albums of note that I'm hearing for the first time

If you can get past terrible lyrics, the album from 1981, Discipline, is pretty great too. Matte Kudesai is a favorite of mine.

I made it a couple of songs before I came to the realization that this kind of thing just wasn't what I felt like listening to at the moment. But another time!

I think the only Spiritualized CD I had heard up to a month ago was the late 90s "Ladies and Gentlemen..." one with the cover that looked like it could have been an IDM album. I still can't remember why I bought that CD as I was super broke at the time, but suspect it was a combination of the album cover (which is still awesome) and Dero raving about that band all the time. Anyways, that album was so incredibly boring and underwhelming. I definitely remember being pissed that I spent $20 on something so mediocre when spending $20 on a CD at that time typically meant I was eating rice and beans for the next week.

Anyways, when Pitchfork revisited their debut earlier this year and gave it such a rave review, I semi-reluctantly put it in my "Music to Listen To" playlist. After skipping past it for a month because I really wasn't too keen on spending what little time I have for music listening to something I think I'm gonna be mehish about at best, I finally put it on. And yeah, it's spectacular. Droney, lo-fi, feedbacky, shoe-gaze at its best.

BLOWN away to learn that undo hasn't been fucking with the Cocteau Twins for like 25 years!

I know almost every song on this album but I'm almost positive I never actually listened to this album until this morning. So good.

Oh wow I love this

whoever could have guessed

I watched The Velvet Underground doc and loved it. I know their albums extremely well along with Lou Reed’s and John Cale’s. But I’m not familiar at all with Nico’s albums.

I’ve been listening to The Marble Index this week and it’s incredible. I don’t think it’s considered her best but regardless it’s something I’m glad to have discovered!

I didn't understand what PC music was when it was a thing people were talking about, but this sounds great to me right now. I also don't know if this is considered an A.G. Cook album of note, but I'm into it. "Aquarius" and the Michael Jackson song that isn't a Michael Jackson song are faves.

*more like genres of note that I’m hearing for the first time

You know I'm feeling that post, B!

Nick wrote:I watched The Velvet Underground doc and loved it. I know their albums extremely well along with Lou Reed’s and John Cale’s. But I’m not familiar at all with Nico’s albums.

I’ve been listening to The Marble Index this week and it’s incredible. I don’t think it’s considered her best but regardless it’s something I’m glad to have discovered!

Kind of a similar story here. I watched the Beastie Boys doc. I like the Beasties - I loved Licensed to Ill when I was in high school, bought Paul's Boutique soon after (my fave, I think), got turned onto Ill Communication by a buddy/the radio singles, and bought Hello, Nasty when it came out. Check Your Head, though, I've never listened to. Slipped through the cracks, probably, for the lack of singles and the fact that I already had and liked Ill Comm and kinda thought of them as more or less the same thing. I told a chef I was working with one time about this after he told me he'd never heard Astral Weeks - even though he's a big Van fan, he was "saving" it for a special occasion; a really cute idea. Michael, he said, you're going to LOVE Check Your Head. Just make sure to save it for a special occasion. So I watched the Beasties doc and was really taken by it - didn't really dig the Velvet doc, but whatever that's just me - especially the nuance of their artistry and the humanism/just some dudes kinda character that Mike D and Horowitz bring to the table, and the way they give flesh to Yauch. I was pretty moved. So, my special occasion was while out driving in the Willamette Valley, an hour drive to pick up some wine from a local producer. Great record. Weird record. I'm excited to get to know it better.

I also am listening to Wrens' Secaucus for the very first time ever right now and am kicking myself for not doing this earlier. This might be my very favorite Guided by Voices album.

If you’re listening to the reissue of CYH, don’t sleep on the b-sides/unreleased material from that era. It doesn’t top the album but gives the listener some insight into their headspace around that time.

This is not the first time I've tried listening to Low but I think I just really wasn't in the right mood before or maybe it wasn't the right album (Secret Name, which I didn't even finish way back whenever but will probably turn out to be not a whole lot different than this album.

This is ridiculously beautiful music. No shit, undo, I hear you saying. "Beautiful" doesn't really articulate what makes it special but I have no use for language anymore, it certainly never had a use for me.

Just want to listen to this all the time. I feel hopeless and depressed with a clarity of the darkness in this world that I never was fully aware of before (and still am not, I think I'm glimpsing maybe 1% of it at the moment but that's a huge step up from the .01% of it that I had the luxury of dipping my toes in and out of for as long as I wanted to. This is not DEPRESSING MUSIC. But it's also not some comforting light at the end of a tunnel or whatever. Just observing that maybe feeling like my life and the world are falling apart at the moment has somehow, perhaps even in a way that I cannot even comprehend, is making me more receptive to this sound than I have ever been before.

I'm thinking about "Whitetail" and "Dinosaur Act" and "Medicine Magazines" all the time.

I might have LOVED this if only I'd heard it 20 years ago and maybe it might have been something that I'd have held dear to my heart throughout my 20s and 30s but but now it's kind of one oft those albums that I'm discovering way too late and may never form the kind of connection with that I did so easily all the time way back then. It is so hard to have those experiences these days, everything feels so cheap and consumable, even in ways that it never came close to back in the yousendit/fish era. Way too many albums were thrown at us with the promises that they were profoundly deep and meaningful and important and now they're all just punchlines. But that's on me for never fully learning how to separate hype and acclaim and other factors from reality.

This is a great album, don't get me wrong, I hope I can enjoy it for a long long time

Merzbow - Pulse Demons

This album has been an enigma for me since I first decided to listen to it years ago. When I say listen to it years ago, I mean, listened to 30 seconds of each track before turning it off in disgust. Who the hell would listen to this for any reason, let alone actual enjoyment? But ever since that first listen this thing has popped up in my head for various reasons over the years. As an enigma often does, it baffled me. But here I was, listening to it again. And again. And again… each time only about 30 seconds.

As a joke a few years ago, I made my son listen to woodpecker pt1 as punishment for yelling at his games. It was at a lower volume and made him laugh more than anything. THIS IS MUSIC?!?!? Was his first and only reaction. I turned the song off and we both carried on with what we were doing.

About 2 months ago I was browsing records at the Highland, IN Disc Replay when I came across the 2019 repress of Pulse Demons. I knew what it was right away, that nauseating album cover with its vertigo inducing op-art drew me in right away. I held it for a few minutes considering a few things but mostly thinking, who the fuck in Highland, IN would ever want this album? I put it down and left after receiving a call from my job. I stopped by a few weeks later and I couldn’t find it… did someone actually buy this thing??? No way… they couldn’t have. I asked the clerk. He looked it up and, no, it was still in stock, ‘probably just categorized incorrectly,’ he said. ‘Do you want it?’ He asked. ‘Not me!’ I loudly proclaimed, as I left the store.

I arrived back at home a few days ago after having one of the worst days at my job that I have had since the start of the pandemic. It left me questioning what I’m doing and just generally feeling hopeless. I got fairly drunk and for some reason had the thought to put this album on. I turned it on, at a low volume, and it finally made sense. I had a blanket over my head and it felt like the music was being beamed directly into the center of my skull. One of the most cathartic listens of my life. I did not feel punished, I did not feel anger or hate. I felt the day get blown out of my head. I felt myself slipping away but not to sleep. My existence became Pulse Demons. Insane time stretching effect abound. Some of the songs are only 3-4 minutes but they feel much longer. So much intensity puts the brain in a wiped state, no feelings or thoughts, just intense being. After the experience I went to sleep. I woke up thinking about it. I was so afraid of this thing for so long and now that I had conquered it I felt like I had been let in on a secret that only those who had the experience would understand. As my boy J. Spaceman said that one time in that one song on that one album, ‘things will never be the same.’

Listened to A Murder Most Foul this morning for the first time. Started crying around 2 minutes in and didn’t stop until the end. A funeral dirge for the American era. It’s like Dylan and Death riding in a Cadillac, that tunnel off in the distance, ‘almost there, let me show you some things before we reach it.’ Beautiful.

A friend rec'd Roy Harper's Stormcock. I had never heard it and was pretty taken by it. The algorithm led me to Kevin Coyne's Marjory Razorblade, which I like even better.



Feels like both are albums of note, even if they aren't particularly noted by a TON of people.

undo wrote:

Probably one of the last albums you'd think I'd post itt but what can I say.

I just bought the vinyl of this without ever hearing a note and partially based off of this and nicks post. Let’s just say I’m not disappointed and may be fairly high right now. What else is new, amiright?

Over the years I've heard snippets of this band, random songs, a coworker at an old job once burned me a copy of Fake Can Be Just As Good, none of it ever clicked with me. That's the absolute height of Just Fine but this band sits dead center in the realm of a ton of music that I love or used to love but at least had been really important to my life, and flashes of brilliance in songs like "Equally Damaged" convinces me that their recipe can work, so I feel like I'm really missing something if I just dismiss them outright. This is the first album of theirs that I've heard in full. I did not care for it.

I kind of hate all of the vocals, it doesn't matter who is singing them. None of these songs or the ostensible hooks in them ever grab me. They don't do "noise rock" in any way that resonates with me. They feel like a second or third-tier mid/late-2000s indie band that just happened to be really ahead of their time. I hate that I feel this way because I feel like the appetite that I used to have for genuinely abrasive and/or "experimental" rock music has been supplanted by a craving for music that instead pushes the limits of smooth vibes, probably fed by a stead diet of minimal techno and polished or sparse "post-rock"-like bands over the years. Then again sooooo much of this album kind of feels stuck in a middle ground between incorporating tons of distorted sounds but also trying to lay them out in some kind of really... polite sort of way? I don't have words for it, maybe I might eventually get them if I decided to live with this album for a long time and actually try to understand it instead of just reacting to it.

Again, I really like the first song on this but everything after that left me very eager to get to the next song after a minute or two at the most.

Kind of feel sorry for them as they reached their artistic and popular peak just before the indie festival era, though I guess they get Rick and Morty money now so hopefully they've learned to live within their means and that's been a nice late-career surprise for them.

Never listened to this band before, somb user forgo was a huge fan? When I check out indie rock bands of yore that I never really gave a listen to I usually try to start with album #2 and this one delivers in ways that so many others have failed in the same experiment. No bad songs here. Can they keep it up for 12 albums? Who knows, once again I might just be happy with this one and not dig in much further but if anyone has a favorite Sloan album I will definitely listen to it.

I love this song.

For the rest of my drive home I felt like a totally different person while listening to this album for the first time.

Or something like that, maybe? Oh dear it is hard to explain.

I felt like maybe I could just love everyone in the whole damn world, I was not stoned

I have a Twin Peaks original Soundtrack on vinyl but I never listen to it. I got it for a super bargain price and bought it but it's weird, I... just don't really want it, it was just something I had to get because I didn't want to get home and then find out it was "rare" or something. I have no idea if it is but I kind of doubt it. Also the die cut cover is annoyingly damaged and it just makes me with it had a "normal" cover that wouldn't get caught on things when you try to USE IT AS A RECORD SLEEVE like the object it is, anyway it happened in store I think

This is beautiful music, I have never heard anything like it in my life. On its own without the visual context they're so often associated with, the handful of songs I was "familiar" with suddenly became new worlds of their own!

The air felt fresher, the sky seemed bluer, everything seemed so forgiveable and full of beauty. There are so many really unexpected moments in these songs, it feels like the cover art looks, hey I know that's usually the idea when it comes to that but here it actually happens for once.

I know this is pretty well known (?) but I had never come face to face with it until today

I don’t know if I actually started a circa-2008 JDFF thread about that record that is very near and dear to my heart, but you’re making me re-live that thread right now. Many a good night of deep listening spent with that one.

I had no interest in this for years and that was a huge mistake! I think I was getting this group mixed up with another "goth" band that couldn't possibly have been more different than this.

Absolutely beautiful tunes, beautiful atmosphere in every song, the guitar is absolutely lovely and the mixing is just... like, I know this is an "80s sound" but I never heard it done as well as this or ever considered it to even be possible. I thought this album was going to sound "dated" but it's not only ahead of its time (shades of Bark Psychosis' Hex abound), it sounds like it's from a beautiful future waiting for us deep on the other side of all this shit, maybe we won't live to see it, who knows

I probably shouldn't post about albums I'm still in the process of listening to but damn I love this, 80s 4AD is a huge blind spot for me and I need to remedy that this year because I'm starting to get the feeling it's where a lot of sounds I've been looking for first originated and still exist in their purest forms.

This was much-needed

Daniel Johnston - Artistic Vice (1991)



I LOVE Daniel Johnston, but his output is so all over the place that I somehow never managed to listen to this album, which is somehow his "debut" even though he'd released like ten other albums by the point it came out.

I swear this song was in my head cannon somehow, but it was still a mindblowing moment when it came on and I only sort of recognized it...  
I feel like this song is scratched into my soul and such a big part of me… but before tonight there's no way I could've named it, sang it...  anything.


Really glad I listened to this record tonight.

quip wrote:I know almost every song on this album but I'm almost positive I never actually listened to this album until this morning. So good.

Recently decided that Life’s a Gas is my favorite song ever.

There are a couple songs on this that I've known for quite some time but I have never listened to this all the way through.

That is actually a lie as I recall sitting in the back of someone's car in 2004 and they put this on so I probably heard it all, or at least most of it, 18.5 years ago.

Would love to say I didn't already have a fully-formed opinion of this before actually hearing it in full but that would also be a lie. Blame it on Internet/message board culture, blame it solely on me, I don't care, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Hardly anything worth really posting here as I'm not going to say it was terrible or amazing. Digging into it beyond the first song (which I've probably heard 100 times as it was put on a mix CD someone made for me like 20 years ago) and the title track, there's nothing as awful as I was hoping for (?) but you can certainly hear its influence on a lot of awful bands that I won't mention here because that isn't really the artist's fault.

Truly meeting this one halfway is a challenge