Alt-J's An Awesome Wave https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B007RX32XK/?tag=pinkfishmedia-21 is a great, if not classic record which won the Mercury Prize. Vocalist Joe Newman probably isn't singing under the effects of Rohypnol....Don't know who Alt-J is but that video is hilarious.
Following that link, Amazon tells me I bought that album on 30 Aug 2012. Which is about 5 years further in the past than I would have guessed.
I remember years ago on some music show that I can’t remember, a rather snarky young women skewered the lyrics of David Byrne. She basically said that he just makes obvious statements & repeats them.
Most of Talking Heads output now ruined.
EDIT I've just noticed that all the albums above except Weir came from Bandcamp. Support the artists!
So many of my purchases do these days. I’m currently spinning Ishmael Ensemble’s Versions Of Light, a limited edition of just 70 copies! Might still be a couple left too. Great stuff, kind of jazzy trip-hop.
How did you hear about that? My main issue is knowing about stuff. I've missed all sorts this year that I had no clue about.
Thanks for the reminder about Binker Golding, I just pulled it out and played it again. A really good album.Binker Golding - Dream Like a Dogwood Wild Boy
Espen Erickson Trio - In The Mountains
Snarky Puppy - Empire Central
Spoon - Lucifer On The Sofa
Alt-J - Dream
Bandcamp is great, I’ve discovered some great Norwegian jazz via We Jazz label. There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.In this case Ishmael Ensemble were featured a couple of years ago on a British Jazz program on BBC 4 along with Nubya Garcia, Matthew Halsall, Sarathay Korwar and others. I knew of Nubya and a few others at that point, but IE were new to me so I bought an album and as ever subscribed to notifications on Bandcamp. That was a bloody expensive TV show, I think I’d spent £100 before the end credits went up!
This year has been really good, I’ve landed a lot of very limited stuff, to the point I now look at 500 as a large issue! This is definitely the way to get the cool stuff these days, RSD is crap, just ignore it. The good stuff is on Bandcamp or certain specific shop exclusives e.g. Rough Trade, Bleep etc. Just get it to land in your inbox and move fast if something takes your eye. As someone who has been buying records for well over 40 years this current era is serving up many of the most limited records I own. How that translates to long-term collectability and desirability I have no idea, but my suspicion is at least some of it will end up being the equivalent of those rare as hens teeth non-big name Vertigo ‘swirl’ prog albums, the real DIY punk and new-wave singles etc. I love the current music scene, and I’ve got sufficient disposable income to buy what I want in a way I really struggled to in my own time. I’ve even got a shop for the stuff I find I don’t connect with (I still only buy stuff I like/think I’ll like new, I don’t buy Bandcamp stuff deliberately to flip).
Man, this is going to be tough...it was a hell of a year for me musically.
In no particular order:
The Future Sound of London - Rituals E7.001 and A Space of Partial Illumination E7.002 (grouped together as related)
Sarah Davachi - Two Sisters and In Concert & In Residence (grouped together as related)
Scanner - An Ascent
Holy Fawn - Dimensional Bleed
Grivo - Omit
Katelyn Clark & Isaiah Ceccarelli - Landmarks
Kali Malone - Living Torch
Ákos Rózmann - MASS / MÄSSA
Josten Myburgh - Scalthorpe Studies
Klaus Lang - Tehran Dust
Peter Conradin Zumthor - Things Are Going Down for Piano Player and Piano Tuner
Howlround - TRESSPASS & WELFARE
However good a record Alt-J make I still just hear this.
What I hear is two blokes with a tiny amount of musical ability doing a shite pastiche of Alt-J, with an undercurrent of jealousy that they wouldn’t be able to come up with something as special as An Awesome Wave even if they had an infinite number of monkeys (including themselves) and an infinite amount of time with which to do so.