Music Music Music

[Phoebe]

Some , as if you're hearing the band play in the next room by holding a glass to the wall, but in my exhausted state I'm the glass.

[Phoebe]

I don't mean the band. I mean the people. Who are these tired people flopping around like a bunch of dead pale fish? You all tried to tell me that millenials don't have a special way of sucking and YOU WERE WRONG.

[Phoebe]

my happy little song!

[Phoebe]

85 is Chic, Risque. It was okay. Good Times and My Feet Keep Dancing are banana-worthy and the rest is pleasant but not super impressive.

[Phoebe]

86. Grizzly Bear - Painted Ruins

I was not fond of this although it started off pretty well - I liked the weird sound of it and there were a few good parts. It wore me down and I gave up. Some kind of depressing lyrics about someone's failed relations or whatever; I was not up for it.

87. Oh Sees - Orcs

Youtube helpfully led me to this album next because I forgot to turn off the little button for Autoplay. It was pretty good, a lot livelier than Grizzly Bear, and at one point there was a big Cello solo that caused me to drop what I was doing and investigate WHAT was actually playing. Turns out it was not indeed the Grizzly Bear but was this whole new album, and lo and behold there was an Orc upon it, and it was called Orcs! So of course I listened to the rest, and it went downhill after the cello solo but was still good.

Having been surprised by cello solos, I forgot to turn off the Autoplay button again, and on this day, of all days, guess what it played for me, which I had not known existed until this very evening?

Edited to say, I think one of Google's artificial intelligences has taken an interest and perhaps finds humor in toying with me, because the next "autoplay" gift it gave me was called (seriously): "early onset dementia". Thanks.

[Phoebe]

You guys, ? There are like a half dozen new ones!!! This is like water, manna for life! I need to be notified immediately by someone other than YouTube autoplay whenever this happens, kapiche? For comparison, I am sitting here on a hair trigger ready to drop four hours straight out of my schedule as soon as the new Tool album comes out and this is of equivalent importance. Yet none of you told me, and I have no time to listen now because people keep coming to see me at work one after the other and I didn't even get a lunch break. Aaaaaaa!!!!!

[Phoebe]

One thing about Chic, it stays with you. Yet it isn't doing anything to dislodge that Drake protege/imitation song about "not nice" - don't know who sings it but it's a sticky earworm for sure. Meanwhile in other news I hear some weird echoes of Azealia Banks in Kendrick Lamar's Humble and wonder if they're intentional. That song got the big shrug and eyeroll at first, but it is so ubiquitous on the radio now (and way better than most of what else is new) that I have agreeably absorbed it. Would rather be listening to Azealia Banks though. .

[akiva]

I never thought I'd see this, but it's incredible.

[Phoebe]

It's like the eclipse happening again for you personally, with music!

[Phoebe]

Have been dabbling with some opera lately and have a theory: there was a different whole style of singing in Europe at a certain period that you just don't see now, and it isn't technically the "best" in the sense that the voices are flawed in various small way, or a note here or there is out of tune, but there is something about the overall performance and the infusion of raw emotion into the thing that makes it "best" as an operatic performance as opposed to, say, a recital of the same piece?

Most examples involve Maria Callas but here is one involving Nessun Dorma, since ultimately we like to listen to the guys sing much more.
It's absolutely wonderful and perfect and at the end his sheer joy at knowing he nailed it so hard is a delight to witness. (I wouldn't watch before that unless you're curious about technique, because he makes a lot of very unfortunately grotesque faces in order to produce these sounds.) Anyway, you'd think it doesn't get much better.

There are a few clunker notes early on, and it's not polished up in the same way that Kaufmann's is, but overall it just soars at exactly the right moments, and bursts forth with feeling without involving any terrible Pavarotti-style screaming and screeching. It's like the difference between mechanically solid, highly successful mating vs. CRAAAAAAZY mating. (Note to rebel brain: I would not mate with either of these.) I don't know. Opera is everything.

Edited to add this even superior version which avoids the problem of having to watch dumb things:

[Phoebe]

Edited in the clarity of hindsight, will fix with album names later:
88 was a Chic album, not sure which one.
89. Buena Vista Social Club.
90. Afro-Cuban All-Stars
91. Tito Rodriguez
92. Tito Rodriguez
93. Tito Rodriguez
94. Dionne Warwick singing the songs of Burt Bacharach
95. Getz Gilberto
96. Simon and Garfunkel
97. Simon and Garfunkel

[Phoebe]

Despite listening to lots of other music lately during marathon sessions of laundering and cleansing and fixing things, the recurring songs-in-head in the midst of being busy busy busy all have been Smashing Pumpkin songs. Why does it have to be like this, you know?

[Phoebe]

After watching Despicable Me, have the "bad bad day" song in mind. Let's see if I can find for you...


This is how driving around town is for me too.

[Stan]

My favorite rappish song.

[Phoebe]

A terrible song that goes with a video game that people cannot stop playing.

[poorpete]

Under the weather but still relatively up to schedule on the challenge. Lately really enjoying Miriam Makeeba and the first two big albums of Sheryl Crow.

Sheryl Crow... Just like The Breeders, I have no excuse other than maybe a social fear of people seeing me enjoy women singing, I dunno or sexism, that I did not own her 90s output on CD. What a great string of singles. Non singles pretty good too...

JT's Future Sex/Love Sounds I bow again to the greatness of Timbaland.

The Pretenders debut is pretty innovative in it's tracklisting. It starts off dirty punk and slowly inches up its production and vocal-warmth that by the end Chrissie Hynde is in full 80s pop mode.

[Phoebe]

Sigh, you have so many good ideas for things I should be listening to! I keep having to get up and do things that interrupt, so I haven't gotten through any more albums recently. Looking forward to a long weekend; should listen to more Pretenders and Sheryl Crow!

I feel kind of guilty about discussing this music because, you know, there's apparently a fan club of one where the one is clearly not the person you'd prefer be in your fan club at all - maybe that's how it always is when you make art, and heaven knows the people who appreciate my own products are often not the people I would have chosen for that - but this stuff is just SO cool, everyone needs to dig into it further! The best one is obviously Counterpoint Improvement - that one is in a class all by itself marked Perfection - but there are lots of other gems sprinkled around. Wish some of the new ones were longer, such as this one (best of the lot imo), though apparently the brevity and trailing off is intended (and by the way, if you're going to listen to this stuff you have to have speakers with some good bass and you must crank up the bass!!! On an initial runthrough it may seem like a simple structure but there are layers of sounds, patterns of variation, all kinds of things in there that might not be noticed at first):



Or maybe I like this one because it has various echoes of counterpoint improvement? The "slow white hip" one is reminiscent in title and some notes of a Jack White song, which makes me wonder if that is indeed what it is in some reconstituted form. That one is pretty cool; I wonder what the white object pictured there is and I have no idea. Anyway, I still like the longer ones like Salvation, the robots, Safe, etc. and so I wish pieces like this one went on longer and mixed in some other ideas. Some of them scare the dog, which has only really happened before during "Nurse with Wound", so I guess that's some kind of company to join.

[Phoebe]

Ok Pete, I started my Sheryl Crow listening with Tuesday Night Social Club. I liked about half of the songs really well and the others were a bit tiresome to me, but partly that is because I'm not a huge fan of her singing style and voice. Sometimes it's a little too weak to handle a phrase or it seems to be cracking in an intentional way, and that's just not my kind of drama. It works best when she's singing something you can sing along with. But for the most part the album is solid and she's a great songwriter. This is still number 97 because I miscounted the chic album above.

[Phoebe]

98 - The Pretenders debut album, which was exactly as described by Pete, and I loved it!!!

99 - Roxy Music, Siren. Starts off with the "Love is the Drug" single and meanders around through various musical styles from there. If you don't love the guy singing, well, it's hard to love this. Every so often I feel like I should try them and every time I reach the same conclusion. He's also all depressed about something so not really what I wanted to be listening to. Not bad though. I see why people like it.

What should the big 100 be? Hmmm

[Phoebe]

In the meantime, I wonder if they gave actual writing credit to The Association for this song. A lot of their songs are 60s folk poppy but this one you can actually sing the Windy lyrics over perfectly and the music will make it sound much the same song. This is fun in the car.