~music Listening Club 0 - Outline and Prep
Alright, so in the ideas thread, several of you expressed that you'd like / it would be more active if we went for a listening club that goes for something more general. As I think ~music is in a bit of a rough spot right now and needs a little more to bind it together, I'm going to try and have a bit of a hybrid solution that can hopefully be interesting for a lot of us.
Again, the idea is to come together and listen to the same record each week, discussing our thoughts on that album over the course of that week in these threads. For now, let's make our goal to build a community and become familiar with the thoughts, tastes, and musical histories of each other!
For every odd numbered week, we will listen to an acclaimed or important album of some kind that will hopefully have far-reaching appeal. I'm going to exercise my own judgement in picking these out of the qualifying albums, but expect them to be the OK Computers, A Love Supremes, and Illmatics of the world. If and when we reach a point where we've exhausted too many of these classics, we can restructure or retire this listening club.
For every even numbered week, we will listen to a more obscure record as voted on by the participants of the thread. For an initial guide, as stolen from @Eva, we will define "obscure" simply as not being certified Gold (or anything higher, of course). This is of course a very loose definition of the term, but it's at least a concrete starting place. As ~ gives us a raw vote count, we will do this through voting on comments. All nominations must be made as a reply to my top level comment. Everything else will be ignored, and this will help keep things organized once this voting occurs on a thread that's dedicated to its own week's record. If it becomes necessary, we can vote on an external platform.
I'm open to suggestions on how to change this process, but let's try to run it like this for a little bit. I don't want to get caught in that loop where you have so many tweaks and find so many flaws that you don't end up doing anything at all.
The first thread will be posted tomorrow (Thursday the 21st here) and will continue on from there weekly.
When we start our first record, feel free to listen, comment, and vote throughout the week. ~ gives us an opportunity to bump things and keep discussion going for a bit longer than Reddit, so let's take advantage of that where we can.
Please reply to this comment with all nominations for Week 2 of the listening club then vote on submissions you would like to see chosen. Votes and nominations will still count until minutes before the second week's thread is posted.
Feel free to "sell" your nominated record in your comment. By the nature of obscure nominations, there probably won't be many others who are familiar with what you mention. Tell us why you think we should hear it, if you'd like!
Please make sure your record includes a freely available stream or download. Probably your best bet is asking yourself "is this on Spotify or YouTube?" Other platforms work too, but I doubt too many winning nominations would be DatPiff exclusives.
Here you can check if your record has been RIAA certified.
I'll nominate The Funkees': Dancing Time. This is some of the best afro-funk that has made it's way to the west. Bandcamp had a great feature on the Funkees a few years ago, they started as a band right at the end of the Nigerian civil war, and became defining proponents of Nigerian funk (along with the Hykkers, BLO, etc.) in the shadow the the giant in the room (i.e., Fela). They were much more influenced by sounds like James Brown and Santana (e.g., check out this ridiculously good cover of War's Slippin' Into Darkness), and present an entirely different side of mid-70's Nigerian music. In 1973, they moved to London and released two albums under John Peel before disbanding under internal strife in 1977. This album collects all their released Nigerian 45's with the best of the London recorded material.
If that hasn't hooked you enough: blast this, loud.
Wow, sold me! If this doesn't make the cut, I'm definitely listening on my own. Thanks for the contribution.
I suspected one of you L2T mods would deliver. Anything Afro (Pop, Funk, Jazz, etc) gets a thumbs up from me.
I'm going to nominate Song Cycle by Van Dyke Parks. To me, this is one of the highest highs of the trippy psych pop that fans of The Beach Boys and Animal Collective (as much as I dislike the latter...) should be drooling over. While it has a decent amount of respect among music nerds, this album never sold well and I see it mentioned surprisingly little given its quality and number of listeners on sites like RYM or Last.fm.
It hits this wonderful middle point between the intoxicating druggy warmth that psych pop is known for and much larger, more intricate (some might say "pretentious") compositions that give it this weight and importance that make it feel like it should be in the classics category of this club, but it isn't popular enough to make the cut.
I had never heard of VDP, but the intro to Vine Street is right up my alley. This reminds me a bit more of Harry Nilsson than either the Beach Boys or AC (though I'm not as familiar with their work) -- particularly the vocals, the orchestral instrumentation and composition style.
Looking forward to giving this a spin this afternoon
He appears to be credited on a few Nilsson albums, so that would seem to be an accurate assessment. I hope you enjoy it!
I very much did -- Donovan's Colors is a brilliant track!
Nominating Planning for Burial - Below the House. It's very thick, decently heavy sludge metal with a side of shoegaze. It's a very lonely, depressing album that tries to translate that feeling through the thickness of its atmosphere.
I nominate Weather Systems by Anathema. A beautiful prog rock record that's great at evoking emotion with its music and vocals.
I think it would be interesting if we all listened to the Ghost Reverie album by the band Opeth. They are a black metal band, but they have longer songs that swing from heavy guitar riffs to melodic, peaceful singing, and back again over the course of one song. A few of the songs on the album are even much softer (Hours of Wealth, and Soldier of Fortune). They are a group of truly talented musicians led by Mikael Åkerfeldt.
I would like to nominate Postcards by Meadowlark. Beautiful vocals backed up by understated piano and other instrumentals. The title track is heartbreaking, especially if you watch the music video.
I nominate the album Stage Four by Touché Amoré . The vocalist wrote the album after losing his mother to Stage 4 cancer a few years back. It’s a really solid, heavily emotional Post-Hardcore record and the last track features Julien Baker.
I nominate HIDE from the Bloody Beetroots, I guess I don't really have a grand story to make about the album but it's high energy and will most likely get you amped for the day. I guess you could say it mixes punk and EDM ? I'm really bad at this.
Nocturne by Wild Nothing -- It is kind of pop but Indie. Real positive energy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XP1jHPp_kQ&t=740s
Nominating Apologies to the Queen Mary by Wolf Parade.
The band ended ended a five year hiatus last year to release a new album Cry Cry Cry, but Apologies is far and away their greatest album, and probably one of the most notable indie rock albums of its time.
Kyuss - Welcome to Sky Valley
Youtube
Spotify
If you're looking to get into the sludgy riffs and laid back vocals of Stoner Rock, this is the one.
For those who need to check if an album is gold certified, the RIAA has a certification search.
Haha yeah, I just decided to add that to my comment as you mentioned it!
The link should be included in the post description at the top each week.
We should definitely make it a requirement that a nomination includes a freely-available stream from a major platform (youtube / spotify / bandcamp, or if you really have to, soundcloud)
Argh (I mean this as an exclamation of frustration, but I guess it also works for addressing you), I wish we didn't have to do that, but you're right. Don't want to be locking people out of participating.
I know :/
Having run these types of things before (particularly our /r/listentothis roundup threads), a link goes a long way for visibility of the the nomination (ideally you want no barrier for entry for users to listen to the track / album / whatever). Plus you don't want to run into a situation where the album isn't available online for some reason.
I was just looking at the song.link that @Cleb submitted -- that seems really useful, especially considering YT is often heavily region-locked
Yup, song.link was my plan and is what I will post today's album with. Someone was posting those here a couple weeks or so ago and I've been trying to help make those standard around here.
Can we make these posts more cookie cutter? Similar titles, similar short description. When will the first discussion be posted? What time and can we standardize that?
Of course! The first post was just ideas for others and myself, and this is just outlining what this will even be. I'll link this first post in all future ones, but otherwise all it will contain is information on the album and maybe a short blurb giving context on it.
Time today should be roughly 2pm CST / CDT. I can't quite promise that it'll be exactly then every time as of now, but it will be Thursday afternoons. There isn't an easy way to schedule posts yet.
Perfect thanks. See you there.