Sometimes when I wait a couple of days into the new month before posting the previous month's Song of the Day, info it's just laziness on my part. And sometimes, it's because I'm just too busy with my job to get to it. But this time, I didn't wait for either of those reasons. The truth is, it was just too close to call.
I'm going to tell you guys straight out, I think this was my worst month ever for SOTD, and it had everything to do with the month's theme. But I'll tell you all about it in a minute.
For new readers, this blog entry refers to the monthly Song of the Day list on the Sputnik Music website. Each month, one User hosts the list and names a theme. Everyone then recommends songs in line with this theme, and people rate the various song recommendations. The list of May songs can be found at Sputnik Music Song of the Day - May 2021.
1. The theme for this months was Songs That Are Under a Minute Long. It was a creative concept, and a good idea in theory. Unfortunately, in practice, it led mainly to two kinds of songs getting recommended: A. hardcore/punk songs, which tend to be shorter than those of most other genre's, or B. Songs that weren't really fully fleshed out songs, but were either just intro's to another song, musical interludes, etc. I can deal with the punk aspect, especially if it's funny punk. The hardcore, on the other hand, with it's growling, shrieking vocals, just kills me. And the intros/interludes/song snippets just frustrated me -- there too many examples of what sounded like good ideas that just never really got developed.
2. We had more than full participation this month, by which I mean not only did we have a different User recommend a song for each of the 31 days of the month, we also had two late comers who were granted bonus recs. But I didn't actually listen to the bonus recs, nor did I include them in my monthly YouTube playlist. (They're listed in the list linked above, though, if you're interested.) In any event, this meant that I got one rec for the month. And it was hard to find anything satisfactory. In the end, I sort of halfheartedly settled on "Generational Divide" by blink-182, which at least: A. Was actually a (sort of) full song unto itself, and B. it was a song for which I liked at least the first part of the vocal harmonies (although it sounds to me like they got slightly out of sync later in the song). In any event, it wasn't well received, and I knew going in it wouldn't be. The Users who regularly rank these songs every month hate pop punk in general, and the Sputnik site as a whole has no love for blink-182's last two albums. In retrospect, I wish I'd chosen "Her Majesty" by The Beatles (but it always feels so bland to rec a Beatles song), or "The Money Song" by Monty Python (which is a novelty song, but a good one). Oh well. blink-182 - Generational Divide
3. Like I said, the nature of theme really limited the choices people could make for their recs, with the result being that my average rating for the month was a putrid 2.62 out of 5. My top pick of the month (which I only gave a 3.5, again an all-time low for me) was a song called "Spiral" by the New Jersey band Pinegrove. It's kind of repetitive, but it gets away with it because, of course, it's only 56 seconds long. Pinegrove - Spiral
4. The winning song, however, was a track by a band called Vansire called "From the Subway Train". (The band is reportedly from Rochester, Minnesota, so what they know about subway trains, I'll be damned if I know. But there you have it.) Vansire - From the Subway Train
5. You can find 30 of the 31 tracks recommended for the month proper on the YouTube playlist I've linked down below. The 31st song, "Do the Moo Shoo" by an artist listed as VeggieTales, is available on YouTube, but because it's a children't song, and there's some kind of strange YouTube policy that won't let you add children's songs to playlists (I don't even want to speculate), it's not on the list below. May 2021 Song of the Day YouTube Playlist
So that's May in the books. I can already tell you that next month's YouTube playlist is going to be really incomplete, and we don't even have all the recs for the month in yet. But you'll have to come back at the beginning of July to hear about it. Until then, be good.
And of course, I'll be back early next week with the result of the latest matchup in the Prog Contest, followed shortly thereafter by the Tale of the Tape for the following week's matchup.
