What are you listening to at the present? (genres helpful)

[Nemoide]

Listening to the preview songs from Terra Magica the new album by Panzer Dragoon composer Saori Kobayashi

A new album from the PD composer featuring cover art by one of the PD illustrators, the vocalist of the few PD songs with lyrics, and notes by the creator of the PD series! I CANNOT WAIT FOR THE FULL ALBUM! And it's not an April Fool!

[darsparx]

Been listening to a bunch of stuff, but I happen to of loaded Rossanne Cash's Seven Year ache on my phone awhile back and the title song is amazing. I love it! I will be delving into more of the like most likely just because modern country music(at least the radio country music is barely country music anyways ). I know people like Shania Twain basically popularized the pop country genre but at least her's more so the early stuff still sounds country as long as you're not talking the dance mixes of certain songs.

[noiseredux]

Miles Davis
Love Songs
1999, I generally don't like compilations in the vein of "greatest hits" and so on. I'd rather hear an album. But I do appreciate when compilations are put together with some kind of a theme. So I picked up Love Songs when I stumbled upon it for cheap. Unfortunately it just doesn't really do it for me. Don't get me wrong, it succeeds in its thematic goal: to give you a playlist of Miles Davis playing to you romantically in the background. And it's fine to throw on when cooking dinner with my wife. But honestly it's just kind of a boring collection. Like, you could make a similar playlist just by going through Davis' discography and looking for songs that have "love" in the title. Of course many of the songs here are good: a fifteen-minute take on "My Funny Valentine," or a lovely "Someday My Prince Will Come," but ultimately I'd still rather hear this songs in the context of their original albums.



The Branford Marsalis Quartet Featuring Terence Blanchard
Mo Better Blues
1990, Looking at the cover art you'd think that the soundtrack to this 1990 Spike Lee film about a jazz trumpeter in the late 60's would be dated as heck. But y'know what? The soundtrack actually holds together surprisingly well all these years later. It opens (and ends) with a vocal ballad sung by Cynda Williams and also includes one hip hop track, Gangstarr's "Jazz Thing" which attempts nicely to work as a bit of a history lesson of the artform. But everything else is Marsalis' Quartet. One thing I've always liked about him was his willingness to experiment. And here he does a great job in channeling 60's jazz into a more modern era. The album as a whole is far more thrilling than I expected, and actually has a very organic sound that can fool you into feeling like you're listening to a live stage show. There's even a track that includes some poetry read by Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes that sits comfortably among the throwback sounds. I'm pleasantly surprised by this album, and I've been meaning to see the movie forever. I'll have to finally get around to that!

[noiseredux]

Dave Brubeck Quartet
​Take Five Live
​1990, I'm normally not one for bootlegs - and this does seem to be some sort of unofficial release. But dammit if it isn't excellent. First of all, the sound quality is great. Taken from a live performance in 1967, you'd almost expect this to be muddy and imperfect. But no, everything sounds crystal clear. The setlist is solid, opening with a lovely "One Moment," and moving through "Mexican Folk Song" and "Blues For Joe," the latter featuring a really great drum solo. The one-two punch of the closing tracks is what really makes this record though. The version of "Take Five" here is a little more upbeat than the album version and just feels really alive. And then you've got a wonderful rendition of "Take The A Train." Like I said, I don't usually rave about bootlegs, but this is really an album worth hearing for fans of Brubeck and Desmond alike.


Young Jazz Rebels
Slave Riot
​2010, This right here is probably the wildest Madlib has ever gotten with his YNQ projects. Released the same year as the proper studio album by The Last Electro-Acoustic Space Jazz & Percussion Ensemble, this record by the Young Jazz Rebels stands in pretty stark contrast. This is 'Lib's take on free jazz and fusion. It is at times a rather challenging album for the listener. But it does pay off - it's not just noise. This is for fans of Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Anthony Braxton... Like all YNQ projects, it's hard to know who actually plays here - the only familiar name on the personnel is Monk Hughes... who is of course one of Madlib's many aliases. A quick search for Melvin Hampson brings up only this album. So who knows? But the instrumentation is great here. Though the album contains a whopping 18 tracks (complete with static crackle and pops), they all flow together nicely feeling like some kind of sonic stew. You may one minute be listening to shrieking electric guitar; the next falling into a track that's entirely percussion and then later finding a sort of soul-jazz keyboard part to nod your head along to. This is a daring record, and one that may need to be heard a few times before clicking. But it will click.

[nullPointer]

I'm trying to decide whether I'm excited about upcoming new Tiger Army album (after going seven years(!) with no new material). OK, that's not exactly true. I am excited, I'm just trying to decide how excited I am. I stalwartly maintain that TA II: Power of Moonlight is the best rockabilly/psychobilly album released in the 00's and probably one of the best rock albums released during that decade regardless of sub-genre classification. But this new stuff? Well ... I honestly just haven't decided yet (and probably won't until the full album actually drops).

The first track certainly maintains their trademark "vintage sound" ... but maybe a bit too much so? I mean this sounds like it could have been an unreleased Del Shannon B-side ... which is certainly not the worst thing ... but it also means that it sounds a bit derivative (and not necessarily in a good way):


The second preview track has a bit more of that classic Tiger Army sound, and I'm digging this one a bit more than the first. All the same I'm still hoping the album has at least a couple songs with more intensity and energy than the ones they've previewed so far.


So yeah! Let's say I'm excited ... but reservedly so.

[SamuraiMegas]

K.flay- FML

She's a mix of electronica and hip hop, and im really digging her. Noise, you might like her track with Danny Brown called "Hail Mary". Don't know how you feel about Danny, but I love him and he sounds great on the track.

[Sano]

Def Leppard - Greatest Hits Album

[KalessinDB]

I "recently" (a month or two ago) remembered Girl Talk exists -- this has led to me listening to various mashup and EDM stuff on youtube for the last couple months. My latest discovery (thank you, youtube randomly going to new stuff) is The White Panda.

I really like this one and The Pawprint but man... Girl Talk's All Day is unreal.

[noiseredux]

Buckshot Lefonque
Buckshot Lefonque
1994, I have to admit that this self-title debut by Branford Marsalis' Buckshot Lefonque project probably means more to me than it should, thanks to good old nostalgia. It was an album that I really listened to a lot back in those formative days when my ears were being molded into a jazz fan via the sounds of hip hop sampling. But it really meant a lot to me back then. See, while there were a whole slew of rappers (A Tribe Called Quest, Digable Planets, Guru...) who were exposing listeners to jazz, it seemed to really legitimize the whole thing when a legit jazz artist like Marsalis went and made an album informed by the sounds of hip hop. It was forward thinking in a backwards way... or something like that. Hearing this record again as an adult is kind of weird. Like seeing an awkward Junior High photo – the exact era in which I'd have been listening to it the first time around. But I tell you this: a lot of the album still holds up rather well. Honestly, the stuff that feels forced is a lot of the vocal tracks. I'm just not feeling these ballads that are thrown in. Luckily, there's only a couple of them. Maya Angelou shows up to read her famous poem, "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings," but it works better than the sung sappy ballads mentioned above. But really the best tracks to me are the ones that are just instrumental jazz with a strong backbeat – stuff like "Breakfast @ Denny's," "The Blackwidow Blues," and so on. The sampling and scratches never feel in the way; thanks to strong work by DJ Premier. It's not the best jazz-hip hop fusion record of its day. And I probably give it more credit than it deserves. But it is an overall enjoyable outing.


Jazz The Definitive Performances
1999, Oh man – broken record time: I'm really not a big fan of Greatest Hits or Best Of or whatever compilations. At least this one attempts some kind of theme. This is basically the history of jazz pressed by Columbia records. And surely they have a brilliant and absurdly huge archive. But, oh no! They've dropped the ball. To be fair, they'd need four discs or more instead of the two found here to really tell the story. My problem is the pacing, I think. The first disc starts with very early recordings and then all the sudden there's a rather jarring switch to Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, and then to a track from Davis' Kind Of Blue, and ending on a cut from Mingus Ah Um. It just feels weird. Three tracks tacked on to the end of an otherwise thematically linked single disc. The second disc feels like it makes more sense... mostly. Brubeck, Monk, 70's Davis, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Herbie Hancock, Weather Report, Ornette Coleman and Dexter Gordon: It all makes sense. And then a vocal performance by Tony Bennett? And then let's jump ahead to Branford and Wynton Marsalis to close things out. I don't know. This just feels oddly compiled. It may have just made more sense to do a box set with a single disc for pre-50's, 50's, 60's, 70's and so on. I know I'm picky. I just don't feel this is a good place for anyone to start looking for a history lesson.


Phil Woods Septet
Pairing Off
1956, This is a neat record. You've got seven players here, and as the title suggest, they pair off... Woods himself and Gene Quill are on alto sax; a young Donald Byrd (!) and Kenny Dorham are on trumpet; for low-end there's Doug Watkins on bass and Tommy Flanagan on piano; and of course, of course! There's Philly Joe Jones handling the drums. Oh! If there were only a second drummer here! The album is made up of four longer pieces, and they're almost like 20th Century compositions in a sense. Which is to say that a lot of thought went into how the pieces are arranged per player. Luckily the liner notes help you follow along with whose turn it is when. And basically the record plays out like a huge tug-o-war between players. At the end of the day, it sounds slightly more adventurous on paper than it does to my own ears, though. I enjoy this record. It's fun, and it's bright. But in a sense I almost feel like I enjoy reading about it and thinking about it than I actually enjoy listening to it.

[TSTR]

Whoever thought that trying to confine "Definitive" jazz to 2 CDs was feasible? Sounds patently ridiculous.