(no subject)

[seekingferret]

I want to bring back my Album of the Week project again, now that my car is out of the shop and I'm getting a little tired with the music on my iPod.

(Just a little tired, though. I've been having some good music days lately. Listened to all of Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" on my morning drive one day last week, and this morning listened to Haydn's "Le Matin" symphony (Symphony #6 in D). Those are pieces which, no matter how many times I listen to them, remain sources of constant discovery. I love the attention to individual instruments in the "Le Matin". In the later symphonies Haydn's increasing mastery over the whole orchestra meant less of an interest in individuating voices (there are, of course, exceptions to this generalization). In "Le Matin" we see a composer still learning what each instrument can say, not quite in full command of the bigger picture, but still inspired to create beautiful sounds. The structure, the edifice that Haydn erected in something like "The Surprise", is missing. But... I digress)

The last time, I think I tried to be too specific about the parameters of the albums I sought. In requesting Top 10 albums, I don't think I was making an unreasonable request, and I'm glad I got a chance to listen to Gaga, but well... my friends are nerds and tend to have an instinctive mistrust of the popular. Even if we do like Top 10 albums, I don't think we would realize that they're Top 10 albums. I'll admit I was thrown off my game earlier this year when the Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs" hit #1. It was an odd sensation, to have purchased a #1 album the week it hit #1. In any case, I had difficulty getting recommendations.

So I'm going back to the basics.

Recommend an album you think I should listen to for a week. No requirements. Any genre, any style, any era. Preferably, it should acquirable on Amazon's MP3 store, but it doesn't need to be. I will listen to it on my drive to and from work and then post a review. Past reviews can be found at My AotW tag

Comments

[roga]

Oh, god, I am so tempted to give you My Chemical Romance or Panic at the Disco if you give me the go ahead. SHOULD I OR SHOULDN'T I.

[seekingferret]

Go ahead. I will give anything a chance once. Recommend me an album.

[roga]

LOL I can't even CHOOSE between them. So either Panic at the Disco's Pretty. Odd. (2008), or My Chemical Romance's Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (2010). Or, you know, boths :-) Their genres are pretty different.

[erika]

Tiësto - Kaleidoscope.

[starlady]

Dessa - A Badly Broken Code

[boxofdelights]

Timbuk 3's A Hundred Lovers

[allandaros.livejournal.com]

Metric's "Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?"

[bookherd]

Oh, fun. I nominate Joanna Newsom's "The Milk-Eyed Mender."

[sophia_sol]

The quintessential Canadian folk singer, Stan Rogers. It is hard to decide which album to recommend, but I think I have to go with "Between the Breaks...Live!"


And I was going to recommend another album by a different group, one that's very different from Stan Rogers, except that apparently the cheapest it comes on Amazon is $75, and mostly the internet is trying to pretend the album doesn't exist. Drat.

[seekingferret]

Thank you!

Uh... have we met? Hi, I'm Ferret!

[boxofdelights]

Hi! No, we have a mutual friend in schemingreader, so your posts sometimes show up on my Network page. I'm Susan.

[sophia_sol]

I do not know if my Stan Rogers suggestion is on your list of albums to listen to or not, but upon reading back through your aotw archives, I've realized that my cd suggestion for him is not the best one. You have more of a tendency than I of seeing albums as a coherent whole. I chose the album that has the most of my favourite Rogers songs on it, but since it's a live album it's not so much constructed as a coherent whole but more as a best-of collection. I think you would be better off listening to one of his other albums, probably one of his three concept albums (each about a different region of Canada): "Fogarty's Cove," "Northwest Passage," and "From Fresh Water." Any of them would be a fine choice.

[seekingferret]

Well, the project is geared around that. I'm not opposed on principle to albums that are just buckets of songs, but the idea of AotW is to spend a week with a largish musical object and get in deep with it, and I find that I generally enjoy it more if a)the album is held together by musical or lyrical thematics or some other form of unity or b)if every single song on the album makes me excited. Few albums can make the second boast, so we're generally in safer water with a).

But the exciting thing about AotW is that I'm at your mercy. The original solicitation for AotW, lo those three years ago, had a whole riff about how if you didn't like me and wanted me to suffer, you could recommend an album you thought I'd hate. Recommend the music you want me to listen to, not the music you think will fall in my comfort zone. The whole point is to listen to stuff I would ordinarily not think to try.

[sophia_sol]

Yes, this makes sense. And given that I want you to enjoy your experience of listening to Stan Rogers, I think that giving you an album that fits a) is probably the better way to go! And since Stan Rogers in general is not something that I think you would ordinarily listen to, I don't think it really matters too much whether you listen to my favourite album, or an album that you'd be most likely to enjoy. So I'll stand by my altered recommendation of one of his concept albums. And since specificity is probably a good thing, I'll say that you should go with "Fogarty's Cove."

[metamorphage]

Florence and I would both really really like you to listen to Antony & the Johnsons' _Swanlights_. Have at it! :-)