Thursday, June 25, 2015

Music: Of Monsters and Men

Crystals:


Little Talks:


King and Lionheart:


Dirty Paws:

6 comments:

  1. Is it just me, or is one of these things not like the others? Maybe I've just forgotten, but I don't recognise the first one.

    *looks at Youtube description*

    "Taken from the forthcoming new album Beneath The Skin"

    Ah. I'll have to make a note of that.

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  2. It's actually out now. I just picked it up on iTunes a couple of days ago.

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    1. I really should pay more attention to these things. I learned a few days ago that the new Florence and the Machine album had come out a couple of weeks before that. (In that case, I did know a new album was on its way, but I'd misremembered it as coming out in early July rather than June.)

      I'd say it's because of a childhood on classic rock leaving me unused to listening to currently-active bands, but Stevie Nicks came out with a new album in 2011, so I suppose it's no excuse.

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    2. Four and a third years later, I finally listened to Beneath the Skin, and it is amazing.

      (And hey, now I've got *another* Of Monsters and Men album to look forward to! Maybe less than four years this time, but no promises: I *still* have a couple songs left to try in that Florence and the Machine album I mentioned earlier)

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    3. Clearly your music-listening habits are very different from mine... (I mean, not a criticism, it's just interesting to me that we interact with "new" music so differently.)

      I didn't know there was another album coming, so thanks for sharing that!

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    4. My to-listen list of songs from bands I know I like is...*checks*...oh hey, a round number: 300 songs.

      (Spread amongst nine artists, though one of them only has one track; meanwhile, Heather Dale and Vienna Teng together comprise nearly two-thirds of the list, since in addition to new stuff they both have a great deal of back-catalogue I haven't tried yet.)

      Partly it's a sensory-overload thing (though that's a much bigger problem with video), partly it's a time thing (normally I test out new music while doing sufficient low-effort video-game grinding, which I haven't had as much opportunity for these last couple years), but I think mostly it's about emotional and cognitive energy. Judging new songs is a type of mental work that I often don't feel up to, and if I just passively listen without monitoring "okay, how do I feel about this? do I like it? is it good enough to keep?" a lot of good-but-not-great songs are likely to slip through the net.

      ---

      I decided recently to start doing an annual check of Wikipedia for new music from known-good artists: regardless of how far I am from *finishing* my to-listen list, I'd still like it to stay reasonably up-to-date.

      The inaugural scan was in late August, and that's how I found out about Fever Dream.

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