Non-Classical Music Listening Thread!

[Mister Sharpe]

Quelle joie! Quel bonheur!  (My idea of happiness, anyway): the brand new Stereolab album, first in over 15 years (not counting the endless parade of re-mixes), purchased just today. 

[AnotherSpin]

[71 dB]

I have never been into Boards of Canada. Now I am listening to their Music Has Right To Children album on Spotify in order to have more accurate knowledge of their music (instead of random soundbites). This music is not for me. I find the music boring, only decently crafted and sonically even annoying. This music combines very soft soundscapes with hard hitting harsh (in a bad way) beats and there is some kind of disconnect between the two. It is kind of having someone add drum machine beats over existing ambient music at ridiculously high level. The beats lack low end which make them sound hollow and wooden. The songs are meandering without much focus. The sounds and rhythms are banal. Spatial mixing is amateurish. No wonder I have always found their music uninteresting.

Imho this is music for people who want to pretend being edgy, but are not willing to get into REAL edgy/difficult music. For me BoC is an overrated IDM act, but then again this is only one album from 1998. I'll check their more recent output just in case...

[Mister Sharpe]

Quelle joie! Quel bonheur!  (My idea of happiness, anyway): the brand new Stereolab album, first in over 15 years (not counting the endless parade of re-mixes), purchased just today. 

Just a follow-up to my post of last week.  Today, Discogs proclaimed this new Stereolab disc one of their community's topmost albums this year.  Say they: "One of the most anticipated comebacks of the last two decades, Stereolab's Instant Holograms On Metal Film arrives with effortless cool. They pick up right where they left off, reviving their singular blend of motorik rhythms, lounge-laced textures, and analog synth experimentation with fresh focus. Tracks like "Melodie Is A Wound" showcase everything that made Stereolab such an enduring presence in the avant-pop world: layered guitars, hypnotic grooves, and liminal melodies that feel suspended somewhere between past and future."

[71 dB]

I'm listening to Board of Canada's Tomorrow's Harvest on Spotify. Compared to the earlier album, percussion sounds are softer/mixed at lower level creating a better cohesion/mood with the ambient soundscapes. The music isn't annoying anymore for this reason. The music isn't any more interesting, but at least it works better. All the songs are very similar. This album can work as background music.

[71 dB]

I also listened to this on Spotify:

Kesha - .

The CD arrived this week. I have listened to it twice. The album is growing on me. Yes, a lot of the songs are "generic" dance pop, but done very well and containing all kind of interesting things typical to Kesha.

75 % of the music sounds like it was produced for Katy Perry. This album is almost like Kesha showing Katy Perry what "143" should have been. I also wonder if Kesha wants other artists on her Kesha Records label and this album perhaps also works as "invitation" for new artists. Anyway, it is a fun album to listen to and better than on the first listen.

This album is COMPLETELY different from what I thought independent Kesha will sound. I expected country rock and she delivered dance pop/electronic pop. I am not much into country rock so this is not a bad thing, just causing a lot of cognitive dissonance for me. At this point I have zero clue what her next album will sound and in what kind of direction is she taking her artistry. Is this a dance pop album before something totally different (her previous album Gag Order was totally different) or is this the model for the future releases? I really don't know.

[AnotherSpin]

Wonderful album by John Martyn

[drogulus]

    The guitarist hugely influenced me. His weirdness is beyond the beyond.

[drogulus]

    There can never be enough Madge. Get Some!

     Danny is on the left as per usual.

     After Green left Danny Kirwin stayed on and wrote one of the groups greatest songs.

[AnotherSpin]

The guitarist hugely influenced me. His weirdness is beyond the beyond.

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[Henk]

Wonderful album by John Martyn

Never heard of him.
His latest album is from 2022. Sounds quite good to me.

[drogulus]

video unavailable

    Try this one.

[AnotherSpin]

Never heard of him.
His latest album is from 2022. Sounds quite good to me.

He was far too knotty to fit neatly into any box, impossible to market, really. Not folky enough for the folk crowd, not quite rock, and jazz stations weren't about to spin a bearded bloke with a battered acoustic and a loop pedal. Booze and drugs often took priority over tours or schedules. While others polished their sound for radio, Martyn stubbornly stuck to the raw and the real. Hits never interested him, only truth, texture, and emotional depth. He was always slightly out of sync with the mainstream and difficult to work with.

Solid Air is his classic album, absolutely unmissable if you're curious. The Church With One Bell is a fine collection of covers, too. But really, he recorded a lot and varied stuff, so there's plenty to explore for any taste.

[SimonNZ]

discs 1 and 2 (of 36): Sydney, Australia, 13 April 1966

Strange that this audience doesn't seem to recognize any of the Highway 61 tracks, though that album had been out for 8 months.

They take The Band in the second half way better that the Brits do in a few weeks.

And this is the only show in the box that that ends with "Positively 4th Street", which is a really weird message to close on ("You've got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend...")

[Henk]

Second listen

[SimonNZ]

The Caretaker - Everywhere At The End Of Time, pt.1

Heard this on a "new music" show last night and was more impressed by this than anything I've been in quite a while. The first part in a six-part series on  the effects on dementia on memory, this lays down the bedrock of 40s and 50s ballroom music and begins the first hints of degradation that will become more pronounced as the series continues.

[Henk]

[hopefullytrusting]

I love bands that don't take themselves too seriously: Peeling Flesh's The G Code



This music is loud. The live concerts I've seen our insane. I have no idea how the vocalists does what he does (that goes for the guest vocalists as well). I love how the mix in 1990s hip-hop and rap. The drummer is a maniac (obviously, he is using a trigger, but I've see enough live concerts to know that those triggers are only doing some of the work). I would never attend a concert unless I could be three or four rows deep on the side, lol.

[drogulus]

    BFPO stands for British Forces Post Office. That's how the bodies come home.

     The patch of the Kate Bush Army

[hopefullytrusting]

The Royal Kellys (of The Kelly Family) - As he moved through the fair:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfYUmF7y69U

This music makes me feel uneasy - the singer is extraordinary, and the tune hauntingly lyrical (reminds me of Bjork) - but I am unsettled by some of the things the family has said (they popped as an ad on my Instagram feed selling skincare, and they kept referencing their European heritage and I might have also heard the word purity; ironically, they are an American band, but like David Hasselhoff most of their fans are German), but I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt.

The song is killer - it is easily in the same vein of Aurora, Bjork, or Enya.