52 Albums
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I'd been thinking since this series began that I would include at least one ambient album, just in the interests of making the scope very broad. I had in mind a few favorites as possibilities, and I finally started thinking about my choice a few weeks ago when Rob G gave us a techno album.
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By the time this record came out in 1984 synth-driven pop had begun to dominate the music scene, and while there was a fair amount of guitar-oriented stuff circling under the mainstream radar, generally speaking you didn’t get to hear much of it unless you actively looked for it. I can’t remember exactly what prompted
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My eldest son, who heard so much folk music as a baby, has now for perhaps four or five years listened to very little else but the Mountain Goats, which unavoidably means I have been exposed to their music too. His predilection makes long drives additionally trying when he has any choice of music, since
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In 1997, the year my first child was born, Kate Rusby, the Barnsley Nightingale, brought out her debut album, Hourglass. At the time I was working on my doctorate, and sharing a flat with an old school friend, also a doctoral student, who spent money on music. I had not yet then myself got out
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I think this will be the first piece in this series to look at a current album (this one came out three weeks ago) but this is a good enough record to warrant the attention. I also thought about doing either Slowdive’s recent self-titled comeback album or Ride’s Weather Diaries, both of which are also
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Seems like I recently said that something was one of the great albums of the '60s…what was it?…maybe not…well, anyway, this one is, or close to it. I've always felt that Procol Harum was under-appreciated. Most people only know "A Whiter Shade of Pale," which is a great song wonderfully performed, but there's much, much more to
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I think I first encountered the term "trip-hop" in a description of this album. I don't remember exactly what the description said, but it was intriguing. I also don't remember if or how I managed to hear a bit of it, as this was in the late '90s or early '00s, before YouTube and various
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In popular music, it is quite exciting whenever an important artist re-invents him or herself. Now that I wrote that sentence I am struggling to come up with any besides Bob Dylan and David Bowie (BD and DB?), but I’m sure there are more. Many of us have written about how much Van Morrison’s music
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While I like this sort of music a good deal I don’t know much of the technical stuff about it – the lingo escapes me, as do the monikers for the various subgenres. What I do know is that among all the varieties I gravitate towards the material with the recognizable musicality of chord progressions
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Slightly revised from an October 2011 post. I liked Gillian Welch's Time the Revelator a lot (you can read my 2008 review of it here), though there were a couple of songs on it that I wasn’t very enthusiastic about—not that I disliked them, but I found them somewhat less interesting than the rest. On that score, The
Light On Dark Water 