Skip to main content

Some 2012 Favorites -- Albums

That's right -- actual albums (well, mostly CD's, to be honest) with a push-and-pull ebb-and-flow that kept me playing them more often than normal.  And I own physical copies of all of the following, which marks me as an old guy clinging to 20th Century media consumption habits to those digital natives out there.  Me?  I like to think that if I actually paid money for these albums, then they are worth my time and efforts on some level more meaningful than a barely considered MP3 of some hook-free "intensely artistic" existential examination.  But maybe that's too harsh.  Here are some of my faves, in no particular order, each followed by a first-draft haiku extolling virtues through verses.

Scott Walker - Bish Bosch

like Lynch for your ears / nightmarish vapors and ash / deliquescent pop

Hot Chip - In Our Hands

autistic swagger / these English nerds kill dance floors / with infectious glee

Chromatics - Kill For Love

swelling and epic / with swooning gauzy guitars / dreamy resonance

Bruce Springsteen - Wrecking Ball

so earthy and real / with any false notes absent / from start to finish

Killing Joke - MMXII

over thirty years / spark past in furious flash / and coruscation

Screaming Females - Ugly

thunderous riffs spiked / with delirious vocals / that slay with whispers

Tom Jones - Spirit In The Room

the twilight lion / still has strength to purr and growl / in the daylight left

Nite Jewel - One Second Of Love

dour introversion / blasted away by the beat / of twee hearts on fire

Norah Jones - Little Broken Hearts

and speaking of hearts / sounds like a trampled spirit / can't stay down for long

Lovelock - Burning Feeling

so now the dance floor / is the last conquered domain / for our Zombi mate

Soulsavers - The Light The Dead See (feat. Dave Gahan)

that old man Gahan / finds his Mode in Delta Blues / and sweet revival

Fiona Apple - The Idler Wheel...

like comet blazing / her rare flare, beyond compare / offers wry delights

Saint Etienne - Words And Music By Saint Etienne

pure Heavenly pop / of a veddy British bent / like they never left

Metric - Synthetica

down to a science / mixing man and machine in / perfect measurement

Like any good list, this is well and incomplete and only captures a moment of emotional spark in the empty ricochets of my memory's chambers.  But it will have to do.  Up next will be movies or songs or nothing at all, depending on the whimsy of my writing bone, but I hope you'll sample the above works of musical joy and despair and introspection.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"The Silver Gun" by Robert Palmer (1983)

I mean...Urdu? Seriously, Urdu . On an already eclectic and worldly album -- Pride , from 1983 -- "The Silver Gun" closes a chapter in Robert Palmer's career by singing a song about a horse in a language spoken daily by over 100 million people. The liquid bass line and propulsive electronics set out a bedrock for Palmer to ping phrasings rather out of place in Western music, askew astride even the peripatetic minimalism of the rest of the record. Somehow, in the middle of Michigan's Appalachia, I had this on vinyl a few years before the CD era officially commenced. It was an album of effort -- even the cover, a pointillism-and-bronze work, had Palmer's head barely above the water -- but the stitches didn't show to my pre-adolescent eyes and ears. In a career marked by zigs and zags, Pride and "The Silver Gun" were most certainly Other, and for a kid that felt like he didn't belong much of anywhere, it was nice to have those discrete feeling...
Post a Comment
Read more

Some 2024 Listening Pleasures

It started with a gift of two JBL Control 25 speakers, and by "gift" I mean "borrowed" -- a.k.a. "will never return" -- from an obsolete tech detritus pile at work. I may have snagged more than two gifts, of course, but the raw footage proving such a claim remains elusive. And after installing the JBL speakers into the upper corners of the music room, and after installing speaker stands for the rear speakers I already had, and after making the hard choice between a big-ass bean bag and a comfy leather recliner to properly center myself in the audio field (R.I.P., big-ass bean bag), there was only one missing piece: the Apple TV 4K unit. So for me, 2024 was the year I streamed a lot of music in Atmos through Apple Music, surrounded by new tunes and old bops in thrilling new dimensions. Some might say you don't need surround sound, 'cos the two ears + two speakers modality has been dandy for a while now, but that's like saying you don't need ...
Post a Comment
Read more

“Keep America great”

“Keep America great” Right now, I can’t watch MSU or U-M football, I can’t go see a movie at the State Theatre, I haven’t been to a concert in almost a year, my neighborhood is swaddled in flags made in China that aren’t the Chinese flag, I haven’t eaten inside a restaurant since February, some of my retirement stocks lost almost 40% of their value, I can’t find certain types of food and drink in the stores, the price of toilet paper has exploded, we are running out of coin currency in circulation, and I haven’t set foot in a classroom since 11 March, which is the last time I saw my friend and colleague alive. “Keep America great” In the United States, there is minority rule from an ignorant off-white supremacist cult leader and the rich and powerful people who can misuse the law and his followers to become more rich and powerful, while people that don’t look like them are being shot in the streets or their homes, or being put in concentration camps where infants wail for their absent ...
Post a Comment
Read more