At Long Last, A Pretentious Music Update!

As readers of my entries would know, my iPod died quite a while back.  What likely was not known (unless I've merely forgotten posting about it), is that my desktop computer also died a few months ago.

As a person who likes to listen to music while I work, this presents a bit of a problem — nearly all of my music is stored on that computer.  That's not to say that I don't have accessible backups, but rather that I have enough backups that I don't know where anything is.

So, when a playlist was needed to be constructed, I ended up going through my most recent ones.  Of course, any songs, artists, or albums that I had listened to to any significant extent were on older CDs.  What this has resulted in is a playlist of artists and albums that I had more as filler — stuff I enjoyed, but mainly was used in between the stuff I really enjoyed.  In some ways, this has been a bit of a blessing; I've been rediscovering artists and albums that had dropped off of my musical radar, so to speak.

It's also resulted in a much mellower playlist than had been the case for a while; plenty of Rachel's, The American Analog Set, Set Fire to Flames, Esmerine, Dirty Three, Bell Orchestre's Recording A Tape The Colour of Light, Anton Fier's pair of solo albums, Bruce (do you really need a link for him?) Springsteen's Nebraska demos, and Mick Harris's post-Napalm Death^* works (Lull, Scorn, Murder Ballads).

That's not to say that it has been completely mellow. After all Mick Harris's 90's and later works includes Painkiller, and no group containing John Zorn can ever really be called mellow.

I've also been listening to Crime + The City Solution again, and finding that I enjoy it more than I recalled.  Though it still reminds me, in some ways, of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds.  Inevitable, I suppose, when both bands have featured Australian frontmen and members/former-members of The Birthday Party and Einstürzende Neubauten.  The Ex's post-1990 works (their two albums with avant-garde cellist Tom Cora, and then everything up to 2004's Turn, excepting Instant and Een Rondje Holland since I can't find my copies) has also been featured prominently.  Comparing their pre-1990 albums with their post-1990 ones is still quite the contrast in sounds, though the thick Dutch accents have never quite vanished.

And finally, there's still a fair amount of Sonic Youth, a band that I seem to listen to in large chunks and then forget about for months afterward, mixed in there.  They're as brilliant, frustrating, and beautiful as I remembered.

* One would never expect somebody whose recording career began as drummer for a death metal band to fall into the mellower category.  Stranger things have likely happened though and, while I can't stand death metal, I do have to say that Harris's dub/ambient work is often quite enjoyable.