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What have you been listening to this week?
What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)
Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.
You can make a chart if you use last.fm:
http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/
Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.
I have fallen back into an early Opeth mood. I used to listen to them all the time back in the early 2000s before Ghost Reveries came out, which was the beginning of the end of my interest in them. I never listened to their first album, Orchid, so I plan on exploring it this weekend.
Earlier this week and last weekend I was in an almost nonstop Limbonic Art mood. For the uninitiated they're a symphonic black metal band whose heyday was in the 90s-early 2000s. To me at times they sound like a super harsh version of video game music from outer space and hell.
https://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/collage.php?user=tom957&type=7day&size=3x3&caption=true&playcount=true
Random suggestion - you should check out Vertebra Atlantis's 'A Dialogue with the Eeriest Sublime', which came out last week. Like most of the artist's prior work, it's in the blackened death metal spectrum, but on this album particularly I get strong Opeth vibes, in terms of song structure, harmonic qualities, and instrumentation (in particular the title track feels like an homage of the creepy, gothic sound Mikael Akerfeldt when he does those clean singing/acoustic guitar passages).
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll check it out today.
I enjoy bands that don't take themselves too seriously, so the musical highlight of my week was coming across the band Mystic Prophecy's album Monuments Uncovered, where they perform old-school metal takes on hits from the 70's and 80's.
Patti Smith's "Because the Night" reimagined as a hard rock ballad? Yes please!
Elton John's "I'm Still Standing" with some real fire and aggression to it? Finally!
CCR's "Proud Mary" replete with downtuned guitars? I got you fam.
I kept track of some of the songs that I thought were nice this week:
One of them is already gone from YouTube so I removed that link
More About Nothing - Wale
It's a mixtape he dropped early in his career. I've always really liked Wale, but never listened to this mixtape despite a lot of people saying it's really good. I happened upon it because I was checking his Spotify. I was surprised because it said it released last year. There's a lot of Seinfield clips, so the mixtape could never be released. But Jerry Seinfield made some calls to get them approved.
Anyways, it's really good. Technically a mixtape, but as good as an album. It's definitely one of my favorite albums of his.
I went back to Garth Brooks, of all things. His music was pretty formational for me in middle and high school. Pulled it up on a whim and spent the whole day working through his catalogue. It reminded me how much I enjoyed the country music from that era.
Unfortunately, almost none of it can be had on streaming services, but here is one I found on youtube: The Dance
If you're looking at albums, I'd go for In Pieces, Fresh Horses, Ropin' the Wind and the Double Live album.
Weirdly, I don't have any of the albums he released after 2000. I guess because none of it was available digitally and I switched from radio to streaming, I wasn't even aware he was still releasing albums.
I'm a child of immigrant parents, and because I wasn't very wired in to American culture, they wanted to change that. So they bought me a box set of Garth Brooks CDs when I was 10 or 11 and that was the only music I had access to on demand for quite a long time. Garth Brooks is absolutely great!
Been listening to In Aphelion a lot. Highly recommend if you are into black metal.
In Flames (melo-death metal) is currently re-pressing their albums for another round of vinyl for next month. So I have been listening to them, so I have been enjoying them currently. Currently they had released the full album of Sounds of a Playground Fading and A Sense of Purpose. Both are really good albums and this is what their fans wanted, sound wise, from two albums ago wanted (even though that album was good).
Spiritbox
Genre is hard here, progressive metalcore? Maybe Tesseract meets Evanescence? Courtney LePlante is incredible, doing both clean and harsh vocals and everything in between. She was previously lead vocalist for mathcore band iwrestledabearonce along with her partner who is now Spiritbox's guitarist. Song recommendations:
prefer doing a single artist for these threads with two or three song recs