Music! What I've Been Listening to Lately Edition, Take Two

I'm going to level with you guys:  I am absolutely beat.  I probably overextended myself a bit today doing some work for family and friends and since I got home, I've been feeling awful.  I haven't really been able to compose my thoughts well enough to write and there is, again, not really a whole lot to write about.  I hate to fall back on doing another music post so soon after the last one, but these are fun and good to write at the moment since there's little else that I'd rather do than curl up in bed and listen to some nice tunes.  I might just do that come bedtime and get back to the normal routine tomorrow; hopefully do enough of Alpha Protocol that I can effectively write about it, instead of imagining all the cool stuff that's going to happen.  Because cool stuff -is- going to happen, you know.  I believe it.

You might recognize the first song is "Sleepwalking" by Photek (featuring Linche) from the Sleeping Dogs post from the other day because it is, of course, what started me in listening to it.  I can't really pin down just what it is about the song that I like, though I really like the vocals and the low-key of the entire thing.  The first time I listened to the whole thing, a good ways in I was afraid it was going to turn into dubstep and have this sickdrop, as they call it, in the middle then do some sort of breakdown that would ruin the entire thing.  But instead it just remains fairly moody throughout which, while it won't always strike a chord with me, it has been doing as much lately.  Still, it's a fairly nice song regardless, and I've been enjoying it quite a lot.

I gotta hand it to whoever put together the reveal trailer for Sleeping Dogs because they picked the perfect song for it, really.  Despite the laid-back nature of the song, the low mood of it, it really lends itself well to some real action-packed scenes like are present in the trailer.  It's very theme and/or cinema-friendly really, which is just another thing in its favor.  There's really not a lot else that can be said about the song really - I just like listening to it and relaxing to/from it.  I could probably set it up through some sort of speaker system in a lounge, grab a chair and a book and have a good few hours with it on in the background while I catch up on some reading.....I would need a lounge for that first.  Still, a man can dream.

I've pretty often thought that it really doesn't matter, for me, the contents nor the context of a song, but whether or not I like the mood of it.  Which is fairly evident in my writing, since I'll always tell you the mood I -get- from certain songs.  So I like to think that it's this mindset that allows me to un-ironically enjoy 'pop' songs without worrying that I'm being too mainstream or something otherwise awful if you've ever been a music snob.  Generally, I just turn on the radio nowadays and flip through a few stations (I have a SiriusXM radio which makes it a little better, selection-wise) between the pop stations and the rock stations and I just stop on whatever sounds good.  That's pretty much how I found "Domino" by someone named Jessie J, and it's just one of those songs that has a good mood that I can enjoy.

Obviously, some might worry that enjoying that means certain things that aren't positive since it's popular, but I do enjoy it.  Again, more for the mood and feel of the song, the upbeat nature it has, than the actual content of it or anything like that.  Which isn't me even protesting too much or anything like that, nor does it need the qualifier.  I'm basically just rambling because with a song like this, there's only so many ways you can say "It's upbeat and I like that, and it's got a generally happy mood and sound and I like that too!"  The vocals are decent to good at parts and the song is fairly basic in itself, but there's just that little fun spark in it that makes it something you (or at least I) want to listen to.

As I said, I generally switch between pop and rock stations to find something that sates my musical desires at any given moment and that's how I found the last song here as well.  Finishing us out with a little bit of rock, this is a song that is actually a cover, and the band doing it is a band that I hadn't known about prior to hearing this.  Aside from hearing their name a whole bunch in years prior, but I could've sworn they were in a different genre of music then.  They could have been, of course, since I haven't looked into them (I care about songs, not bands or artists), but this is definitely rock and since then, I've heard a few more songs by them that are in the same genre.  Regardless, Five Finger Death Punch is a pretty neat band name and this cover of "Bad Company" is pretty good to listen to for me.

It's really really good at points with the vocals and while the quality (and this is song-side, as far as I can tell, not to do with the video) isn't spectacular, it offers quite enough to be enjoyable to get the blood pumping as they say.  Though, I've heard quite a few other songs I should've put here instead, but I couldn't think about them at the time, so that would suggest there's a reason I went with this one, eh?  It's a good song in its own right and maybe I just went with it because of the band name since, again, Five Finger Death Punch is a pretty great band name.

That's been kind of a peek into what I've been listening to a lot lately.  Hopefully you can enjoy at least some of it as well (if nothing else, then Sleepwalking at least, since I really think that's a fairly genuinely good song) and maybe it'll even expand your musical horizons a little bit.  Or maybe you've heard all these songs before, don't like them and your horizons are perfectly broad the way they are.  I dunno.  But this is what I wanted to write about tonight, eventually, when I was actually able to sit down and get to writing, so that's what we got.