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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.
New albums (for me)
Fontaines DC - Romance
SOFT PLAY - HEAVY JELLY
Fontaines DC - Irish band leaning into 90s/00s vibes which sounds very different than their previous albums. I like it a lot. Love their last album as well. Previous records before are good too, of course.
I just discovered SOFT PLAY and love them! So fun and humorous. Apparently they renamed themselves (old name "Slaves" oof) and have other albums under their previous name. New album is fun and it's always great to find a new band that you can delve into. The band members each have their own music as well.
Chelsea Wolfe released a new album earlier this year (She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out) and is releasing a new remix EP named Undon. A few remixes on it are out now and they're excellent.
I also found Soft Play recently. I particularly like Mirror Muscles off of the new album, gets me in the mood to work out. I recommend going through their back catalog, some good stuff in there.
New Fleshgod Apocalypse album, Opera (tech death symphonic metal).
Still sinking my teeth into it. Some people are complaining that there's too many clean vocals but that doesn't bother me. Their previous clean vocalist (and bassist) left the band and the female opera vocalist they've worked/toured with before has joined as a full member of the band and taken over the cleans. But she isn't always using her opera voice. In at least one song she even had a No Doubt kind of rock voice. I don't know that it really works for me... But I wasn't big into the previous male cleans either (again I don't mind the presence of clean vocals, just some of what they do with them, and they aren't totally ruining the songs). In a way I might just be spoiled by Epica.
Recent releases (past two weeks):
LEATHERS - Ultraviolet
Wishy - Triple Seven
Laura Cannell - The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined
Cool Heat - Abandon
Oxygen Destroyer - Guardian of the Universe
Vile Rites - Senescence
Horns & Hooves - Spectral Voyeurism
Dungeon Keeper - Chaos Sorcery Strike at Midnight
Other stuff:
God's Hate - God's Hate
Various tracks by Vader, Capitalist Casualties, David Bazan, KC Rae, Now Now, TW Walsh
Been meaning to dig into these more two since they recently came out:
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Flight b741
Iron Firmament - Cascadian Tactics
More detailed descriptions/reviews of recent releases on my blog:
Best Albums (Week of 08/09/2024)
Best Albums (Week of 08/16/2024)
I've been loving that Vile Rites album! It comes out swinging with some strong old school Florida DM vibes from the get-go but the gradual shift into something altogether proggier is beautifully done. The bass sounds awesome too, some serious heft in the mix.
This album fucking slays, holy shit.
I've been on a huuuuge Dave Malloy kick recently. He is the guy that wrote Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, a musical excerpt from War and Peace.
Specifically, the 2nd epilogue that he wrote for that musical Epilogue
Also, this specific performance of a song from one of his other musicals, Preludes. The musical was written to have the main character, the classical pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff be played by an actor and a separate pianist, but this actor did both roles for a song and did both roles very well.
I listened to Sabrina Carpenter's new album Short N Sweet.
I was, of course, familiar with her two singles: Espresso and Please, Please, Please. I'm not sure if Espresso was originally made for the album, I've seen contradictory stuff on that. I really liked Espresso, even if it ended up being overplayed throughout TikTok and Spotify's janky algorithm, but I wasn't a fan of Please, Please, Please.
It turns out most of the album sounds like Please, Please, Please. When I heard the first title track, Taste, I didn't like it. But the more times I heard it the more it grew on me. So I started getting used to that sound, which was not really what I was expecting from Carpenter since I'm not terribly familiar with her.
But I like it overall. It's good enough bubble-gum pop. Nothing really feels like it stands out, nor does the album strive for something important. It's simply just okay.
Triple Fire from Geneva Jacuzzi is her first major release in eight years. Her two albums are perfect. This will grow on me, but it isn’t as good yet.
Nile - The Underworld Awaits Us All
I haven't listened to a lot of Nile, so I can't make a comparison to their other stuff, but I'm loving this! Definitely worth a pick up for tech death fans.
Additionally, I want to be more intentional with music again instead of just letting spotify recommend stuff, so I brushed off my foobar and actually purchased this album in 2024, imagine that. I did also order an ipod classic on ebay because I've been wanting to decouple various things from my phone and this is a good way to let me get music onto a dedicated device that isn't designed to addict me to everything. It's not here yet, but I'm excited about music again and ready to load it up with some albums as well as checking new releases this Friday!
From 2015 or so to 2021, I acquired 1370 albums, mostly in flac, to make up a 500gb library. But before this week, I hadn't downloaded a single album since 2021, it was all through streaming and I feel a little gross about it. So I definitely want to get back into the swing of things of actually owning music and managing my own library, though I probably won't be getting 300 albums a year like I used to, lol, I ended up just burning myself out back then.