Crate Digging: February 2026 (YouTube Music Edition)
6 YouTube Music Videos I Watch Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over
Dave Lombardo -- War Ensemble -- Yankee Stadium
“There’s no joy here,” Augustus Crimes said during one of our drunken phone calls when I asked him to check out the video. He was right in a way he didn’t know: Lombardo left Slayer because he was turning in shifts like this with constant touring and not even breaking $100K/year. But still, what power and efficiency. Talk about setting up your workspace for optimized thrash. I love watching how the arrangement of his kit enables his technique, no motion wasted for those fills and rolls. Hell of a shift, even if it was exploitation.
Mountain - Don't Look Around (1971)
You’re missing out on what music is if you haven’t lost a night in Beat-Club’s feed. It looks like this German music show started out as a goof-ass lip sync thing, but became a font of incredible live studio sets by the late ‘60s. I think stumbling around Thee Oh Sees’ work at random over the course of the 2020s primed the ear tissue I needed to revisit heavy acid/blues rock minus my usual prejudices. My personal highlight: Right around the bridge when the camera pans left and you can see bassist Felix Pappalardi’s authoritative, lightning fretwork and how he’s working inside drummer Corky Laing’s Operation Barbarossa-level assault on those skins.
Giant Steps Coltrane Solo on Banjo
I still remember the night around 1999, coming home sweaty, drunk and stoned from the club with Rachel; we were just going to pass out, but I threw on Coltrane’s Giant Steps with only the slatted light from the street in the room, gaping at the speaker with my head at the foot of the bed, unable to turn away. I’m still learning about what those giant steps were composed of and why they were giant. Seeing others return to it — a kid with a banjo whose peers are coughing irradiated blue Taks on their phone screens in time with the algo — is a nourishing morsel on a night of compulsive Tubing, when you’re running out the clock before bed, looking for nothing, and then something finds you.
Cherry Wainer & Don Storer - Peter Gun (1966)
Beat-Club again, this time found through Dust to Digital’s supreme curation. The immediacy of this, Wainer mugging eccentrically in that trim dress with white piping as she and Storer unlock the power of this spy chestnut. You’ll crave Hammond organ tones for a month after this. It might be a detour into a whole new analog second life or give weight to the suspicion that you were born in the wrong time.
The Pirates "Lonesome Train" 1977
I’ll trade you all the phones-up arena shows in the world for this night at Dingwalls in 1977. The Pirates, after innumerable lineup changes and mutations since Johnny Kidd and The Pirates’ 1960s smash “Shakin’ All Over,” sweating like pigs with legend Mick Green hammering the holy piss out of his guitar, absolutely owning their lane in a punk-crazy London.
The Cramps - Tear It Up (Live - Urgh! A Music War) 1980
Over the years I backed into an appetite for what this band did, roistering in that locus of rockabilly power and the panting sex- and death-drive of the genre with transgressive theatrics. Lead creature Lux Interior is a natural for this exercise and I never get tired of when the camera moves between his obscene cavorting and Poison Ivy chewing her gum and looking bored as hell. This expertly cleaned-up VHS footage told me in one document why I’d been quietly loving this band more and more over the 2000s.
Win my giveaway pile of indie tabletop charmers. Details in Episode 110. Listen here.
You’ve got until the end of March 2026 to enter: Win indie tabletop artifacts from Grumpy Spider Games, Long Tail Games, The Seahorse and the Hummingbird, and Ada Press.