Unsung Podcast

by Unsung Podcast

Episode 127 - Corollaries by Lubomyr Melnyk (Side B)

Our voyage into continuous music comes to a close as we dig into Lubomyr Melnyk’s eighteenth (!) album Corollaries. For the unfamiliar, Melnyk categorises his style as being something almost beyond classical music, yet this release sees him team up with neoclassical composers Nils Frahm and Peter Broderick. This album seemed to give Melnyk a new lease of life; upon getting together with Frahm and Broderick he stated “Where were you in my thirties?”, a statement that stands in stark contrast to his general aversion to playing with other musicians in the years before. There’s a lot to be said about Melnyk’s playing, and I think we cover most of that in the episode. Once again, potato quality audio from Mark but hey, it isn’t terrible. There’s no doubt in our mind that Melnyk is unsung. The question is, do you agree? Vote below.

Episode 126 - Corollaries by Lubomyr Melnyk (Side A)

OH GOOD LORD IT’S ANOTHER TWO PARTER. Maybe we should get better at planning these things… Anyway. Chris has been chomping at the bit to do this Lubomyr Melnyk album for a while. In fact, some may even remember that he brought it up during our Pandemic Mixtape. Well, the time has come to finally tackle this post-classical/minimalist work and in doing so we absolutely had to cover his…interesting thoughts on musical philosophy. Which cascades into his questionable thoughts on the actual science of how sound works. Which takes us down a big old rabbit hole, as I’m sure you can imagine. All of this to say that it takes us a while to get to the album as a result. Also, the dude’s done like 20+ albums (although we don’t cover all of them) so that’s another whole thing we had to deal with. We also talk about continuous music (the genre he reckons he’s in…of which he is the only practitioner), his incredible piano playing speed and a bunch more things. We’ll chat about Corollaries next week. Also, apologies for the bad sound on Mark’s part this week.. Technical error as resulted in proper potato quality sound.

Episode 125 - Donuts by J Dilla (Side B)

Finally, after the extensive preamble, we’re now down to talking about J Dilla’s third album Donuts. Because of the nature of this record, we didn’t break it down track by track as the whole thing flows as a kind of suite, so we do a little bit of track analysis and talk more extensively about the composition of the album, the techniques and technology used to create it, the samples used, the message of the record and a whole lot more. Is this an unsung classic? Vote on our facebook page. Black lives matter. J Dilla may not have been obviously political in his music very often, but he certainly had things to say about the black experience in America when he was on the mic. Indeed, his song “Fuck the Police” explicitly deals with his own negative experiences with the police, something Ma Dukes would later say often came down to the fact he was a “clean young man” that wasn’t selling drugs and the Detroit PD just couldn’t believe it. J Dilla’s story is, as we are all well aware, not an outlier. It’s time for this to stop. We all have a part to play, and a good place to start is to amplify black voices. So go do it.

Episode 124 - Donuts by J Dilla (Side A)

Rarely do we go into an episode thinking it’ll be a two parter. It certainly wasn’t the intention with this one. Yet it turns out there’s rather a lot to say about J Dilla. He was a truly gifted producer and musician, who created an incredible amount of music in his short term here on Earth. Donuts was his second (or third) full length album, and was released a mere 3 days before his untimely death at 32 years old from a heart attack. But as a producer and beatmaker, he’d created and contributed to way more than three album’s worth of songs and, as has been demonstrated since his death, composed a lot more tunes alongside. On this episode we really dig deep into his story, talk about some of the career highlights, cover off a bunch of the things he worked on (not all because frankly, there’s a lot) and give you as much of the story of his life as we can. People who know a lot about hip hop may be wondering how this man could possibly be unsung, but the fact remains that his influence is still being felt to this day and not a lot people know about this album and his life. Vote next week!

Episode 123 - The Troubadour Mixtape

It’s time for another emergency mixtape, folks! Due to unforeseen circumstances Weaver wasn’t available this week, so as something of a response to what seems like a deluge of people live streaming acoustic gigs from their bedrooms, Mark and Chris decided to rustle up this little number about singer-songwriters. It goes without saying that we’re mostly focusing on solo artists in this episode, and it’s by no means an exhaustive list of the ones we think are good. In fact, we’ll probably revisit this topic a little further down the line, and no doubt some of the artists mentioned will get their own episodes too. So grab a beverage and relax as we talk about some of our favourite singer-songwriters. Next week we’re going to cover Donuts by J Dilla. Promise.

Episode 122 - The Dillinger Escape Plan Triple Threat (Side B)

Doing these two Dillinger Escape Plan episodes was a blast. You can hear part one here, where we spoke about the band’s history, live shows, touring and all of the other albums we’re not covering on this episode. It’s a good deep dive into one of metal and hardcore’s most influential acts. On part two we each make that case as to why the DEP album of our choice is the correct one. Chris has backed Calculating Infinity, Weaver’s fighting in the corner of Miss Machine and Mark thinks One of Us is the Killer is the best. Which is it? Well, we couldn’t decide because we obviously all disagreed on which is their best album, but you can help us with that by voting below. Next week we’re going hip hop and instrumental as we cover Donuts by J Dilla.

Episode 121 - The Dillinger Escape Plan Triple Threat (Side A)

Aye so at the start of the year we thought we were absolutely capable of make our episodes a bit more concise. We were wrong. Sorta. One of the few good things to come out of lockdown is that we can spend more time researching and then talking about artists. PJ Harvey is a good example of that, and we expand upon that idea with our Dillinger Escape Plan threesome. The idea was to pit three DEP albums against one another, with Christ vouching for Calculating Infinity, Weaver backing Miss Machine and Mark bigging up One of Us is the Killer. With each of us covering a separate era of the band we soon found that we were all rather comfortable chatting about what this band means, what they stood for, and every single aspect of their sound. We figured this out as we were recording (although you’d never be able to tell) and decided to split this episode in half cleanly, so in this part we talk about the band’s history and the albums we didn’t choose. Vote comes next week.

Episode 120 - Is This Desire? by PJ Harvey, with Vicki (Side B)

It’s part two of our PJ Harvey episode, and this week we talk about her fourth album Is This Desire? in full. We get into the flow of the album, how it differs from her other work, and do our usual track by track breakdown. Weaver also drops in via voice mail to give us his thoughts. Plus we have the usual nexus shenanigans too as we look to try and connect PJ Harvey with the bloody Peperami mascot, The Animal. So, the question we pose to you is this: Do you think Is This Desire? is the definitive unsung PJ Harvey album? Over the past two episodes we’ve discussed whether or not it’s her best, and if it’s the most well known album (it’s not). You can probably guess which way we float on this, but it’s your call so vote below. Next week: The Dillinger Escape Plan Triple Threat.

Episode 119 - Is This Desire? by PJ Harvey, with Vicki (Side A)

Chris has been deliberating on which PJ Harvey to pick since before this whole podcast even started. It was a choice so difficult, that he’s had to call in back up in friend of the pod, and resident PJ Harvey expert, Vicki. Weaver couldn’t join us in full this week due to a myriad of technical issues (seriously, we tried for like half an hour to find a work around), which further proves we’ve yet to come up with a foolproof remote recording method that takes into account women who make tarot cards, phones without headphone jacks, and decent quality mics. We are, however, closer than ever to creating the perfect remote episode. Promise. This week, Vicki picks PJ Harvey’s fourth album Is This Desire? for your consideration. This episode turned into an absolute whopper, so we’ve broken it down into two delightfully bitesized(ish) chunks. We cover the history of PJ Harvey and a bunch of her albums to boot. Voting comes next week. Hopefully you’ll think we’ve made a good case. We’ve also compiled a wee PJ Harvey playlist, which is pretty great if you’re unfamiliar with her work. You can find it over at www.unsungpod.net

Episode 118 - Homework by Daft Punk

Weaver’s taking us back to France this week, as he gives us the lowdown on 90s house music and we give Daft Punk a good analysis. It’s difficult to imagine a time when Daft Punk were not one of the biggest electronic artists in the world. Everyone’s heard them. In fact, there’s a pretty high chance that you’ve heard “Around the World”, which was taken from this very album! The story goes that Daft Punk only wanted to put out singles, but after writing a lot they decided they had enough tunes for a full length, and some 4 years after they arrived in the French house music scene, they released Homework. All of the singles they’d released up to this point are included, and the rest is history. We go on a journey of their discography and Dave tells us about house music too. A good listen, if we do say so ourselves. Is Homework Daft Punk’s unsung classic? You decide.

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