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If there was a definitive discography of classic albums, what should be in it? Host Mark Fraser from The Curator Podcast, and titans of Glasgow music/co-hosts David Weaver from Detour and Chris Cusack from Bloc, discuss and dissect perceived classic albums to decide which albums would make this list. Then, after we've talked it to death, we turn it over to you to decide once and for all via a handy poll. Cast your vote on our Facebook page and let's celebrate unsung classics.
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Just over 6 years ago we came up with an idea. Well, Chris did, to be precise. What if we do an episode where we each pick an album and then put them head to head, with the public deciding which one is best. That's how our mixtape was born. Since then, it's kinda moved away the format of each of us picking an album and backing it, and started to become more of a deep dive into a specific genre or theme. But this is how it begun.
Unsung was barely 6 months old at this point. Indeed, this episode is just over 6 years old as of the time of publishing. We've tried a few different things over the years. Changed the format in various ways and pushed it to see how it would break. This is one of the ideas that really stuck.
This episode also makes a great companion to the nu metal focused covermount we did last week. It's also one of our most popular, and silliest, episodes. We hope you enjoy.
The covermount CD is certainly a relic from a bygone era. We actually have a bag full of them, all acquired through various means, none of them worth anything.
But when was the covermount CD, or tape born, why, and what were the political and economic factors involved in magazines creating them, and artists getting on them? We break it all down in our episode on the history of the covermount CD with our good friend Crag Carrick, all the way from the land of Oz.
With the exception of Soul Asylum and the Presidents of the USA, unless you were seriously tuned into Kerrang! and/or alternative music in the 90s there are very few bands you'll remember, let alone recognise, in the back half of this CD. Bullyrag, Janus Stark, Pulkas, Cecil, Pissing Razors and Genitorturers have all vanished more or less into oblivion since the 90s. Genitorturers perhaps being a bit of an exception in that they're still going to this day.
Grant, and the rest of the crew, are positively bewildered by the rest of this compilation. And very occasionally surprised.
This week Grant Donaldson joins us to talk about this Kerrang! covermount CD that came out during the hey day of nu metal. Turns out Grant is quite unfamiliar with nu metal so this was a real fun episode. In side A we talk about the first half of this CD, which includes the talents of Jerry Cantrell, Everclear, Bad Religion, Psycore and One Minutes Silence. It's all downhill after that, which you'll hear in the next episode...
Born from a fever dream, Mark had the idea to review records found in poundland. You used to be able to get some primo garbage for a quid. Sadly, you can no longer buy CDs in poundland but the memory lives on.
To that end, we thought it'd be fun to revisit the first in our series called Sound is a Pound. And on episode one, we reviewed Onka's Big Moka by Toploader. Very funny stuff. Dig in.
We break down the usage of music in ads into four categories: best original ad jingles and songs, songs made famous by adverts, famous songs best appropriated, songs ruined by ads. We also hear from our listeners on their favourite and least favourite tunes in adverts.
Given the sheer amount of work we've done lately on the pod, we thought we'd do something a little easy and do an episode on music in advertising. Except, it actually turned out to NOT be that easy because, well, this is a pretty fascinating topic. In part one we talk about the history of music in advertising and pick a couple of examples.
We've been on a real run of pulling out shows from 2019 recently and it seems the trend is not gonna break this week. We decided that we'd double down on the heavy, dirty misery of Yacøpsæ and revisit our episode on Pig Destroyer. Y'know, a proper grindcore band.
It's time to get really grindy and real with the band's more recent material, which is very fast, brutal and dark. It's a bracing but also fun. This band have a lot of songs but it's all quite short, so you can really batter through their discography in short order.
Joe also gives us some of his thoughts on the band and then we get to the nexus.
There's a fair chance you haven't heard of Yacøpsæ before unless you're very much in tune with DIY grind/powerviolence. One of the things we started this podcast to do was to shine a light on great bands were think are truly unsung. This band are one such example of that.
They're very underground, and are very, very, very brutal. In part one we talk about the squat scene, the definition of grindcore, how it differs from powerviolence and dive into their large, unwieldy catalogue.
As this is a genre we're mostly unfamiliar with, we brought in the expertise of Joe McGlynn, who you may remember from our Carcass episodes. He was in a band called Man Must Die, now in a cool hardcore band called Go Down Fighting, and is a host of Shit You May Not Have Seen podcast. Things get very weegie here too, so be prepared for some incomprehensible Glaswegian accents.
We're throwing it back to Sept 2019 on this episode, as Chris talks about an album he adores - Shaking the Habitual by The Knife. This was the band/act that Karin was in before they did Fever Ray and it is very very good indeed. Hope you dig this look back!
When we suggested doing Fever Ray after our episode on The Knife's Shaking the Habitual back in Sept 2019, this album didn't even exist. Indeed, Radical Romantics now takes the title of the most recent album covered on Unsung. Back in 2019 Chris would have picked their debut album but as you can see, that's now longer the album he thinks is the best...
But before we get to that, in Side A we talk about the history of Fever Ray, a little bit about Karin themselves, and their first album.
And to wrap up our two episodes on Fever Ray we talk about Plunge before Chris goes deep on why their new album, Radical Romantics, is the best thing they've yet done.
The pandemic was still stalking the world when we recorded this episode, so you'll have to bear with the sound quality. It's decent, mind, but recorded remotely. Anyway, this was, until recently, our only flirtation with a Saddle Creek artist so we thought it fittings to bring this one out of the vault. We do talk a little about the label, Bright Eyes and Desaparecidos but not at any real length. We do go down the well on Cursive in a big way, though. So, enjoy!
THE CONCLUSION. Kyle's still alive. Barely. In side C we get to the point of this whole sorry triumvirate of episodes: to discuss Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. And the nexus. Of course.
Kyle's still with us in this episode, but he's dreaming about taking a bath. Which we kept him from. Sorry.
Sadly, there was work to do. And that work is to continue our chat about Bright Eyes' back catalogue, covering everything from Fevers and Mirrors to Down In the Weeds, Where the World One Was.
This week we're joined by Kyle Wood, who creates music under the name of Lovers Turn to Monsters. He has chosen Digital Ash in a Digital Urn by Bright Eyes, claiming rather boldly, that it's amongst the band's best work. Which many fans would no doubt disagree with.
In side A we talk a wee bit about Conor Oberst, his history, the pre-Bright Eyes moments and the first two Bright Eyes albums.
Calling in our good friend Crag from Australia, we chat about the covermount CD from a 1998 issue of Kerrang! The CD is called, obviously, Radio Kerrang! Vol. 5 and it has an intro from the Deftones and an exclusive Soulfly track on it.
Remember how bad nu-metal could be at times? Well, it's all on display in this pearler of a collection. Relive it, or live it for the first time, in FROM THE VAULT episode 6.
On this episode we look at modern turbofolk. It's still hugely popular in some areas of the Balkans, in particular Croatia. So we dive into some recent examples from the genre and then take a wee peek into what the future of the genre might be.
Last week was heavy. We ended on a pretty sour note. This week is slightly better if only because you get to hear some actual music and we talk a lot less about war criminals. Operative word here being less; we're talking about Ceca this week which means we must talk about Arkan.
After that we then get start to look at some of the other popular turbofolk artists that emerged in the late 90s and 00s, then
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Spot on with how not every album they release is gold, but that they have soany great albums under their belts. Great episode, boys 🤘🏻