New Music Saturday
Jan. 10th, 2021 03:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
singedsunIt was our friend's last night with us tonight, so we all kind of hunkered down and watched stuff together. Gretal & Hansel was released on Hulu in the last few days so we put that on. I don't know if anyone else here has watched it but oh man I was not expecting that movie at all. It's some ephemeral time that's both very long ago and still a little bit modern. Sophia Lillis was a wonderful Gretal, but I couldn't help but feel like she seemed out of place the whole time. Also, surprise appearance by the every beautiful Jessica de Gouw, whom I LOVE. It was a small part, but she was there nonetheless and it made me happy.
So because of that and also because I tried to do a small end of the year wrap-up thing behind the cut here, this post got pushed into today.
I have one good video recommendation this week, because the week was a trash fire here and it was very surreal to try and just listen and enjoy music at all. Which means I didn't do much of it.
But, here we go:
Firstly it's First to Eleven's "Stairway to Heaven (Led Zepplin)" cover with Lauren Babic, Violet Orlandi & Halocene (I think just Addie from Halocene, but I wasn't paying close attention). If you like this one you can watch another they did a few months back for Queen's "Somebody to Love".
And now,
Okay so I use Last.fm to keep up with my music habits. What's in the image below is basically like the Spotify wrapped, but not just Spotify. It counts my Spotify listens in addition to YouTube and YouTube Music (formerly Google Music). I think it also tracks bandcamp or soundcloud... I forget which. It's just a browser plug in and it's super useful.
Anyway as you can see, they've given me a top artist, album and track, with the other four in the top 5 for each list. What's fun about this is that I really wasn't expecting some of them, but you know, here we are.
Firstly, Nothing but Thieves are in first place for both album & artist. Their Moral Panic album came out in October? I think or maybe late September. I feel for them hard. Especially the track "Is Everybody Going Crazy?" Which you can see in the #4 spot under tracks. This was basically my work and writing album leading into Nanowrimo and I had it on A LOT.
I'm very surprised by Adam Lambert's album, VELVET making the #2 spot for my album of the year, because I know I listened to it a lot, but I guess I listened to it even more than I thought. But then, not one of his songs made my top 5. However, I can tell you that the album came out really early in 2020 and it was the first thing I started listening to during the day when I started working from home back in March. It's fun, it's upbeat and it kept me a little more sane when work was an absolute disaster every day for that first month or so.
I know why MCR's Three Cheers album in on there -- in March, when I still thought I'd be able to see concerts this year, I was trying to get tickets to the MCR show for my friend and I in Minneapolis to take a weekend trip and see them. Of course they sold out before I could get any, but then all the shows were cancelled anyway and haven't yet been rescheduled. There were a few weeks there though where I was definitely coping but just playing that album (which is my favorite of theirs) over and over. Not the concert experience I was hoping for but maybe our dogs and cats enjoyed my little solo concerts as I sang during work.
A lot of the rest is heavily influenced by my playlists during Nanowrimo. I'd built out a huge playlist and kept updating and changing and rearranging the songs on it while I wrote. When Soilwork's album came out at the end of the month, I was heavy into the action-y end parts of my draft and it was like a perfect little cap on that part of the draft. I did fall head-over-heels in love with the song "Death Diviner" which might be obvious here. I won't tell you what the count is on exactly how much I listened to that song. It was a lot.
honigfrosch gave me some end of the year questions a little bit ago, and I'd like to talk about them here too, since I'm talking about my end of the year stuff.
What are some of your earliest favourite songs that you can remember? As in, no children's songs, but the first forays into pop/rock/whatever. Someone on Twitter recently asked a question like this too, so it's fresh in my head that the first songs I really have strong memories of (that aren't just The Beatles entire discography) is "Every Breath You Take" by The Police, and "That's Why They Call it the Blues" by Elton John. I come by my love of music through my dad who is a really huge music fan. We always had music on in the house. My dad was 25 when I was born so he listened to popular/current rock music for the time, which means there was a lot of early 80's rock in our house. Styx, Boston, Chicago, Bruce Springteen, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. Personally I had a SUPER strong connection with Toto's IV album, which had "Rosana" on it. I must've gotten an old like kiddie tape deck for a birthday or Christmas when I was a kid, so I remember vividly walking the sidewalk in our small town listening to that album on that small tape player. So I've been deep into rock music since I was literally a toddler.
Which genre do you have a lot of respect for but just can't get into, or want to like but it doesn't click? Jazz. There are very few Jazz songs I can listen to without it just making my head hurt. My brain just wants to look for the natural melodic progressions and a lot of jazz songs just take too long to get there. I always just feel slightly uncomfortable listening to it? (My husband loves Jazz, so he's learned to listen to it without me, or to find someone like Miles Davis we can both enjoy.) Really prog rock kind of also goes hand in hand with Jazz -- again there's some I like, some I just don't like. Ska is also in this category, along with what I'd call noise rock and speed metal, the kind of heavy bass, heavy drum, super fast music that's hard to track.
Has there ever been a song (or songs, plural) that creeped you out so that you refused to listen to it, maybe for years, maybe still? For Christmas one year, my step-sister bought me the Stone Temple Pilots album, Purple. I tried to like it, but I made it to "Lounge Fly" and just hated it. I think I gave that tape away to someone else. There's also a NuMetal band called Spineshank that I LOATHE. They're just not good? Back in the day when I first started going to concerts regularly, Spineshank was just starting to gain popularity. Which meant they were the opener for like EVERY band we wanted to see... for like two years straight we saw them over and over again. I just really came to hate them. Imagine in the days when Type O Negative was still touring, being so excited to see Peter Steele and you have to wait through 45 minutes of really shitty, loud and nonsensical newbie metal musicians. I love a good opener, and that's not Spineshank. (It was especially frustrating when there were several legitimately good opening bands that were getting the shorter time slot, or fewer touring dates, so they basically just faded away - the band "Simon Says" comes to mind. They were so good.)
Also I think I deleted it accidentally from my inbox, but I know someone asked how I figure out what to post every week. Basically, my main music tool of choice is (now) YouTube (formerly Google Play). So I have a separate YouTube account where I follow all my favorite artists, both indie, mainstream and cover bands. So I go through every week (several times usually), add all the new songs to a queue and put it on while I'm working or writing. Then as songs make and impression on me, I copy the link or the embed code and save it in a OneNote text document, with the artist and title and maybe one thing that caught my attention about it.
For albums, I hit up the new releases on both my YouTube music account and my Spotify account (their algorithms are different so I see different releases, I catch most new albums that way. Then, there's also Bandcamp, which I don't check weekly, but I do follow favorite artists there also and get email notifications when they post something new. If I don't have time at that moment I'll copy the link into that same OneNote, or I'll leave the tab open and come back to it when I do have time.
The TL:DR being I listen to music often enough on multiple platforms that the new stuff comes to me. And this is how I listen to things just generally? So it's not much more effort to save the links as I go. I just have to bring it back here and actually format it and add my thoughts, ect.
A few bonus music mentions for this week:
Witch of the Vale - Hurt (Nine Inch Nails)
FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE - Blue (Turns to Red) an Eiffel 65 cover.
Sevdaliza - Tiny Desk (Home) Concert
Two Feet - Fire
And if you like hip-hop and good lesbian content, there's a new Jazmin Sullivan album out here [Spotify].
Also in music news, I saw that Kings of Leon has announced a new album and I'm so stoked for that. I really adore that band, it's gotten me through some weird times.
Anyway, that's music for this week. Tell me what you liked or listened to this week, I love to hear about it. If you have any other questions about music, throw them my way too!
So because of that and also because I tried to do a small end of the year wrap-up thing behind the cut here, this post got pushed into today.
I have one good video recommendation this week, because the week was a trash fire here and it was very surreal to try and just listen and enjoy music at all. Which means I didn't do much of it.
But, here we go:
Firstly it's First to Eleven's "Stairway to Heaven (Led Zepplin)" cover with Lauren Babic, Violet Orlandi & Halocene (I think just Addie from Halocene, but I wasn't paying close attention). If you like this one you can watch another they did a few months back for Queen's "Somebody to Love".
And now,
Okay so I use Last.fm to keep up with my music habits. What's in the image below is basically like the Spotify wrapped, but not just Spotify. It counts my Spotify listens in addition to YouTube and YouTube Music (formerly Google Music). I think it also tracks bandcamp or soundcloud... I forget which. It's just a browser plug in and it's super useful.
Anyway as you can see, they've given me a top artist, album and track, with the other four in the top 5 for each list. What's fun about this is that I really wasn't expecting some of them, but you know, here we are.
Firstly, Nothing but Thieves are in first place for both album & artist. Their Moral Panic album came out in October? I think or maybe late September. I feel for them hard. Especially the track "Is Everybody Going Crazy?" Which you can see in the #4 spot under tracks. This was basically my work and writing album leading into Nanowrimo and I had it on A LOT.
I'm very surprised by Adam Lambert's album, VELVET making the #2 spot for my album of the year, because I know I listened to it a lot, but I guess I listened to it even more than I thought. But then, not one of his songs made my top 5. However, I can tell you that the album came out really early in 2020 and it was the first thing I started listening to during the day when I started working from home back in March. It's fun, it's upbeat and it kept me a little more sane when work was an absolute disaster every day for that first month or so.
I know why MCR's Three Cheers album in on there -- in March, when I still thought I'd be able to see concerts this year, I was trying to get tickets to the MCR show for my friend and I in Minneapolis to take a weekend trip and see them. Of course they sold out before I could get any, but then all the shows were cancelled anyway and haven't yet been rescheduled. There were a few weeks there though where I was definitely coping but just playing that album (which is my favorite of theirs) over and over. Not the concert experience I was hoping for but maybe our dogs and cats enjoyed my little solo concerts as I sang during work.
A lot of the rest is heavily influenced by my playlists during Nanowrimo. I'd built out a huge playlist and kept updating and changing and rearranging the songs on it while I wrote. When Soilwork's album came out at the end of the month, I was heavy into the action-y end parts of my draft and it was like a perfect little cap on that part of the draft. I did fall head-over-heels in love with the song "Death Diviner" which might be obvious here. I won't tell you what the count is on exactly how much I listened to that song. It was a lot.
honigfrosch gave me some end of the year questions a little bit ago, and I'd like to talk about them here too, since I'm talking about my end of the year stuff. What are some of your earliest favourite songs that you can remember? As in, no children's songs, but the first forays into pop/rock/whatever. Someone on Twitter recently asked a question like this too, so it's fresh in my head that the first songs I really have strong memories of (that aren't just The Beatles entire discography) is "Every Breath You Take" by The Police, and "That's Why They Call it the Blues" by Elton John. I come by my love of music through my dad who is a really huge music fan. We always had music on in the house. My dad was 25 when I was born so he listened to popular/current rock music for the time, which means there was a lot of early 80's rock in our house. Styx, Boston, Chicago, Bruce Springteen, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. Personally I had a SUPER strong connection with Toto's IV album, which had "Rosana" on it. I must've gotten an old like kiddie tape deck for a birthday or Christmas when I was a kid, so I remember vividly walking the sidewalk in our small town listening to that album on that small tape player. So I've been deep into rock music since I was literally a toddler.
Which genre do you have a lot of respect for but just can't get into, or want to like but it doesn't click? Jazz. There are very few Jazz songs I can listen to without it just making my head hurt. My brain just wants to look for the natural melodic progressions and a lot of jazz songs just take too long to get there. I always just feel slightly uncomfortable listening to it? (My husband loves Jazz, so he's learned to listen to it without me, or to find someone like Miles Davis we can both enjoy.) Really prog rock kind of also goes hand in hand with Jazz -- again there's some I like, some I just don't like. Ska is also in this category, along with what I'd call noise rock and speed metal, the kind of heavy bass, heavy drum, super fast music that's hard to track.
Has there ever been a song (or songs, plural) that creeped you out so that you refused to listen to it, maybe for years, maybe still? For Christmas one year, my step-sister bought me the Stone Temple Pilots album, Purple. I tried to like it, but I made it to "Lounge Fly" and just hated it. I think I gave that tape away to someone else. There's also a NuMetal band called Spineshank that I LOATHE. They're just not good? Back in the day when I first started going to concerts regularly, Spineshank was just starting to gain popularity. Which meant they were the opener for like EVERY band we wanted to see... for like two years straight we saw them over and over again. I just really came to hate them. Imagine in the days when Type O Negative was still touring, being so excited to see Peter Steele and you have to wait through 45 minutes of really shitty, loud and nonsensical newbie metal musicians. I love a good opener, and that's not Spineshank. (It was especially frustrating when there were several legitimately good opening bands that were getting the shorter time slot, or fewer touring dates, so they basically just faded away - the band "Simon Says" comes to mind. They were so good.)
Also I think I deleted it accidentally from my inbox, but I know someone asked how I figure out what to post every week. Basically, my main music tool of choice is (now) YouTube (formerly Google Play). So I have a separate YouTube account where I follow all my favorite artists, both indie, mainstream and cover bands. So I go through every week (several times usually), add all the new songs to a queue and put it on while I'm working or writing. Then as songs make and impression on me, I copy the link or the embed code and save it in a OneNote text document, with the artist and title and maybe one thing that caught my attention about it.
For albums, I hit up the new releases on both my YouTube music account and my Spotify account (their algorithms are different so I see different releases, I catch most new albums that way. Then, there's also Bandcamp, which I don't check weekly, but I do follow favorite artists there also and get email notifications when they post something new. If I don't have time at that moment I'll copy the link into that same OneNote, or I'll leave the tab open and come back to it when I do have time.
The TL:DR being I listen to music often enough on multiple platforms that the new stuff comes to me. And this is how I listen to things just generally? So it's not much more effort to save the links as I go. I just have to bring it back here and actually format it and add my thoughts, ect.
A few bonus music mentions for this week:
Witch of the Vale - Hurt (Nine Inch Nails)
FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE - Blue (Turns to Red) an Eiffel 65 cover.
Sevdaliza - Tiny Desk (Home) Concert
Two Feet - Fire
And if you like hip-hop and good lesbian content, there's a new Jazmin Sullivan album out here [Spotify].
Also in music news, I saw that Kings of Leon has announced a new album and I'm so stoked for that. I really adore that band, it's gotten me through some weird times.
Anyway, that's music for this week. Tell me what you liked or listened to this week, I love to hear about it. If you have any other questions about music, throw them my way too!
no subject
Date: 2021-01-10 09:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-15 06:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-15 08:24 am (UTC)I'm a person that can and will listen to the same thing for long periods of time, so I'm not too surprised my last.year was dominated by vgm.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-10 06:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-14 06:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-11 07:38 pm (UTC)Omg, I know what I'm blasting if I ever Uber someone again.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-13 01:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-14 06:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-28 03:46 pm (UTC)I listen to free-form radio (WFMU) a lot, so when they play something that interests me, I go to Bandcamp and add it to my wishlist. (They also have a heavily-played list that updates every month, and I check that out and make additions based on that too.) A couple times a month I go through it and winnow out the albums I like. I also read the Bandcamp newsletters. And of course I get updates from the labels I purchase from. And once a quarter I'll check out the more standard review sites (allmusic, pitchfork) and mow through a bunch of albums, seeing if anything is of interest. Plus there's what friends post on-line (which, in the example of KPop is mostly not for me but then I pass it on to Kid #1 and she appreciates it.)
For playlists, I have a Holding Pen where I dump songs I've heard.
It's remarkably similar to how I do any other kind of research, actually.