The League Of Extraordinary Tracks II: 2. RELIGION – Polls

This week’s League Of Tracks is the first theme to go beyond pre-existing pop polls – we are tacking RELIGION with a selection of devotional, heretical, or otherwise spiritual tunes from across the history of pop.

As usual the rules are simple.

Go listen to the songs on the PLAYLIST POST
Vote for up to 4 of them in the poll – but!
You mustn’t vote for anything you already knew. New discoveries only!

Into the multi-denominational faith room of pop we go…

League Of Extraordinary Tracks S2E2: Religion!

Please pick up to FOUR of these tracks.

DO NOT PICK TRACKS YOU ALREADY KNEW!

Spotify and YouTube playlists in the playlist post.

The poll has expired!

The League Of Extraordinary Tracks II: 2. RELIGION – Playlists

The League Of Extraordinary Tracks II: 2.RELIGION – Results!

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mondosalvo

31 October 2023 00:49

Perhaps I have seriously overestimated the appetite for cheeky mid-80s skatepunk among this electorate.

vinnycrackers

31 October 2023 11:22

Reply to mondosalvo

Lol it got my vote!

healingandy

31 October 2023 10:23

Was most taken with the extended baseball metaphor of The Ball Game, the deep waters of Miserere, the apparent sincerity of The Goodies (Brits AIA, for sure) and Aly & AJ’s confesso-pop banger, and these were where my votes went. There’s a commendable variety in the selections. This was quite an experience for a godless heathen.
Had to take the Beasties off the table as previously heard, I’m afraid.

Steffen Rayburn-Maarup ?

31 October 2023 10:35

Overall, liked last week better, but there was a handful of nice tracks here.
I imagine the Beasties will struggle to find new listeners.

actualee simpson

31 October 2023 18:01

Loved this group. Had to disqualify Mary Lou Williams, Sierra Ferrell, and Aly & AJ — though MLW was dq’ed as my *inspiration for nominating this poll theme* (!!) and Sierra Ferrell was a Shazam in a record store.

I did NOT have to disqualify the Beastie Boys, because I could not for the life of me ever remember actually listening to the entirety of the album. But didn’t vote for them by a nose (I think the best “religious” Beastie Boys song is “I Don’t Know” from Hello Nasty).

Loved how the Goodies would have fit right in to the Animals poll — heavenly choir as menagerie (or vice versa?), genuinely trying to cram every bright and beautiful thing into the same track; take a number.

Loved how Sister Wynona Carr is so single-minded that at some point you wonder whether baseball is a metaphor for religion or religion is a metaphor for baseball.

Loved how Amma keeps layering on voices and ideas across ten-plus minutes until if you might think there’s something holy going on, and loved how Allegri throws all the layers on at once and keeps it going for ten-plus minutes, almost smug in knowing how Godly it’ll all come off.

Which leaves the other three, punk guys who muster some genuine passion for religion (which is to say, against it), religious guys who muster some genuine punk, and the reggae that didn’t stand out as *particularly* religious but that didn’t really matter.

Went for Goodies and Freddie/Hitchhikers for surprising me and Allegri and Yellowman for not surprising me.

actualee simpson

31 October 2023 18:09

Reply to actualee simpson

Like Frank I would have seriously considered nominating Krystal Meyers’s “Beautiful Tonight,” even though my personal evangelism for that track over a decade plus means two or three people in the electorate would have probably already heard it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HHEmSuQbxs
Probably would have nommed Mary Lou Williams, “St. Martin de Porres.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_LcpXEA0W4
(Also: great sequencing on this one, Tom, might just copy the whole playlist over to my ongoing League tracks.)

Dan Bright-Amaya

3 November 2023 10:43

Fair play for *almost* getting me to vote for the Beastie Boys 🙂

Jeff Worrell

3 November 2023 12:35

I own three of these, and have actually sung one in public IRL. Of those three, I actively dislike one (Beasties; CYH is their worst LP).
Amazingly, I hadn’t heard this Goodies song before to my knowledge. The TV show was required viewing in my childhood but if this from the show I don’t remember it. I wish I liked it more tbh. Bill Oddie is a musical genius and I expected better, although I liked the proto disco groove.
That narrows the field considerably. Fairly easy choices in the end: Freddie, Wynona, Sierra and Yellowman.

Baltimore Jacks

3 November 2023 13:50

My feelings about these songs evolved quite a bit over multiple listens. In the end Freddy and Yellowman stood out, though neither had on first listen.

mondosalvo

3 November 2023 18:56

If it weren’t for the relative familiarity of the Beastie Boys song nominated this week, I feel certain now that Spermbirds would’ve arrived in last place. I’m a little surprised by that, but maybe I shouldn’t be. I was introduced to this song in 1988, having started 9th grade in public high school that fall after having spent the entirety of my prior educational years in private Christian schools.

I was a complete fish out of water, but I quickly became attracted to our school’s group of skaters and they were happy to have me. I became really good friends with several of them and remain that way now. There was another guy who was as fresh to this public school situation as I was, but for him it was because he’d been living in Germany as an Army brat for the past several years. Afternoons at his house, trying and failing to learn skateboard tricks, we listened to a lot of punk tapes. One of them was Something To Prove by Spermbirds, a German band that sounded like all the American bands. Nobody else knew who they were. They weren’t covered in Thrasher Magazine or any other place, but to me they were just as important as Dead Kennedys or Black Flag or Minor Threat. How would I have known any different?

Anyway, “My God Rides A Skateboard” still hits (me) pretty hard, especially because I was reaching the age where I absolutely DID NOT enjoy going to church every week anymore for reasons mentioned in the song (hypocritical televangelists) and because of the values I was developing as I got nearer to adulthood.

So that’s why I nominated it, for better or worse.

Last edited 8 months ago by mondosalvo

koganbot

4 November 2023 09:05

Aly & AJ’s “Church” would be my top except I already know it. It touches me in its torment, of course, but I’m disappointed it’s so simply and starkly ambivalent as opposed to the complex ambivalence of their teenage “Blush.”

Haven’t researched their religious journey as teen fundamentalists who then veered left, incl. pro-choice and support for LGBTQ+, without (as far as I know) overthrowing their basic Christianity (though I don’t know the form). They made good music from the get-go, always thoughtful in the lyrics, though youthful, naturally enough. Ended their Christmas album with a song about not being able to get with Christmas cheer, and not ’cause baby failed to come home or they were blue without you, but because they felt like frauds.

koganbot

4 November 2023 19:22

Voted “Anima Christi,” “Bells,” “Ball Game,” “Natty.”

Mary Lou Williams “Anima Christi.” Despite Williams’s being one of the first jazz musicians I heard as a kid, I never got to know the breadth of her work. So this is a surprise, a gospel song that’s fundamentally sounding gospel. Has “jazz” accompaniment in the sense that, for a while, black dance music was being called “jazz” when it wasn’t being called blues or R&B. I like how the piano chords fit the dance that fits the vocals that are not reaching for the sky so much as presenting its world’s needs to the sky. “In your wounds I would hide.” Or in our chords.

Sierra Ferrell “Bells Of Every Chapel.” Beautiful voice that, because it’s hiding out in Americana, is at more of a distance than it should be. Not that I’d have her go full Brill Building on this – that would come off as a distanced “neo” of another sort. But this fundamentally is the Dixie Cups more than it’s folk or country, and I hope Ferrell finds a way to go as flat-out as the Ronettes, Dixie Cups, and Shangri-Las were once able to go.

And for all I know she has, as this is the first song I’ve heard of hers – though at the end of her YT vid there’s a snippet of another song, and I like its performance even more. It turns out it’s her cover of Tim O’Brien’s “The Garden,” which she hasn’t yet posted on YouTube (confusingly, she’s on YouTube with live versions of a different song called “The Garden”).

koganbot

4 November 2023 19:26

Sister Wynona Carr “The Ball Game.” Yes, in the Big Inning God created the heaven and the earth. (Thank you. I’ll be here all week.) I like that the journey round the Diamond is so treacherous. Also, especially like the rhythmic jitters from the organ – gives the song cleats, as it were.

(I stole the big-inning joke from Chuck Eddy. He might’ve stolen it from someone else.)

Yellowman “Natty Sat Upon A Rock.” As rocks go that one sits upon, this one’s pretty lush.

Helene Hoffman

5 November 2023 00:19

Mary Lou Williams & Amma were the standouts for me (the kind of things I was looking for to nominate before I remembered the fire and brimstone rockabilly curio already in my streaming library.)
Otherwise I really enjoyed the playlist & could’ve picked most of the others for my final 2 (Ferrell I sadly had to disqualify; the choral track & the Beasties didn’t connect but didn’t annoy either, and they added atmosphere & variety.) Wound up going with Yellowman & Goodies.

Steffen Rayburn-Maarup ?

5 November 2023 10:47

Nominating Allegri: I know it won’t win but that’s alright, we’re here to be acquainted with *new music*.
Allegri not doing so well: Hmm, what might win in next week’s group …

vinnycrackers

5 November 2023 14:18

Reply to Steffen Rayburn-Maarup ?

I think I’m trying to find the sweet spot between NEVER WINNING and NEVER LOSING and that’s my life metaphor!

Tom

5 November 2023 11:49

I admit it, when I got the Goodies nomination in I rolled my eyes (I considered “Funky Gibbon” for the animals poll but it has not aged well), and that lack of christian charity pushed my final vote to it, edging out “Sinners” and the Allegri, both of which I also enjoyed. Yellowman and the first half of Amma my picks of the week – the second half of Amma I drifted a bit for but perhaps that’s the idea. Mary Lou Williams rounds out my four.

Bittersweet feeling seeing Most Holy on the Spermbirds sleeve!