Last Saturday: David Bowie - Bring Me the Disco King

     They say that bad news comes in threes, so hopefully the music world is done losing talent for a while now. First Scott, then Lemmy, and now David; Ziggy has returned to the stardust whence he came. I'm sure by now you've all heard about the passing of David Bowie, so now it's my turn to pay a little Loud Noises tribute.

     All the usual suspects from Bowie's career have likely been trotted out ad nauseum over the last 24 hours or so (and there are a lot of great songs to revisit) so I'm going with a haunting version of a personal favourite of mine. The track in question is "Bring Me the Disco King", originally recorded in the 90s but only finally released on 2003's Reality, but I'm going to direct your attention to the Danny Lohney remix that appears on the soundtrack to the first Underworld movie.

     For one thing, David has figurative help from, among others, Maynard James Keenan on the Underworld version of "Disco King". But Bowie's tired melancholy is centre stage, especially at moments when the song is stark and stripped back. I used the word "haunting" above, and I'll use it again here, because this is a hauntingly beautiful version of a lesser-known Bowie song. Check it out, and raise a glass to the thin white duke.

Stone Temple Pilots - Down

     By this point in your Friday afternoon, most of you have likely heard the bad news that's going around the interwebz, but on the off chance that I am somehow your primary outlet for music news, here it is again: Scott Weiland, singer for seminal 90's band Stone Temple Pilots (and some other acts that, while enjoyable, weren't Stone Temple Pilots), has died at the age of 48.

     For anyone familiar with Weiland's history of substance abuse and his struggles to get clean, this news can hardly be shocking, but that doesn't make it any less sad that we've lost a talented musician and an important part of all of our collective musical histories. Listening to a variety of Stone Temple Pilots stuff today has reminded me of just how central STP was to my own musical experience growing up. I've since delved into some pretty wild and woolly areas of the world of heavy music, but even I can't deny that Stone Temple Pilots have an impressive body of work. I could probably name a dozen songs right now, from throughout the band's career, that I still dig just as much as when I first heard them.

     So let's pick just one of those songs to say goodbye to Scott. It's a tough call, I know, to pick just one, but I think I've settled on "Down", the opening track from 1999's No. 4. It's got a good heavy riff, a great guitar solo, a brooding atmosphere, and of course, plenty of Scott Weiland goodness. I feel like No. 4 doesn't necessarily always get the same love as the first couple of Stone Temple Pilots records, but the combination of the record's overall sound and the timing of its release (I was in high school at the time) has solidified No. 4's spot in the hole in my paper heart. You will be missed, Scott.

Song of the Day: Stone Temple Pilots - Vasoline

     If you've been following music news at all in the last week or two, you've now doubt seen that the on-again-off-again relationship between Scott Weiland and the rest of Stone Temple Pilots is once again off, quite possibly for good this time. You've also no doubt seen that, for now at least, Linkin Park's Chester Bennington is STP's new singer.