Mike Compton & David Long - Evening Prayer Blues

Mike Compton is the mandolin. I first became aware of him and his incredible virtuoso flourishes in the Down From the Mountain concert film, which was an evening celebrating and performing the traditional music found in O Brother Where Art Thou.

In 2006 Compton and fellow mandolinist David Long put out an album of traditional blue grass numbers titled Stomp. The album is a celebration of bluegrass music with large sections of the album built out of the duelling instrumental melodies of the two performers. There's a particular focus upon the songs of Bill Monroe, the American musician widely credited with inventing the bluegrass genre (the name of the style comes from Monroe's band the Blue Grass Boys).

And so we have todays Best Song Ever: Compton and Long's powerful reading of Monroe's 'Evening Prayer Blues.'

Donald 'Duck' Dunn Passes Away, 1941-2012

Donald 'Duck' Dunn passed away yesterday (May 13th) in his sleep after finishing a double show in Tokyo. Duck was one of the most influential soul and R&B bass players in the history of pop music. He played on an enormous range of Stax records releases throughout the sixties and seventies including Albert King's 'Born Under a Bad Sign,' Otis Redding's 'Respect,' and most famously as part of the organ fried Booker T. & the M.G.'s. While he joined the M.G.'s after the release of their well known song 'Green Onions,' he helped define the bumping and shaking instrumental grooves the band would go on to explore, creating rhythms still built upon and sampled to this day.

Duck, nicknamed after Donald Duck by his father when he was a kid, was a largely self taught bass player. Rather than take lessons or learn specific lines to practice he would play along with records and fill in what he felt was the missing sound in the rhythm. As a result his playing is a relatively unique mixture of fluid lines, hard jazz and grooving funk that fills in the melody of a song as much as it provides a rhythm. It never draws too much attention to itself, but creates a fuller and richer sound for the song over all- the mark of a truly great bass line and player.

We've pulled out a triple bill song selection to celebrate Duck and his contribution to pop music.

The first is the title track from Melting Pot, Booker T. and the M.G.'s 1970 instrumental R&B opus.

Next the final track of McLemore Avenue,  the four part instrumental reworking of The Beatles Abbey Road. The track comprises of a medley of Sun King, Mean Mr. Mustard, Polythene Pam, She Came in Through the Bathroom Window and I Want You (She's So Heavy).

And finally from the soundtrack to Michel Gondry's 2008 film Be Kind Rewind, a rendition of standard I Ain't Got Nobody which reunited him with M.G. members Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper and Al Jackson Jr.

TRIPLE BILL: Bastion - Darren Korb

Bastion is extraordinary for being the only video game soundtrack I put on in the background and consistently get non-gamers coming up to me head a-bobbin' saying 'What IS this?' 

Bastion's soundtrack was composed by Darren Korb, audio lead for Supergiant Games and multi-band independent musician since he was a teenager. The music is a dazzling mixture of soundscapes, genres and styles. Banjos twang and grind over digital crashes and smashes while ghostly harmonicas trade blows with distorted slide sitar. And that's ONE song out of twenty two.

The result is a fantastic soundtrack which instantly crafts a narrative on top of whatever you're doing. For example, I listen to Bastion a lot when cooking. Suddenly those draining plum tomatoes are no longer a lumpen mass of vegetables- they're prairie critters I'm having to slaughter to survive in the brutal wastes of the west.

I don't know what prairie critters are. I don't know what the brutal wastes of the west would be. But I know EXACTLY what they are when I'm in the moment with Bastion's soundtrack.

The East meets West meets Folk meets Industrial meets Classical meets Baroque mixture of the album ensures you never hit a dull moment. Cellos march you to war before delivering you into the hands of water logged harps. Chiming twelve strings tango with funked up dobros. Six shooter pistols clink and clank against rumbling electro bass. Korb is one hell of a musical magpie, and he knows how to construct an absolutely towering nest out of his bits and bobs.

The whole album is available to stream from Supergiant Games Bandcamp page and can be yours for ten bucks. It's also up on Spotify and YouTube. You have no excuses. Allow Bastion's transcendent soundtrack to craft some new adventures in your life.

Shooting Breaks - Garage A Trois

Shooting Breaks by Garage A Trois

Garage A Trois are an instrumental band featuring saxophone, vibraphone, synth organs and heavy, heavy drums. That sentence alone should immediately tell you how awesome they are, but if you need further convincing here's 'Shooting Breaks,' a track from their fourth studio album Always Be Happy, But Stay Evil released earlier this year- and today's Best Song Ever.

'Shooting Breaks' is the sound of an endlessly surreal panic attack. Great tongues of synth and organ curl down at you from the sky. Drums burst through the ground in the shape of hearts caught in voodoo cardiac arrest. Vibraphones (already the total melding of paranoia and joy into one sound) clink and crack through the roar in a constant game of aural peekaboo.

It's wild as hell, and just when you think you're getting to grips with it you reach the 2:20 mark and things get funky and terrifying in equal measure, like fifty foot elephants doing a can-can across your brain.

Saudade - Love and Rockets

Saudade is a Portuguese word which means (approximately) nostalgic longing. This definition does sort of kill the romance behind the term, but it's hard to describe in English. It's not just nostalgia. It can be longing for a loved one or place. It can be the melancholy accompanying the realization that you will never know everything the world has to offer. It looks back at what has been and forward at what may never be. And that pretty much sums up the mood (and is the title) of today's Best Song Ever: Saudade by Love and Rockets.

Love and Rockets (named after the Hernandez brothers comic series) are better known for their heavy and gothic music. Their first album Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven however (from which this song was taken) explored more psychedelic territories and soundscapes. Saudade, appropriately, closed the album.

There is something quietly final, even apocalyptic, about the song- like the empty ruins of a city. Drenched in echo, acoustic guitars gently jangle debris across the streets. Far off in the distance drum girders crack and tumble off the rusted skeleton of skyscrapers. Liquid bass pours down through the cracks and crevices into parched dirt. Heart strings push and pull against distorted electric squalls and murmurs before quietly dying into the ghostly call of a radio broadcast.