Week 14 – Tuesday 2^nd Apr – Monday 8^th Apr

Gang Starr – Full Clip

I don’t really remember Gang Starr from my childhood. It’s a fact that my older brother listened to them, and by consequence I listened to them as well, but they don’t really take up that bit of mental space like other bands do. There are one or two songs I distinctly remember walking to high school listening to (on my CD player, no less). I was very much expecting every song on here to resonate in my memory. But almost none of them did.

Weird.

I generally don’t like ‘best of’ albums. They lack the cohesion that really good albums have. There is also a really good chance that a song you think is excellent doesn’t make the cut. It’s kind of weird that this happened, considering all the less-enjoyable remixes that were for some reason included on this.

 

Week 15 – Tuesday 9^th Apr – Monday 15^th Apr

Muse – Origin of Symmetry

The singing reminds me of a person who once reffered to a singer’s style (I forget who) as ‘self-indulgent moaning’. That’s what comes to mind when I hear this. I also have a mental image of Muse, before they got big, in someone’s house in a suburb with the lead singer saying to the rest of the band ‘Hey guys listen to how high a note I can hit’. For no other reason than the fact that he can.

 

Week 16 – Tuesday 16^th Apr – Monday 22^nd Apr

Fleetwood Mac – Rumours

You know, doing this album a week thing is worth it for those “Oh, that’s who wrote this song” moment that I continue to have. You can probably guess that the song in question was ‘Go your own way’. For as well as I knew that song, I had no idea who wrote it.

Not sure I cared much either, but I am glad to have a name with a face.

I guess it was fine, as far as a listening goes. But for an album that some people call one of the best of all time, about a week after listening to it I found it to be pretty forgettable.

 

Week 17 – Tuesday 23^rd Apr – Monday 29^th Apr

Franz Ferdinand – Franz Ferdinand

I audibly groaned when I heard the first few seconds of this album, and I can express my relief when the album quickly changed pace. I enjoyed listening to it enough, and it even had one of those ‘oh, so these are the guys who made that one radio song’ moment. I don’t think I ever heard an album that sounded so obviously early 2000’s, although I am not sure that is a complement.

Here is a weird thought: often when Anglophones sing their accent iron out to a pretty heavy extent, and frequently you cant actually tell where a person is from when they sing. While the specificity of the accent didn’t come through, something of it did, and I could tell at least that the singer was not American.

It could also have been the throwaway reference to BBC2. I don’t know why, but that line just kind of took me out of it. Maybe a Brit who hear a reference to CNN would feel similarly.

 

Apr POST DUE: May 4th