Tag: music discovery

Crazy Long Weekend

I’m 67 minutes away from a long weekend. Lots going on, and I am going to miss almost all of it.

I’m Nana sitting tonight so I will be at my mom’s house until dinner time tomorrow. That means I will miss out on Massachusetts declaring that the global pandemic over and opening up the entire state. Bad move? Likely.

Sunday I will be home for most of the day, which is good because it’s our wedding anniversary. 12 years. 12 wonderful, happy years. Sure 2020 and the first half of 2021 have licked balls, but marriage wise it’s still been incredible. The kids are at their dad’s this weekend, but we’re going to steal them for a while so they can help us celebrate. We’re not doing anything special, just being together. I’m willing to bet that at some point later in the year we will do something more substantial to celebrate. Covid has pretty much taken two anniversaries from us, so we need to do something significant to make up for it.

As for Sunday night and the holiday on Monday, I am Nana sitting again. But wait, Robert. Isn’t that a day early? Why yes, yes it is. Me covering Sunday night/Monday lets my brother go to my niece’s soccer games and it lets me do something on Tuesday. But Robert, Tuesday isn’t a day off, it’s a three day weekend not a four day weekend, isn’t it?

I booked a vacation day for Tuesday so that I can drive back up to Vermont to help my Step Daughter move into her first apartment. Pardon me, I’ve got something in my eye. No, I’m not crying, you’re crying.

I still need to pack up some stuff for tonight and tomorrow, including my MacBook. I want to mix a song or two or three tonight or tomorrow. I want to wrap up May’s Record Every Month entry. I also have an episode of That Pedal Show to watch. I don’t have a Star Wars The Bad Batch to watch because I picked that off before work this morning. I might try to watch some MST3K because I’ve been kinda in the mood for that lately. Mostly though I’ll just be missing Jen and the kids like crazy, because that’s what I mostly do while I’m at my parents. Le Sigh.

Music Discovery

 

Last night I was waiting for the laundry to finish….

Have you noticed that like 90% of the stuff I do, I do while waiting for the laundry to finish?

…what the hell was I talking about?

Oh yeah, I went to a site I hadn’t been to in over a year called albumoftheyear.org.  The goal being to find some good bands that I had never ever heard of before and then listen to them and hope they are good.  I picked a few genres and then checked around for the highest reviewed bands and made a playlist to keep track of them.  If the band sounded okay within a song or two of the album I was listening to then I added a song to the playlist.  Now I can listen to more and decide if I like them or not.

Brilliant?

Yeah, maybe.

Then again… maybe it was just midnight and the Dodgers/Phillies game I was watching wasn’t really holding my interest and I wanted to stay awake.

This playlist is designed to be shuffled, and if all goes well it will be a living document of bands that I don’t know but maybe should.

 

Music Discovery New Years Resolution Continues

So if I can embed Spotify urls into wordpress, then I can share things I’ve been listening to as part of my New Years Resolution to find new bands to listen to.

From Boston, MA we have Mean Creek whose Local Losers record is a current favorite.

The big winner so far is a Scottish band called The Twilight Sad. They are a little bit… what’s the word… gothier? Maybe? A little bit gothier than I usually go for, but the album Nobody Wants to be Here and Nobody Wants to Leave has wormed its way into my brain and it absolutely will not go away.

More to come later.

Music Discovery Update

My New Years resolution to find new bands to worship is well under way.  While I haven’t come across anything that is life alteringly amazing yet, I have found some really cool sounding bands.

I said I’d keep everyone updated, so here’s a couple of things to listen to.

This band is from Boston and I found them on the WMBR Pipeline! podcast.  Pretty cool, and just a little proggie.

Moniker

This band is from Scottland.  Pretty straight forward stuff, but really great melodies.

The Twilight Sad

I’m not sure what to make of this band.  I listened to most of this album (on spotify… I’m sorry) and it’s… weird.  In a completely chaotic crazy way.  This band apparently has been around for a while, or they date back to the 90’s but split up and reformed more recently.  Something like that.  The jury is still out on them, but they were the first thing I came across that I wanted to listen to a second time.

Swans

I will continue to keep the entire universe up to date on my search for new bands to get excited about.

Even though no one on Earth actually cares.

Music Discovery

I miss having a proven source for discovering new music. It used to be radio and MTV (urgh), then in the mid-90’s (for me at least) it was late nights in bars in Boston. That was the heyday for me as far as finding music that was in a separate world from the charts and the land of commercial music. It was glorious.

Eventually it ran out of gas though. Well, truth be told I was the one who ran out of gas. The idea of driving home from T.T. the Bear’s place in Cambridge at 2am started to lose it’s appeal, and musical trips into town became something saved for special occasions (ie: Mission of Burma).

In 2008 I was looking for a site to use to host my attempt at the RPM Challenge and I ended up on both Virb and Alonetone. Both sites lead me to a slew of bands and artist that I otherwise never would have found. Many of those acts still have me waiting with baited breath for the next release even though most of them were very far removed from my usual musical comfort zone. Folk rock became a thing for me, as well as lots of acoustic singer/songwriters (usually women), and dare I say it… some electronic music (for shame, Robert!).

Since then? Eh… not much. I did what I did back in high school when hair metal made me want to claw my eyes out in disgust. I went back in time and found things that have been overlooked. That has resulted in a recent obsession with Richard Thompson, and to a slightly lesser extent Sandy Denny.

But new music? Again, not so much.

This year I am resolved to change that. I don’t know how, but it’s a New Year and resolutions are all the rage. I am going to search the interwebs for music made by people I have never heard of before in the hopes of finding a new musical obsession or two. Or three. Or 100. I might start with the mountain of best music of 2014 blog posts that have been popping up world wide over the last few weeks. After that? I don’t know. Not spotify, or beats, or any of that. I don’t want to be spoon fed the way we were back in the radio and MTV days (urgh). I want to discover, not be marketed to.

I’ll let you know how it goes.