Current mood:	melancholy
Current music:	Pure, Mary Beats Jane (which nearly made the top five too)

Top Fives

This entry would have happened yesterday if it was not for an annoying feature of Opera's mouse gestures. I have learnt my lesson and I'm composing this update in TextPad before pasting it into Opera...

I watched High Fidelity at the weekend. Later, as I pondered my lack of blog updates I decided to take leaf out of John Cusack's character's book. I'd do a top five post. Inspired by what I was doing when I had this idea, here is my top five tracks I listen to at very high volumes when driving:

1. Long Snake Moan, PJ Harvey. From the opening "Mm hmm..." to the closing roars of guitars and vocals, this is just a great song. Driven along by an energetic bass riff, this song manages to include two fabby guitar breaks inbetween PJ Harvey's feral vocals. It's a great example of a song that's powerful and raw without being dark or bleak with it. The other tracks on To Bring You My Love are very good too but this for me is the stand out track. Is This Desire's Perfect Day Elise may have supplanted this in the top five if the rest of that album was up to the standard of To Bring You My Love. Long Snake Moan is also the song that I'm most likely to turn the volume up for when others are in my car.
2. Up Above My Head, Alabama 3. From the Brixton collective's latest album Outlaw, though an acoustic version is also available. It opens like it's going to be a cover of Walk This Way but this song is archetypical Alabama 3. Cool riffs, samples and lyrics littered with pop culture references all come together to form an uplifting and immediately accessible track. It just sounds great at high volumes. Woke Up This Morning is the track's obvious competition but I've perhaps been a little too over exposed to that song and besides it seems more prone to distorting at high volumes over my car's speakers than Up Above My Head does.
3. Someday I Will Treat You Good, Sparklehorse. This is probably the most accessible song on Sparklehorse's first album Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot and thus a primary reason I got into the band. It's a fairly straightforward indie rock song, albeit with some occasionally odd lyrics but it has a great pace and energy. It is also the winner of a special prize for the song that I am most likely to sing along to at loud volumes.
4. Save You, Pearl Jam. Well they're not short of loud rock songs but this one from Riot Act wins. Get Right from the same album was also in contention as well as tracks from pretty much every other album they've done. Save You probably wins out because Riot Act was one of the first CDs into my car's CD changer and seems to work well in the car. Of course the fact that it's a loud and fast paced rock song with some good example of Eddie Vedder roaring lyrics helps. It is also the sort of tune I wish I could have stuck in my head when I'm tearing down the hillside on my mountain bike. Usually all I have in there when I'm doing that is my own internal commentary ("change gear, haul on the pedals, lean against the corner fool!, arse I'm not going to go into this jump as smoothly as I'd like...") and the noise of the bike going over the trail but who wouldn't like a rock soundtrack to their life?
5. Lakini's Juice, Live. This one's from Secret Samadhi, the album they made after they stopped trying to sound so much like Pearl Jam. Big chunky guitars are backed up by strings that don't sound too much like an overproduced rock cliche. In conjunction with the lipstick Voodoo lyrics you get a cool heavy rock song with a nice edge of sanity feel. The closest competitors I can think of from Live are Simple Creed from V and Like I Do off Birds of Pray but they don't really come close.

If only the ol tag could do countdowns, then that'd be even better, but there you go. I suppose if you want to make this a whole dirty meme thing you could start giving people top fives to fill in. Hopefully they wouldn't all require so many annoying links...