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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 don't normally listen to much music on youtube but I did find this Canadian banjo player who performs by Talise that I've been listening a lot to. Wonderful voice. She has an album on bandcamp but I prefer her more stripped down youtube videos.
Little more than just last week, as I just had a 20 year anniversary with Last.fm, and in short I have been listening to mostly black and death metal for most of that time. With the occasional Wagner opera. I digged through the stats and wrote a small post about it.
Turnover has just released a tenth-anniversary cut of Peripheral Vision, a psychedelic indie rock album that now features alternative takes and instrumentals. I'm really enjoying the new take on some familiar favorites.
The new Coheed and Cambria album dropped a few weeks ago and I've been enjoying that. It's not the banger that Vaxis II was, but it's still really good.
Put on the Tron soundtrack and remembered how much of a banger that one is. Gotta find more synth orchestral music. Seems like a rather niche genre.
For some reason, seeing it phrased this way reminds me of the Hardspace Shipbreaker soundtrack "tension" mixes. Here's Suthern Gothic (Tension Remix) and The Miners (Tension Remix). It's a radically different genre than Tron - Appalachian Americana - but it blends acoustic and synth in a similar way.
Some context: Hardspace Shipbreaker is a science fiction game - hence the synth - that takes themes from the labor conflicts in Appalachian company mining towns in the early 1900's - hence the Americana.
The game uses a dynamic soundtrack system where, normally, the soundtrack is only Americana; but in "high tension" situations, like if you're low on oxygen or a nuclear reactor is about to melt down, it blends the synth elements in. As a result the OST doesn't have any synth, it's just acoustic, so they also produced these "Tension Remix" versions of the song that include those synth elements you hear in the game.
Oh, something a lot more similar to Tron that I'd probably classify as "Synth Orchestral" is the Surviving Mars Soundtrack.
I spent most of my twenties and thirties on finding new music. It was one of the more time-consuming hobbies, and listening to it was a great way to bond with friends. Going to concerts, etc. Eventually, life got busier and hings stalled for a while. But lately, I am slowly coming back, and I am trying to discover what all those youngsters have been making in the last decade.
Apparently, this week was about rap and EDM. These albums will get some repeat listens before I will finally decide to keep them or not:
Cheekface, Dennis Commetti, Cabbage, and Spoon.
I randomly had a hankering for Spoon during my morning walk the other morning, Dennis Commetti and Cabbage for my commute, and then Cheekface for my evening extraneous drives.
I've gotten behind in my weekly music recs/roundups for my blog, but just posted my favorites from the week of 4/4 today, so I'll put them here since it's what's been on my radar the past few days.
Clean-sung, instrumental, or otherwise non-extreme music.
Momma - Welcome to My Blue Sky
Indie/alt rock from LA. A great follow-up to their wonderful debut. Clean and crisp riffs and warm tones everywhere. Great production that feels very full and rich. Straightforward indie rock with great, often dual, vocals that lay pretty loudly on top of the mix but in a way that works- the music all feels very vocal-driven.
Glare - Sunset Funeral
Dream pop / shoegaze from Texas. Dreamy, reverby vocals, dreamy multi-layered droning guitars and an overall humid and melancholy vibe. Full of textures and big drums.
Scowl - Are We All Angels
Hardcore-influenced, angular punky indie rock with laidback vocals that is very melodic but without pushing into bubblegum pop-punk tropes, instead it feels dark, genuine, and fierce. It feels sarcastic, angry, and closer to a melodic hardcore punk than anything else.
Extreme heavy music (harsh vocals)
Dart - Speed Days
Speed metal influenced metal punk from Finland with rock organs! This absolutely rocks. Fast, DIY, and old-school! Fast punk guitars, black/thrash style old-school open E riffs which bring Motorhead and others to mind. Barky, aggressive biker yell vocals with some slight breaking / squeeling for even more of that speed metal vibe. This is skeleton-on-a-motorcycle music for sure.
Verheerer - Urgewalt
Anti-fascist black metal from Germany. Aggressive and sharp vocals that often have a wide range from shrieks to pained, despairful wails, to spoken-word yells. Musically goes near-dissonant in some portions, punk in others, and more standard black metal blasting too. Overall this is a bit of a wild strange beast, but it works.
Goetia - Otherworldly Agency
Grindy death metal feat. member of Delirant Nerve. Absolutely full-force blasting and production here that is right in your face. Fast guitar solos, grinding and blasting drum sections, shrieky vocals, mid-tempo grind sections too, this is something to wake you up in the morning! Can't wait for a full-length release.
I found yesterday this song Honey and Glass - Peyton Cardoza and it has resonated with me a lot. Usually for me, it's quite challenging to be "emotional" but I think this song made it easy for me.
I'm still debating with myself if that's good or bad. (The council still hasn't decided)