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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.
As a result of the release of Apple's year review thing for Apple Music, I noticed that 2019 for me was essentially 7 albums (not necessarily released in 2019):
Tool - Fear Inoculum
Baroness - Purple
Gunship - Dark All Day
Green Lung - Woodland Rites
Chvrches - Love Is Dead
Opeth - My Arms Your Hearse
Cult of Luna and Julie Christmas - Mariner
And that's over 12 months, which made me realise that I've not been listening to nearly as much music as I used to.
And so I've resolved that for a while I'm simply going to put my whole collection on random and try to rediscover some old classics from over the years.
So far I've had some Outkast, Shrinebuilder, Bone Thugs N Harmony, Dream Theater, David Bowie, and some Chelsea Wolfe.
It's been nice to drift for a while :)
One of the best concerts I’ve ever been to was when Opeth performed My Arms Your Hearse in full as their encore. It’s easily my favorite album of theirs and to have them play the whole thing was just phenomenal.
Wow, that must've been immense!
I saw them tour Ghost Reveries and then again on some kind of "Monster of Prog(?)" event, and whilst they were definitely competent I was never wowed by them (in fairness to Mikael he told us at the start of the prog gig that he'd got diarrhoea and wasn't feeling great lol).
I saw them like 5 times from the late 90s to early 00s ad they were fantastic every time.
I remember being blown away by how amazing they were when I first heard them. I shared it with some friends as a bit of a "soundtrack to the 80's" nostalgia thing, but it very quickly became clear that it was much more than that.
And for it to have Squirmy Sax Man playing on the record was just too perfect!
Rediscovering Animal Collective, more specifically Sung Tons. Never gave this album a shot for whatever reason even though I know its supposed to be one of their best. I know their newer stuff gets a bit of flack but I honestly have not heard a song by them that I haven't liked.
As a pretty big Animal Collective fan, I tend to think that if you haven't heard an AnCo song you don't like you haven't listened to enough AnCo :-)
The lyrics kinda remind me of house of leaves. I wonder if they were inspired by it?
I have been listening to Ghost who I'm having trouble describing. For a while I wasn't sure if I liked them at all - I'm not a huge metal fan, I do occasionally enjoy some death and doom metal, maybe a bit of thrash here and there but generally it's not my thing. But after a few hours I really got into it. I love their schtick, and their videos are great fun, plus their live shows are reportedly amazing. If I had to describe them it might be as "Black Sabbath meets Def Leppard meets Spinal Tap" but that misses something.
I've also had a few listens through Jeff Goldblum and the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra's latest album, I Shouldn't Be Telling You This, which is so damn smooth. Has an excellent version of The Beat Goes On (is it even possible to make a bad cover of that?).
The new Madeon album Good Faith came out today and is really good IMO, so today I have been listening to that. Earlier in the week I was listening to some of Anderson .Paak's earlier stuff, SNOWCONE by REI AMI, and the album THINK:PEACE by Clarence Clarity.
I've been listening to Shub-Niggurath - Les Morts Vont Vite which is basically the sonic equivalent of Lovecraft's horror.
I already listened to it like 15 years ago but at the time I couldn't fully appreciate it, now it's like a breath of fresh air. I think you need to be pretty far gone to like this kind of music though.
Not really this week but over the last few weeks I finally got around to listening to the debut black midi album Schlagenheim - and it's really, really good. In fact, I'm a little bit obsessed. Every time I go to put on music I consider listening to a playlist or perhaps a new album but instead seem to always choose Schlagenheim. I love their sound - and am undeterred by the idiosyncratic vocals. It's exciting to me, a 19 year old guy from the South East of England, to listen to music made by 20 year old guys from the South East of England.
If you haven't heard Schlagenheim, you need to. You should listen to the whole album, but I would say that Western is my favorite song from it.
My all time favorite chill/lo-fi track My Friends. by barnes blvd
Mostly been listening to Yuzo Koshiro's early work with Falcom this week.
I have also been listening to the album N by Nano. This one was a bit of an experimental buy; I really like Nano's rough-style vocalization and her songs can have some pretty decent lyrics at times, but overall I really don't like the actual music in this album. Whenever I buy an album like this, I try to listen to it a few times over so I can get a full appreciation for it, and I will typically love it more on each repeat. But this one made me dislike it the more I listened to it. The songs seemed to be very generic in their composition, but it seems like the producer wanted to add a complex, fast-paced piano part to them (an odd but not unwelcome trend in Japanese music), but it wasn't done very well so it just makes the entire song a mess of noise that detracts from the voice I bought the album to listen to.
The irony is that I actually got this album by mistake; I actually ordered one of her earlier albums and was sent this one by accident. The whole reason why I was giving Nano a chance was because I enjoyed some of work she put online early in her career.
I've been listening to some C418 (Dief, Excursions), Boards of Canada (Old Tunes Vol. 2), and Copious by Neo-Fusion (or is it Neo-Fusion by Copious? I honestly can't tell). I'll link that last one here, since it's not well known.
Ronald Jenkees, in particular Guitar Sound
I have been listening to a lot of Paradise Lost. Love those guys.
Heard it in a Jonathan Morrison video a while back, but Loote finally dropped All the F*****g Time: Apple Music
I have also been listening to The Great Old Ones. H. P. Lovecraft inspired Black/Death Metal.
Mainly some Russkaja. I got to see them live a couple days ago, so I prepared by listening to them quite a lot!
went to the record store today and bought these bad boys:
Scrapper Blackwell – The Virtuoso Guitar Of Scrapper Blackwell [delta blues]
Various – What Is Truth? (Volume Two) [experimental]
The Mahavishnu Orchestra* With John McLaughlin – The Inner Mounting Flame [jazz-rock fusion]
Peter Lang – The Thing At The Nursery Room Window [american primitive guitar]
Gustav Brovold – Hyperbolic Space [techno]
and then i've just bought Fire-Toolz -- Field Whispers (Into The Crystal Palace) [experimental] (60% off everything on this label rn with the code 60OFFSALE)
the guy at the record store said i had 'eclectic taste' while i was checking out and i've never felt more validated as a hipster
Can I kick it? (Yes you can!)
Quite a lot of different artists this week usually just listen to the same ones but have been listening to Apple Music playlists and really enjoying them