At the moment, I’m in the middle of another shift in my listening habits, a fairly sizable one. For years I’ve been neck deep in Electronic and Hip Hop with occasional forays into Jazz and even rarer ones into the Rock, Country, and Folk diaspora. Something about synthetic beats with warm and sticky rhythms and mechanical melodies grabbed me. I hungered for dystopian tracks that spoke of a near future urban sprawl but something has been shifting in me and I’m finding my fingers crawling out in search of something more organic, something human.

Looking over the past three months of purchases sees this trend growing:

1. The Hold Steady – Boys and Girls in America
2. Katharine Whalen – Dirty Little Secret
3. Jas. Mathus – Old School Hot Wings
4. The Blue Van – Dear Independence
5. Horses Brawl – Horses Brawl
6. Thievery Corporation – Versions
7. Luke Vibert – Lover’s Acid
8. Luomo – Paper Tigers
9. Ad Astra Per Aspera – Catapult Calypso
10. John Coltrane – Fearless Leader
11. Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus
12. Radio Citizen – Berlin Serengeti
13. Paris Combo – Motifs
14. Willowtree – What a Way to Go!
15. The Black Neon – Arts & Crafts
16. Ratatat – Classics
17. Monsieur Leroc – I’m Not Young But I Need The Money
18. The Contingencies – Viva Ole
19. Bobby Hughes Combination – Nhu Golden Era
20. Marc Mac pres. Visioneers – Dirty Old Hip Hop
21. Wale Oyejide – Africa Hot! The Afrofuture Sessions
22. Nomo – New Tones
23. The Format – Dog Problems
24. Quantic – An Announcement to Answer
25. Thomas Mapfumo – Spirits To Bite Our Ears : The Singles Collection 1977-1986

Out of twenty-five albums, fifteen are unrelated to Electronic or Hip Hop and a handful that I did not highlight sort of occupy a space that isn’t quite really Electronic nor quite the organic feel of Rock or Jazz. This, so far, has seen me snap up five albums completely out of my normal element. So what’s with the shift?

Nostalgia. Well, that’s the lame ass theory I’m running with anyways. Looking back over my review for The Contingencies where I raved about a sound that leans way back but charges forward fueled by straight ahead guitar arrangements. After having snapped up that album along with Willowtree my ears felt thirsty for shorter, tighter, more aggressive arrangements. Not necessarily Punk or Thrash but sounds that left me warm all over reminiscing about practicing all weekend in the drummer’s half-heated garage, fingers stiff from the cold and swollen from pounding out song after song, never getting motivated enough to get a gig even at the local dives because really all we wanted to do was play.

Seems odd to think that after dropping out from the Daddy’s Junky Music and Sam Ash groupie scene that I would throw myself at music on the opposite spectrum but for a good eight years close to 80% of what I’ve been listening to could be classified as MPC/Pro-Tools music which is a far cry from the gritty Rock and Punk fueled Blues arrangements I cut my teeth on back in high school and my first tour of duty through college.

Recapturing lost youth on the eve of my first child? Yeah, that is the most likely answer here that and an astounding sense of ennui with what I have been listening to over the past year or so; that crushing feeling of “meh” has been heavy as of late and these last couple of selections have gotten me feeling a little more fired up about music.  If anything, my restless tastes result in a wide and varied selection and I can hope that our daughter, as she gets older, might find herself pawing through it on late nights like I did as a kid with my parents collection.