YOU ARE HERE: zharth.net / Zharth's Music Log / Week 186 (Soundhound Stumper)
(Originally finalized on February 26, 2026)
Preface: I don't know if it's still relevant, but SoundHound is or was a mobile app that would "listen" to a song and identify it for you. So if, for example, you heard a song playing in a store or a restaurant or something like that, and you wanted to know what it was, you could run SoundHound and it would tell you (if it was able to identify it). I don't know exactly how it works (although I have some ideas), but once upon a time I thought it would be fun to try to put together a list of obscure songs, to see if I could stump SoundHound. But more important than the success rate is the opportunity to share some truly out-of-the-box tracks that I wouldn't get to share with you otherwise, before I retire this music log for real.
Monday: Silvertide - Jet Lag [unreleased demo, circa 2003-ish?]
Comments: I gave Silvertide a proper introduction during my week dedicated to 21st Century Discoveries. An obscure retro rock band from the early millennium, for all their talent, they were, sadly, short-lived. I have a bootleg I recorded myself at a show where the band debuted a few songs intended for a second album that was never completed, but what I want to share this week is an unreleased track that was passed around in the early days, that I believe was recorded by the band before or around the time of the release of their debut EP.
Tuesday: The Lizards - Down [Cold-Blooded Kings, 2004]
Comments: I've been to a few concerts in my day, and the opening act is always a toss-up. I've seen artists as established as Robert Plant, Pearl Jam, and The Allman Brothers Band opening for other acts. (If you're wondering who those acts could possibly have been opening for, they were The Who, The Rolling Stones, and Tom Petty, respectively). In fact, the first time I saw Silvertide live, they were opening for Van Halen. The Lizards is a band I discovered when I caught a modern Ten Years After performing at the B.B. King Blues Club & Grill in New York City in the spring of '06. They played this song and I liked it so much, I strolled over to their merch table after the show and bought their CD.
Wednesday: The Blue Pearls - People [Watch Out, 1999]
Comments: I stumbled upon "Swedish Top Band" The Blue Pearls online during a period in my life when I was obsessed with guitarist and original founder of Fleetwood Mac Peter Green. I saw that this band had covered some of Peter Green's songs, and so I wrote them an email. They sent me a copy of their CD in the mail, along with a letter signed by bandleader Bela Stephens who, it turns out, had met Peter Green once upon a time. The covers are good, but for a lover of the slow blues format, their original material is just as compelling.
Thursday: Rockbitch - Eveline [Motor Driven Bimbo, 1999]
Comments: I don't remember the circumstances in which I discovered Rockbitch, but I can tell you that I have never encountered a musical act quite like them before or since. I don't know if they're still active all these years later, but what made this all-female metal band truly unique was the fact that their music represented merely one facet of a holistic lifestyle philosophy - which, unlike many posers in the metal genre, they genuinely lived and breathed. Members lived in a "sex commune", and would perform explicit pagan rituals on stage during concerts, all in glorification of the feminine principle. This fact is well-documented online for the skeptical and the curious alike (but not for the faint of heart).
Friday: Gugun Power Trio - Wounded Heart [Soul Shaker, 2013]
Comments: I don't have much of a story about this song, but considering that the band (a power trio from Indonesia, also known as Gugun Blues Shelter) released this album under the Grooveyard Records label - which is where I found the likes of Joe Bonamassa and Lance Lopez - that is undoubtedly where I came across it. And what a fantastic demonstration of the Grooveyard Mission it is, with its "supreme bad-ass, killer heavy guitar six string mojo".
Saturday: B'z - Strings Of My Soul [The 7th Blues, 1994]
Comments: While we're traveling the globe in search of international guitar slingers, here's a track that would have felt right at home on my Guitar Instrumentals theme. The Japanese have long had a healthy appreciation for guitar rock (Deep Purple was "Made in Japan", and the "Land of the Rising Sun" embraced The Runaways with open arms), even offering up a guitar god of their own in the form of Tak Matsumoto. You may not have heard of him on this side of the Pacific, but if the fact that he has a Gibson model signature guitar is any indication, he's the real deal.
Sunday (AM): Reichi "Chabo" Nakaido - Tooi Sakebi [Serial Experiments Lain Soundtrack, 1998]
Comments: Serving as the ending theme to one of my favorite obscure anime series from the '90s - a speculative science-fiction story that delves into some of the darker applications of technology in the early age of the internet (or "Wired") - my appreciation for this somber rocker drenched in gravitas (the title translates roughly to "a cry in the distance", or better yet, "a far cry") runs so deep, that not only did I learn to play it on guitar, but also sing it entirely in Japanese!
Sunday (PM): The Black Mages - Dancing Mad [The Black Mages, 2003]
Comments: I know we've come to the end of the week, but I'm gonna add one more song because this is my music log, and I make the rules. And if this does end up being my final theme, I could think of no fitter an ending. I hadn't planned on spending so much time in the Far East, but I have a lot of experience with Japanese culture, so I guess it's the thing that's most familiarly foreign to me. And now that we've done anime, what about video games? Performed by a band put together by Nobuo Uematsu, in order to play metal renditions of songs he composed for the Final Fantasy series, this is the song that plays over the final boss encounter in Final Fantasy VI. It's one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite games of all time; and it's a masterpiece of artistic beauty. "The end comes... beyond chaos."
Honorable Mention: Jabberwocky [Demotog, 2005]
Comments: If that last song was our grand finale, then let this be the music that plays during the credits, as the lights come on and the crowd starts to disperse. As my failsafe for the Soundhound Stumper, I included on that original playlist this song that I wrote and recorded myself, and have never published through any kind of official means. I have a number of different versions of it - some softer and some harder, and with different pieces tacked onto the beginning or end. But this is one of my favorites, because of the ambience of the location. I recorded it in a stairwell in the college dorm of my junior year, upstairs from the basement station where I hosted my own weekly radio show. At a perfect moment during a lull in the middle of my song, a burst of students came into the stairwell, and my playing can be heard to continue as the noise recedes.