Week 36

Control Machete – Solo Para Fanaticos

Whoops! Well, shit…

Ok, I probably should have figured this out. I mean, my Spanish is good enough to translate Solo Para Fanaticos, so the question really becomes whether or not I would have put together that Only for Fanatics would mean ‘Greatest hits’ album.

I knew every song on here. But, I had forgotten how good a track Danzón was, so there is that.

Fuck off. In terms of life 2020 was some next level shit. On some easier year I would have erased this and listened to a different album but god damn it I got shit to do. Good enough!

Week 37

Tre allegri ragazzi morti – Primitivi del futuro

This is something of a local band for me, even though I had never heard of them. Frankly, I wasn’t sure Friuli had ever produced anything good except for Prosciutto San Daniele. I was wrong apparently, or so I heard from a compilation album of modern Italian artists. 

But I wasn’t blown away by this album. I just didn’t find many tracks that really resonated with. I still have the discography, so I am willing to give the other tracks a shot.

Week 38

Elton John – Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

I like Elton John. I have heard enough of his songs to know this. The man and his writer are both extremely talented. I bring up his writer because Elton John is one of those acts that come up in conversation every now and again, and someone is always smugly ready to point out that he didn’t write any of his songs.

And I don’t care.

Someone said that this album had most of his best songs. I am not sure I agree. I think i need to learn that with older acts, I am better off just finding a greatest hits.

This was another one of those albums that came with with a bunch of other discs, many of which I had no interest in. It included a whole album of covers of Elton John tracks by seemingly everyone and their postman. I just didn’t care. I listened to the main bit and ignored all the rest.

Week 39

Zeal and Ardor – Devil is fine

A friend of mine told me about the title track from this album. It was stuck in his head, despite the fact that he lives in a conservative religiously theocratic country (guess which one). He got me curious about it, and I gave the title track a whirl on YouTube.

It was pretty damn good. It was also pretty damn unique.

Thus the album made it onto my queue. It was pretty damn cool. I tend to not like any sort of  faux-satanism as an aesthetic, and I was worried that this was going to be heavy on that. Thankfully, it wasn’t. There was some of it, but not a lot.  There were a lot of instrumental avant-garde tracks that I could really get behind. Apparently, that’s the type of music I like. Or so I have been told.

Week 40

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard – Polygondwanaland 

Speak of the devil. I am not sure KGLW is avant-garde, but it is surely a sort of weirdo prog / psychedelic rock. I listened to one of their albums last year and I didn’t really like it – even though one of the tracks from it was absolutely fantastic. However, I was quickly informed that it was pretty much not one of their best. So I was went hunting for whichever one was best.

“Polygondwanaland” was apparently it. And yea, this album was a whole lot more memorable. Strikingly so. And hey, the album is free. I certainly think I heard the ‘psychadelic’ in this album more than the previous one. That’s good and bad I guess, as that genre isn’t my favorite.

Ultimately I am not sure how process this. While I listened to this I couldn’t help but think that this was clearly a better album than the one i had previously listened to (Oddments, for the record). However, after listening to this one I didn’t really have a sense of coming away with any really notable tracks. It all sounded kind of the same, which was a good same. But Oddments managed to produce one real banger of a track that I can’t really forget. Does that make it the winner.

Nah, probably not.