Topic: What are you listening to right now?

Ah yeah, it would be easier to explain how quantum physics affect our everyday life "You see, this was recorded in such a way that the singer couldn't hear the band and vice versa, so not only it is dissonant, it is also anti-rhythmic...".

That Nirvana album I'm after is supposedly good. I think it's one of the very early true concept albums (or rock operas, whatever they are called), along with S.F. Sorrow by The Pretty Things. I've never heard it though.

I know most people nowadays stream/download music and then buy it if they like it, but I don't. I stream occasionally if there's a single I want to hear, but with the low prices of physical music nowadays, I'd rather take a chance and buy an album, even if I end up not liking it.
This is probably something I developed as a teenager. I bought Love's Forever Changes when I was 16, and I remember hating it at first. But, you know, I had spent the money already, so I was stuck with it. Because of that I went back to that record more and more, and eventually something clicked and it became one of my all time favourites. If it were a YouTube link, I would have forgotten about it literally five minutes after closing the web browser.

Each year I try and acquire the whole discography of one or two artists I really really like, even the records usually regarded as stinkers. I'm doing this because the older I get, the more I realise I can't trust reviews anymore, and I fell in love too many times with albums universally considered by "critics" hit-and-miss, if not plain dull. Luckly music is a cheap hobby and for the price of one single new videogame which you play for 10 hours and then throw out the window, you can get 10 great albums, and among them there's going to be at least one that will change your life forever, or the way you dress, or the way you play your instrument.

Right now? Um ... the Splatoon 2 queue music? Other than that, not much of a music guy but if I listen to something, it's exclusively videogame osts on iTunes.

To make more of a list of recommendations rather than just taking the thread title literally. Here's a list of albums I'd highly recommend in general. Not that I'm necessarily currently listening to them regularly because of the way my sync playlist works. But they're still favourites regardless....

The Avalanches - Since I Left You
listen here

The Drones - Gala Mill
listen here

Powderfinger - Internationalist
listen here

Queens of the Stone Age - ...Like Clockwork
listen here

Deerhunter - Fading Frontier
listen here

Wii Shop Channel music, seriously lol

White noise. It gets me to sleep

Okay, since the climate is right for recommendations, I'll list a few of mine entirely based on the personality types you can meet on these boards:

Shpongle - Nothing Lasts ...But Nothing is Lost (full album)
youtube link
This is for the "The Splatoon OST blew me out of the water" people. Shpongle is a british duo and one of the few dance acts that actually makes legitimately good psychedelic music, capturing both the spirit of post-Barrett/pre-political Pink Floyd as much as the acid house movement of the late 80s. A joyful, ever surprising and overall terrific record. Older guys will instantly recognise the advantages of listening to this under the influence, but younger guys will appreciate its playful nature.

Les Rallizes Denudes (Hadaka No Rallizes) - Night of the Assassins (song)
youtube link
This one is for the Japanophiles who enjoy J-Idols and pop songs soaked in autotune and vocoders. Just replace the Idols with a mysterious band led by a shamanic performer and a Communist Red Army terrorist, the pop hooks with a monolithic bass riff and the autotune/vocoder with some of the heaviest noise ever made since John Cale left the VU.

Beady Eye - Flick of the Finger (song)
youtube link
This one's for the people who like trailer music. In 2013 I emailed Ubisoft a little montage I made of this song playing over the trailer for ZombiU, telling them "You should have used this song for the trailer, you collective of idiots". Yeah, the song was released 6 months after the game, but that's not the point. The point is that this is a mammoth of a song that could easily be the soundtrack to any car chase/bank heist/rooftop escape/missile crisis/tanks entering Tiananmen Square sequence ever.

I have an Amazon music account and I'll generally just play a random station or playlist.
Occasionally, if I'm felling crazy, I'll say something like 'Alexa, play music by Led Zeppelin' or Prince or Eminem.
But shuffle is usually a chicken dinner.

Speaking of Slowdive, this track always makes me think of the Fire Temple in OoT

Battle themes from FE Awakening playlist. I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed Awakening's music (fates is better but still....)

Take this SNES owners!

As a comeback album it is pretty damn solid. Unfortunately as a MBV album everyone is just going to discount it because it isn't Loveless. Personally most of my favourite MBV songs are on Isn't Anything so I just look at MBV as the second disk to Loveless. And as such it does the job well enough.

Super Furry Animals-Fuzzy Logic
Bruce Springsteen-Darkness on the Edge of Town

Those have been my breakfast jams.

Wow! Haha! So much going on here! I've been listening to Feist as well, but I've been getting into the new album, Pleasure. Other stuff would be A Mirror Dimly by Citizens & Saints, as well as some revisits of Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd, and The Band by THE BAND (this one is never really out of rotation round here).Hmmm....oh! Yasin Gaye, a mix of Mos Def's rhymes with Marvin Gaye's music, perfection!

Lots of good recommendations, videos and conversation to work through above. I enjoyed learning more about the shoegazer genre.

@skywake - You've gone to great lengths to insure you have a fresh rotation of music. That's an impressive system. I tend to drill down on an album I enjoy and listen to it until I nearly don't enjoy it anymore, so it's interesting to read about listening habits from the other side of that spectrum.

@spizzamarozzi - "Some of the musicians on the album may have felt a little trapped, like maybe Captain Beefheart had lost his mind a little bit and was holding them in a barn against their will, forcing them to perform. It comes through in the music." There's more I want to say in reply to #24 than what I have time to type out at the moment. Hope to have some time this evening.

@LuckyLand - It's so great. Is there any question it's the greatest tune within its small genre of "digital shop music"?

@NinChocolate - Ha, was hoping someone would take it literal. I require white noice to sleep as well. Silence is way too loud. I prefer a good fan for that task which serves double duty to remedy my other sleep time neusoris, stagnant air.

@MegaTen - may I suggest you to put the YouTube videos as links rather than embedding them, so the thread is neat and easy to browse? We don't want this thread to end up like a giant unbrowsable wall of videos like the "Music" thread, don't we?

on a separate note, I just spent €45 on a bunch of Japanese psychedelic albums from the 70s. I know they are not going to be "unconditional classics" as the book says though, but still, I wanted to try with my own ears. Do people ever buy records without having listened to them on YouTube/Spotify before?! I do that all the time.

This reminds me, I often watch Amoeba Records' "What's In My Bag" video series on YouTube, and I get so frustrated when I see people picking stuff they already know front to back. Older artists seem to be more honest - they pick stuff and have no problem admitting they have never heard it. But the youngsters are just terrible, they basically ONLY pick stuff they already know by heart and can lecture about for ages - which kinda defies the purpose of going to the biggest record shop in the universe (that is, to discover music that is new to your ears).

I approve.

@spizzamarozzi - A bunch of "Japanese psychedelic albums from the 70s" has me feeling feverish in a good way. What fun that will be to work through. My friend, you allow the music to come to you, and by doing so; you become an instrument through which music flows.

The best part about digital and streaming in my opinion, is that its knocked the price of used physical media down to ridiculous lows. I've been able to buy vinyl for cheap for a long time, and the same with CDs in the last few years. I've acquired entire discographies by accident buying boxes of records at auction and garage sales. I've paid $80 for 120 albums, and the same for a single album, and they all bring me joy.

It wasn't until my daughter came along (and later my son) that I found the value in streaming and digital. The any time, any where nature of it suits us well regardless of audio quality, and I can cast my music to the stereo in our new(er) vehicle; which they love. All of our family dance parties are on the home stereo though, on vinyl or CD, and they're epic.

I've always used automatic playlists of some kind. Hell, before I had a digital collection of music I had a CD stacker I used to set to random. Not that I don't listen to full albums but having an automated playlist just means I don't have to think about what I want to listen to next.

I've literally had years of tinkering with it on one player or another. It's constantly changing. My first one actually preferred music I'd played more often and I'd just exclude artists once I'd overplayed them. Which is a good way to only listen to a few tracks! I've only had the "no repeats" setup with a bias towards new music for the last couple of years.

I'm listening to City Escape.