What have you been listening to this week?

Had a trip down guilty pleasure memory lane with some good 'ol Turisas. Currently listening a lot of Moonsorrow again (partly on streaming, partly on vinyl) as well as Between the Buried and Me (vinyl) and some of Susumu Hirasawa's albums.

So mostly metal, sided with some 1990's synthpop.

https://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/collage.php?user=mrburd&type=7day&size=3x3&caption=true&playcount=true

I recently discovered (thanks google play music) a band called Puta Volcano. Their most recent album 'AMMA' is really good, I get some Soundgarden or Audioslave vibes from them. A related artist that I saw, but haven't checked out yet is called Red Scalp. They seem to have a native american theme to their music.

I've been going through some of Red Scalps top played songs and MAN are they nice. They remind me of a Stoner-Rock version of Red Fang, which seemed like stoner-metal to me. I like em a lot, they'll be getting some play time from me for the next couple weeks.

I just now hit play on Nightwish's latest album, HUMAN. :||: NATURE. It dropped this morning.

Two tracks in and this is a bit different for them. Larger symphonic production for sure, bit more on the proggy side (which I like). The entire second disc is one composition in eight movements, looking forward to getting to that one. Tuomas seems to be channeling his inner Ayreon.

We picked up a pair of reworked 70's monitors, a Music Hall table, and a receiver before the COVID-19 pandemic. Haven't had much of a chance to pick up some records other than some of our favorites that we had our eyes set on so I am doing a lot of music digging on Spotify.

Right now I'm listening to Barbara Strant who I can't really find much information on. This is essentially the only information I can find.

"Barbara Stant launched her career at Norfolk, Virginia's own, Shiptown Records. Starting as one of the Idets (the labels own version of Motown's Adantes), Barbara found herself singing in sessions for a variety of artists. But her own talent didn’t go unrecognized, and Noah Biggs (Shiptown’s mogul), soon realized it was time to feature Barbara (who entered the company as Barbara Holmes) as a feature artist in her own rights." - Discogs

Would love to hear if anyone knows much more about her or Shiptown Records.

Ooooh ok so I have been a fan/supporter of the band Master Boot Record ( https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/ ) for quite a while and they sent out a collection of videogame theme song covers called "warez" recently to all their supporters and followers. Now Master Boot Record is an actually good blend of metal and techno, mixing the drums and chord setups of electric guitars in metal with a chunk of the sounds used in techno and industrial music. So instead of just squishing both genres together they get a pretty unique sound that's pretty fascinating to listen to (one hell of a good set of training/lifting/running songs btw).

Warez is a bit of an outlier for them, since it focuses so much on video game covers, and sometimes misses the point of the bands sound in that endeavour - BUT its still very much a good listen if nothing else for the nostalgia of Legend of Zelda theme song.

Then I started re-listening to Khruangbin which is, by now a fairly well known band playing a mellow... I don't know what genre to be honest (mellow AF funk?). It's fairly scaled down, few lyrics repeated, bass, drums and guitar combo. The song Maria Tambien is probably their breakaway hit and for good reason. Insanely mellow and if I was a pot smoker, this is probably what I would be listening to during. https://khruangbin.bandcamp.com/album/con-todo-el-mundo-n-s-america-edition

Oh and finally The Historian Himself and the Gather Bones album https://historianhimself.bandcamp.com/album/gather-bones this one is like Master Boot Record and Khruangbin kinda hard to define. It's rap yeah... but its rap with more of a early 1900'eds Americana, depression, second goldrush feel to it without feeling like a gimmick.
Songs are usually about archeology and palaeontology since the musician is a palaeontological illustrator as a day job (just soak that in, the dude works drawing dinosaurs and make raps about them) - and the album Gather Bones have a lot of those BUT its sticking hard to a main theme making the album more of a concept album: Lovecraftian Horror set in the early 1900'eds western US (kinda).

Ok ok ok so what makes this so cool is that the story's (and they are more like little horror story's than raps) are insanely well put together for the format. Moving between tales/songs like "colonialist explorers, isolated, travelling with an ancient being they found that repeats the sins of past men in a gibbering alien hymn" and "old gold digger in late 19th century California manically digging as a last ditch effort to get rich but digs too deep and finds himself among the ghosts of chinese workers in the mines". The last one have the wonderful line "I hollered a hearty 'howdy' but a bunch of 'ni hau' echoed up all around me".

Really nice to listen to and wonderfully dorky :)

For a long time I was so puzzled to why people kept listening to newer old school heavy metal sounding bands. I've been listening to metal for 20+ years and love me some old heavy metal but just couldn't get why new bands kept playing this type of metal. It just seemed expired and "tame" to me. I realized that I had some unrealistic expectations of brutality, sound and power I've gotten used to in my listening routine that just didn't apply here in the same way. I just love how you can push your way through something like that when it comes to music and then a completely new world just opens up. Currently listening to HIGH SPIRITS album Another Night from 2011 and it fucking kills.