It has been a long time since I scribbled about my listening habits but that is from a lack of time and motivation. Even with the recent pricing changes at eMusic I am still swimming about in countless albums thanks my discovering Amie Street and their liberal use of credit sales to part my hard earned money from my person. That said, I am in a Funk/Soul period at the moment and am diving headlong into album that are either vintage or neo in their arrangements and execution. Below are four that are burning my ears off at the moment.
The Lee Fields album, My World, reminded me of Darondo’s Let My People Go, smoke laden and gritty in its emotionally raw masculinity. Love Comes And Goes is by far my favorite cut with shivering strings and shimmering guitar chords backed by brassy horn stabs, a jumpy bass line and a rock solid back beat. The chorus pulls me in and often I’m belting it out unabashedly regardless the company or place.
Let Me Be Your Man by Tyrone Ashley’s Funky Music Machine blew me flat with the opening chords of Come On Home. the album is deep, raw, sweet with a splash of skank to keep things in line. The cover of I Can’t Help Myself has this fantastic unpolished feel to the production that, while probably indicates the age and stress on the master copy, imparts a real sense of immediacy to the recording. The album has a taunt story behind it of loss, fire, and eventual rescue that makes it all more precious of a listen.
I have been riding Sounding Out The City for the better part of this year, savoring every bass jump, horn stab, and snap of the snare. Tracks like Behind The Blue Curtains become a private soundtrack for the minutia of my life, adding a little swing and soul to the most mundane of tasks. Slide Show sees the group taking the simplest of interplays between a jumpy bassline and an arpeggiated chord on the guitar and twists it into irresistible head-nodding hook. I just picked up their new release today and am really looking forward to spinning it up, especially after the countless listenings this album has offered.
The spin down of horns on Menahan Street Band’s Home Again! is sweetly offset by the acoustic guitar and offers a fantastic take on a upbeat Soul instrumental. Brass features prominently on Make The Road By Walking and the arrangements weave nasally saxophones and brittle trumpets into a surprisingly thick stew of sound. The group also very refreshingly draws from a variety of inspirations, in particularly a kinetic kind of Reggae anchors Montego Sunset but it still maintains a gritty industrial feel too it.
If there is one thing that I miss about my pre-Internet life it would be the making of mixtapes. Before eMusic, Last.fm, iPods, and fat broadband came into my life I obsessively bounced tracks from CDs and other tapes to make the perfect soundtrack for a moment in time. July back roads, October in Greenwich Village, February in a steel shop, there was a mix for every time and place. For whatever reason, technology and life in general saw the need and time for mixtapes evaporate and the couple of times that I tried to reboot the process for a mix trading group I was a complete failure, either phoning the mix in or just not delivering.
It seems odd that I listen to music all day long, obsessively hunt for artists and albums that are completely new to my ears but don’t organize them into neat little packages to remember that place and time when they first crackled on the cheap speakers in my car on the way to work or swam out of my headphones late at night. Here’s my first crack at getting back into mixing and while it is a little disjointed and skips from Africa to Brooklyn to Jamaica it is a quick glimpse into what I have been listening to this past month.
C60 for May 2009
Miriam Makeba – Malouyame
Thomas Mapfumo – Mhondoro
Mulatu Astatke / The Heliocentrics – Masenqo
Buraka Som Sistema – Kalemba (Wegue – Wegue)
Bronx River Parkway – El Resbalon
Chin Chin – Hotter Than Hot
Richard Swift – Lady Luck
King Khan & The Shrines – Welfare Bread
Holly Golightly – You Have Yet To Win
Mama Lucky – These Are My Tattoos
Sly & Robbie / Amp Fiddler – Black House (Paint The White House Black)
Culture – I’m Alone In The Wilderness
Dungen – Minda damer och fasaner
The Goretti Group with Dennis De Souza Trio – Of My Hands
I’m hoping that each month I can knock out a mix of what might be dominating my ears at the moment with the goal of keeping those mixes to the reasonable constraint of a C60 tape. Enjoy!
I often get excited about new things everyday exclaiming their life changing properties but Kutiman is something different. DJ Shadow’s album Entroducing… shattered all my ill-conceived notions of art and music and clear my mind for the notion of cutting and pasting sound collages, Kutiman takes that to the next logical step by mining YouTube videos for melodies and rhythms and then stitching them together to form hilarious Funk breakdowns, grinding Drum and Bass anthems, or haunting ballads.
My favorite track (video?) by far is I’m New as the vocalists are sublime…
Someday is a close second as Sarah Amstutz has a wonderful voice.
The lines are drawn and the contestants are steeling themselves for auditory combat!
Seriously, 120 albums is a hell of an amount of albums to listen through and judge against those before and after. So rather than make this an exercise in memory, or one with standards for that matter, I’m going to run this like an underground cock fight. While it has all the appearances of being a free-for-all I’ll set up some basic boundaries, albums will compete intra-genre first then the victors will emerge to struggle against their peers. What this is not is serious. Like couples figure skating judgment will be capricious and on personal whim, whatever moves me at that moment will get the nod–come to think of it, this sounds like a Pitchfork review except without the literary torment and the rattling of Ivy League diplomas.
As my math skills are suspect, some of these brackets will have an album or two that do not fit nicely into a three-some (yes, I went there); those albums will wait on the sideline and get tossed into a sudden death with the finalist or be used to punt a pair into play.
Without further ad I bring you the first round of contestants: Genre Alternative!
Round One
Calexico Carried To Dust
Cordero De Donde Eres
J*Davey The Beauty In Distortion / The Land Of The Lost WINNER
Dengue Fever Venus on Earth
Thao We Brave Bee Stings and All
Scott Reynolds Adventure Boy WINNER
The Gaslight Anthem The ’59 Sound
Hauschka Ferndorf WINNER
Hot Chip Made In The Dark
Grouper Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill
BLK JKS Mystery EP
Santogold Santogold WINNER
Basia Bulat Oh, My Darling*** WINNER Minus The Bear Acoustics
Lau Nau Nukkuu
Firewater The Golden Hour WINNER The Hold Steady Stay Positive
Gang Gang Dance Saint Dymphna
Portishead Third WINNER
The Postmarks By The Numbers
Black Taj Beyonder
Faraquet Anthology 1997-98
Fall Out Boy Folie à Deux
Elbow The Seldom Seen Kid WINNER
Vampire Weekend Vampire Weekend
Plants and Animals Parc Avenue WINNER Jack Peñate Matinée
Round Two
J*Davey The Beauty In Distortion / The Land Of The Lost WINNER
Basia Bulat Oh, My Darling
Hauschka Ferndorf
Santogold Santogold
Scott Reynolds Adventure BoyWINNER Firewater The Golden Hour
Portishead Third
Elbow The Seldom Seen Kid
Plants and Animals Parc Avenue WINNER
Round Three
J*Davey The Beauty In Distortion / The Land Of The Lost
*** Wildcard initiated as eMusic had the wrong release date for Coptic Light encoded, and if I were a 1/3 as organized as Qyuen I wouldn’t be editing the fight list on the fly…
Last year I purchased 251 albums from eMusic and maybe another 50 or more from Amazon MP3 so by that count I was buying some 25 a month or nearly 1 a day. That is one hell of a habit but what makes it harder is sifting through all those and tally the ones that hooked me because, while I’m and obsessive list maker it is always far in arrears.
My first step is to figure out what from those 300 or so purchases was released in 2008 and then of that group which of that set are not re-releases–it is usually that latter part where I give up. In my first pass I’m left with 1399 tracks and no real way to parse that into albums with Amarok except maybe counting but I don’t have that many fingers and toes. Thankfully, I set Amarok up to use MySQL as it’s engine so with a quick query, and a little clean up for the freebies, I have 120 albums* to work through.
Now, my more purest readers and friends might exclaim, “Not all of these albums are actually 2008 releases! Cull! Cull!” While I agree with that in principle I really am an individual governed by sloth and am truly unmotivated to verify the true release date of each album. Either way it is going to take me a long while to whittle things down to a Top 10.
This is my playlist…
2562–Aerial
3 Na Massa–3 Na Massa
Al Kent Presents The Million Dollar Orchestra–Better Days
Ananda Project–Night Blossom
Aphex Twin–Classics
Aziza Brahim–Mi Canto
Baby Charles–Baby Charles
Basia Bulat–Oh, My Darling
Black Taj–Beyonder
BLK JKS–Mystery EP
Bombay Dub Orchestra–3 Cities
Booka Shade–The Sun & The Neon Light
Calexico–Carried To Dust
Carl Craig–Sessions
Cheb i Sabbah–Devotion
Chin Chin–Chin Chin
Coldplay–Viva La Vida Or Death And All
Cordero–De Donde Eres
Curtis Macomber–Asia: Sonata for Violin & Piano, Piano Trio
Dan Zanes and Friends–¡Nueva York!
Deastro–Keeper’s
Debashish Bhattacharya–Calcutta Chronicles: Indian Slide-Guitar Odyssey
Dengue Fever–Venus on Earth
Derrick May–Innovator
DJ /rupture–Uproot
Dub Trio–Another Sound Is Dying
Duffy–Rockferry
Elbow–The Seldom Seen Kid
El Guincho–Alegranza
Eliot Lipp–The Outside
Esperanza Spalding–Esperanza
Etran Finatawa–Desert Crossroads
Fall Out Boy–Folie à Deux
Fanatix–This Thing of Ours
Faraquet–Anthology 1997-98
Fenin–Been Through
Firewater–The Golden Hour
Gang Gang Dance–Saint Dymphna
Ghislain Poirier–No Ground Under
Gnarls Barkley–The Odd Couple
Grouper–Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill
Grupo Fantasma–Sonidos Gold
Guillermo Klein–Filtros
Hauschka–Ferndorf
Headlights–Some Racing, Some Stopping
Health–Disco (V3)
Hector Zazou & Swara–In The House Of Mirrors
Hot Chip–Made In The Dark
Huun-Huur-Tu–Mother Earth! Father Sky!
Jack Peñate–Matinée
James Blackshaw–The Wolf Also Shall Dwell with the Lamb
James Blackshaw–White Goddess
James Hardway–L.A. Instrumental
J-Boogie’s Dubtronic Science–Soul Vibrations
J*Davey–The Beauty In Distortion / The Land Of The Lost
J-Live–Then What Happened
Josh Martinez–World Famous Sex Buffet
Joy Division–The Best Of
Juno Reactor–Gods & Monsters
Kasai Allstars–In The 7th Moon, The Chief Turned Into A Swimming Fish And A
Kaya Project–…& So It Goes
Kayhan Kalhor–Silent City
Kraak & Smaak–Plastic People
La Sonora de Lucho Macedo–Gozalo – Bugalu Tropical Volume 2
La Sonora de Lucho Macedo–¡Gózalo! Vol. 1 – Bugalú Tropical
Lau Nau–Nukkuu
Les Voix Baroques–Canticum Canticorum
Louie Vega–House Masters: Louie Vega
Luomo–Convivial
Lyrics Born–Everywhere At Once
Marco Benevento–Invisible Baby
Markus Schulz–Markus Schulz – Amsterdam 08
Melody Gardot–Worrisome Heart
Michael Nyman–8 Lust Songs: I Sonetti Lussuriosi
Michael Nyman–Mozart 252
Mike Ladd–Nostalgialator
Minus The Bear–Acoustics
Moby–Last Night
Natacha Atlas–Ana Hina
Natural Self feat. Andreya Triana–The Art Of Vibration
N.E.R.D.–Seeing Sounds [Explicit]
Niyaz–Nine Heavens
Nomo–Ghost Rock
Plantlife–Time Traveller
Plants and Animals–Parc Avenue
Portishead–Third
Q-Tip–The Renaissance
Quantic Presents…Flowering Inferno–Death Of The Revolution
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