Championship Vinyl, The Inner Workings Of

The inimitable Hipinion is running a challenge at the moment to list your top five songs from your top five artists of all time. Piece of cake, I thought. Wrong. I had enough trouble coming up with my five favorite bands, much less singling out five songs in their catalogs. But I've got a list now. I want my efforts to come to something, so I've decided to post it here. Feel free to post your own list. Here's mine:


Yo La Tengo
1. Today is the Day (fast version)
2. Detouring America With Horns
3. Drug Test
4. The Lie and How We Told It
5. You Can Have it All

Destroyer
1. Beggars Might Ride
2. The Bad Arts
3. It's Gonna Take an Airplane
4. Self Portrait With Thing (Tonight is Not Your Night)
5. Mercy [We Had the Right]

Wilco
1. I'm Always in Love
2. Muzzle of Bees
3. At Least That's What You Said
4. When You Wake Up Feeling Old
5. Pot Kettle Black

Mountain Goats
1. Game Shows Touch Our Lives
2. Jaipur
3. Song for the Julian Calendar
4. Tallahassee
5. Grendel's Mother

The Replacements
1. Androgynous
2. Alex Chilton
3. Answering Machine
4. Can't Hardly Wait (Tim version)
5. Left of the Dial


So there it is. Looking over it, I've picked five fairly canonical indie bands, nothing unique about that aspect of the list at all. Destroyer is probably the only unique touch in there. I like to think that I got some pretty deep cuts within the artist lists though, check out that unreleased Replacements studio outtake, or the super-early Mountain Goats and Yo La Tengo tracks.

The Replacements list was unbelievably easy; they're not the most consistent band out there, so the hits just stand out like a sore thumb. I had a really tough time with Yo La Tengo and The Mountain Goats, mostly because I feel YLT is a better albums-band than a singles-band, and The Mountain Goats just have a such a vast and uniform discography, much of which I still haven't heard.



I'm surprised that I've finally admitted that Pavement has fallen off my radar. They'd been my favorite band since...10th grade or so? I think my embarassing love for them culminated in my painting of the Wowee Zowee cover art on my senior square. I haven't looked at that thing since I graduated. So yeah, it's been a good ride Pavement, thanks for all the good stuff, but it's time for me to move on. It's not you, it's me. I'm the one who hasn't worked hard enough in this relationship; I wasn't able to give enough of a commitment, and that's all my fault. But we can still be friends, right? Malkmus?






Top 5 links of the past few days:

• Make a laptop case out of an old t-shirt.
  
• Some info on the Tromba Marina, a bowed string instrument that sounds surpisingly brass-like.
• Ridiculously elaborate pot-growing operation.
• Very messy networks.
  
• I'm pleased to report that I gave Mr. Behrend nightmares from showing him this caterpillar infestation of a Swedish town. Reportedly they are probably the larva of Yponomeuta evonymella, the Bird-cherry Ermine.