Taco Land's Pancakes and Pizza album - (see our review). Plus another song from the awesome new record from Sad Baby Wolf.  This morning's Gershwin song is performed by the late, great Rosemary Clooney, and we closed out the Pre-shuffle with John Wesley Harding with the opening track from his 2011 album,The Sound of His Own Voice.

Let's head into the shuffle - now....

Friday Morning Music Shuffle - Heavy Metal Drummer Mix

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Good morning - er afternoon.  After two days of Non-Shuffles, I turned the Shuffle mode back on and came up with some songs to get us through the last day of the work week...

Pre-Shuffle:  We started things off with another track from the fantastic self-titled EP by The Foresters - a track called "Alone".  Next, we had a fun little triad of songs which featured two more songs from The Lucky Jukebox Brigade's album Pretty Well Damned.  In between, "Taffy" and "Carnivultures", we had Sinatra's version of Gershwin's classic Someone to Watch Over Me.  It was really cool how well those three songs worked together.  We closed out the pre-shuffle with a track from Odd Man Out, the Killing Kuddles' album we reviewed on Wednesday. 




Coming up after the JUMP, we have a shuffle which includes two cover songs and an Arrested Development reference...

Tuesday Morning Music Shuffle - Reasonable Man Mix

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You know, I'm not one to dwell in the past... well at least as it relates to this blog, but I was thinking about yesterday's Shuffle, and how proud I was to be able to present three great new pieces of music from artists and musical styles which could hardly be more diverse, and which (at least in my mind) were united by a love of what they do and an authenticity of spirit which can be a rare quality in music these days (or any days).

As they say, now for something completely different.  We shuffled up the same playlist of songs and here is what emerged for today....

Pre-Shuffle Shuffle:  A cool Punk Rock band from New York State called Bridge Under Fire which we pulled off of The Appetizer Sampler from Built4BBQ.  A couple more tuneful tracks from the outstanding Pretty Well Damned album by The Lucky Jukebox Brigade.  We close out the Pre-shuffle with a pretty cool Rock band from Brooklyn called Brothers (not be to mistaken for any other band called Brothers, this band is referred to as Brother NYC).

Shuffle forward after the Jump

Monday Morning Music Shuffle - Let's Make History Mix

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Well, it seems like I actually made progress last week - presenting more tracks on the blog than I added to the Playlist.  Then, this weekend came along...  There is a seemingly endless amount of really good to great music out there, and the list keeps growing.

Meanwhile, my album review to do list keep growing, while the free time seems to dwindle. So, I'll keep at it... 

 The Pre-Shuffle included another track from the minuteflag EP.  "Candy Rush" is a wild jazzy, punk rock jam of an instrumental.  We followed that with some more great bluesy folk pop from our friends Val and James who record as You and Me - this time we heard "Today is Gonna Be a Better Day".  NOSE! demonstrating the timeless art of "Hamboning".  We heard a classic.  Harry James and His Orchestra doing "Blues" from An American in Paris composed by - you guessed it - George Gershwin. We closed out the Pre-Shuffle with all 10 minutes of "Go Girls (Complete)" from the Go Girl album by Dog Without Warning.

 Shuffle comes up right after the jump.... JUMP!

Friday Morning Music Shuffle - D Day Mix

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Don't bother to double-check your calendar, it's not June 6.  No, the D here is a reference to the Roman Numeral D which equals 500.  What you are reading is the 500th  Blogger Post here at Ear to the Ground.  (Note: We began as an upstart blog on the now (or soon) to be defunct Posterous site).  In transferred to Blogger sometime around the beginning of 2012. Full disclosure, we did transfer a handful of our Posterous posts over, and those are included in the 500, but we still think this is a remarkable achievement.

As we approached 500, we considered a self-indulgent retrospective post looking back on our finest moments with perhaps some blooper reels thrown in for good measure, but none of that stuff seemed to fit what we try to be all about. 

So without further ado (but with a huge tip of the hat and thanks to everyone who has joined us and assisted us on this continuing journey), we are simply going to do what we do best... we offer up an inexplicable mix of new and old and well known and obscure music which by all rights (maybe) should not be in the same mix, and we offer it with our simple and overriding (usually unstated) message: "Hey, I heard some cool music today.  Let me tell you about it."

Today's list of songs comes up after the jump:

 

Thursday Morning Music Shuffle - April 4 Memphis Mix

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Thinking about MLK and the price of Freedom and Justice and the power of Love and Mercy.  For the record, the shot didn't ring out in the early morning of April 4 (despite U2's poetic license, it was the late evening). But I digress. 

The awesome music continues to roll in faster than we can distribute it out to you.  Stay tuned!

First up, we had a whopping eight songs in our Pre-Shuffle Shuffle this morning.  Just to explain, I listen to music on my ride into work and then on my walk from the parking lot. It was taking to long to write a complete post about all of the music, but I wanted to take the opportunity to give some quick shout outs.  So I invented the Pre-Shuffle Shuffle which contains fewer details but 100% of the love.

Pre-Shuffle Shuffle includes: Colorado by way of Brooklyn Singer-Songwriter and CXCW Alum David Lott, Birthday boy Luke Anderson and his band The Danbury Lie with another great song from their '?' album out now via Bandcamp. Built4BBQ band and friends of The End Men (obligatory The End Men mention) New Red Scare are a Rock and Roll band from Albany - Unlucky One is from The Appetizer Sampler.  More Gershwin. Connecticut prodigies, The Foresters with Mugshot from their self-titled EP. A track from the forth-coming album, Damaged Goods from veteran Canadian band The Mohawk Lodge. A classic track and one of my favorite songs by Nashville by way of Mobile, Alabama singer, songwriter and guitar god, Will Kimbrough going back to his This album.  And the Pre-Shuffle closes out with yet another great track from Taco Land's awesome new album Pancakes and Pizza which is out now.

 

We hit the Shuffle, Shuffle after the Jump

Tuesday Morning Music Shuffle - Avant Guard Dogs Mix

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It's festival announcement time. We'd love to hear from our Readers about which festival lineup you are most excited to see. I'll be honest for most of the major festivals, probably 90% of the lineup seems almost obligatory.  By that, I don't necessarily mean it's bad music, just that there seems to be a core group of bands who you know are going to be at every major festival.  So, we're most interested in any artists who you were surprised to see on a festival line-up.  

Let's get to it:  This morning, we had four songs in our pre-shuffle shuffle and four song in our Shuffle shuffle.

Pre-shuffle:  we continue to dig on the Dog Without Warning album Go Girl.  Today, we heard Pacific Time Zone which more of an alt-country feel to it then some of the other songs we've heard from the album.  We also had another great song from the self-titled You and Me album. We heard a newish track from our good friend Galen Wade via Soundcloud, and the pre-shuffle closed out with another great track from The Lucky Jukebox Brigade - he heard Flip which the band performed for this year's CXCW.

Now, let's get to the Shuffle - it's after the Jump

Monday Morning Music Shuffle - Fools in Love Mix

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No fooling, today's pre-shuffle shuffle and Shuffle Shuffle have an interesting and entertaining mix of music.  We are short on time so let's get to it.  Remember, as per our new habit, we have created a handy-dandy playlist which represents most of the songs in the daily shuffle.  The video playlist is posted at the very bottom of this post.

Pre-shuffle-wise we have the only non-instrumental track off the legendary Minuteflag EP which was released back in '85 and featured members of SST bands Minutemen and Black Flag.  The song Fetch the Water is included below.

We also have a song from Porgy and Bess composed by George Gershwin and performed by the great Sarah Vaughan along with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

We have our first taste of the new album by Taco Land.  Look for much more on this great album in the days and weeks to come.

And we close out the pre-shuffle with another track from Dog Without Warning  who came to our attention via CXCW.

Now the shuffle:

Thursday Morning Music Shuffle - 18 Years Too Late Mix

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The subtitle of this post references a comment made by my friend Rex Silo regarding the fact that the reconstituted Black Flag is headlining a music festival in our hometown.  By the way, Ear to the Ground favorites Black Jake and the Carnies as well as newly discovered FOTEM (friends of  The End Men) John the Conqueror are also playing that festival.  More details on all that later.

I decided today to add all the songs from my morning listening that I could into the Amazon Widget.  Therefore, you will find music from George Gershwin, The Black Keys, + Shane MacGowan covering Townes Van Zandt.  In addition, the pre-walk portion of the morning music featured some early period Hayden Coleman with a chunky, cool beat called "Vans (Down by the River)" which you can check out here:

The official Shuffle is after the jump and after the widget: