Adventures in Audiophilia
Oct. 25th, 2005 12:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficI'm an audiophile. I admit it. I've filled up my 20G iPod with a little more than half of my CDs, and I'm still acquiring far too many. Will it never end? I doubt it. So here's what I've been listening to lately.
Prog Rock
I grew up listening to a lot of artists that bordered on Prog Rock - Alan Parsons Project, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd - but I've never been terribly interested in finding more of the stuff. When I was in high school I borrowed a bunch of rock albums from my school's music library, including some earlier Pink Floyd and Genesis. I thought it was crap. I realize now that at the time, I was looking for stuff I already knew. I was waiting for that recognizable hook. And of course prog rock doesn't go for that.
My brother gave me "Trick of the Tail" by Genesis for Christmas; this is their first post-Gabriel album. In listening to it, my thoughts were: first time through - this is crap; second time - this is boring; third - this is kind of catchy; twelfth to twenty-fifth - this is GENIUS!!! I can recognize now the similarities between Tull's "Thick as a Brick" album (and "Aqualung" to a lesser extent) and Floyd's "Wish You Were Here," both of which have long been favorites of mine, and early Genesis. I feel like I've been missing out on a whole constellation of good albums.
So I recently purchased "Selling England by the Pound," and am now listening obsessively to that. This is music that is hard to like, in a way. Because it's so influenced by classical music, the album only works as a whole. You can't skip songs you don't like as much without ruining the flow of the whole thing. So I'm caught wanting to skip forward to my favorite bits but knowing that if I do skip to them, they won't be as good.
"Selling England by the Pound" has its rough spots. There are moments when a great riff comes in, then the synthesizer pisses all over it by doing those oh-so-seventies swirling scales. But since it's all of a piece, I can't avoid those annoying bits.
Listening to old Genesis also changes the way I hear their later albums, like "Invisible Touch" and "We Can't Dance." Though both of these are undeniably pop-py, I can now here the influence of their earlier progressive style.
"Selling England by the Pound" also has Phil Collins' debut as a lead singer in the song "More Fool Me." Listening to that is like listening to a flower bud. I can hear the stylings that will turn Phil Collins into a king of pop, but it's a long, long way between this and "Sussudio."
Along with my newfound appreciation of Genesis, I've grown to love Pink Floyd's "Animals" and "Meddle." This makes me want to explore more of Genesis's early albums (and they have so many) and to revisit other prog rock groups, like Yes. I have Yes's 90125, by far their most pop-py album, and one the members of the group view as deeply atypical of their style.
So now I need to go out and buy a bunch more albums. Argh.
Emiliana Torrini
I just bought an Emiliana Torrini album, sight un-heard. She sings "Gollum's Song" on the Two Towers soundtrack and has one of the most interestingly creepy voices I've ever heard. She's Icelandic/Italian, and shares with Bjork that strange Icelandic inflection to her pronunciation. The album, "Love in the Time of Science," is really quite good. There are points where the lyrics make you just go "wha...?" but her voice makes it a good listening experience. I'm a fan of Bjork too, but Torrini preserves the exotic appeal of Bjork's style without being as inaccessible. So now I need to go get her other albums.
Angel
I also just bought the Angel soundtrack (hey, I'm a sucker for that $25 free shipping thing on amazon, OK?). The score itself is fairly typical. I'll add it in to the rotation of TV scores I listen to that are mostly only good because they remind me of a show I like (I mean, who's ever heard of Robert Kral?). But it has two highlights. One I've already mentioned, which is Christian Kane singing "LA song," which was composed for him for the episode "Dead End." He has an absolutely enchanting country-western voice. Too bad he's never recorded anything else. And there's the added benefit that the lyrics foreshadow the events of the next few seasons of the show.
The other highlight is "Touched" by Vast. Heavy metal sampling Gregorian chant. Can't go wrong with that. This is the second time I've come across one really good song on a soundtrack recently (the other being "Absurd" on the "Sin City" soundtrack) that makes me want to immediately go out and buy that band's album in hopes that everything they do is as good. This is a risky venture at best, but I find it's a lot less risky the farther the group is from mainstream pop. Pop lives or dies by the hook in a particular song, but groups with (for lack of a better word) more musical substance have a style that can carry from one song to the next. Or that's the hope anyway.
Everything I listen to makes me want to listen to more. I'm being very deliberate about the albums I buy, trying to educate myself. And don't even get me started on the ongoing exploration of soundtrack composers. Above and beyond the cost of purchasing all this stuff, is the time investment. It takes a lot of hours of listening to really get to know an album, and that's what I want to do: really get to know and to like this stuff. I haven't even had time to properly listen to Vertical Horizon lately, or the many albums I bought in the past but only listened to once (like all the Duncan Sheik and Swing Out Sister I seem to own). It's exciting to find new works I enjoy, but it's frustrating too.
Prog Rock
I grew up listening to a lot of artists that bordered on Prog Rock - Alan Parsons Project, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd - but I've never been terribly interested in finding more of the stuff. When I was in high school I borrowed a bunch of rock albums from my school's music library, including some earlier Pink Floyd and Genesis. I thought it was crap. I realize now that at the time, I was looking for stuff I already knew. I was waiting for that recognizable hook. And of course prog rock doesn't go for that.
My brother gave me "Trick of the Tail" by Genesis for Christmas; this is their first post-Gabriel album. In listening to it, my thoughts were: first time through - this is crap; second time - this is boring; third - this is kind of catchy; twelfth to twenty-fifth - this is GENIUS!!! I can recognize now the similarities between Tull's "Thick as a Brick" album (and "Aqualung" to a lesser extent) and Floyd's "Wish You Were Here," both of which have long been favorites of mine, and early Genesis. I feel like I've been missing out on a whole constellation of good albums.
So I recently purchased "Selling England by the Pound," and am now listening obsessively to that. This is music that is hard to like, in a way. Because it's so influenced by classical music, the album only works as a whole. You can't skip songs you don't like as much without ruining the flow of the whole thing. So I'm caught wanting to skip forward to my favorite bits but knowing that if I do skip to them, they won't be as good.
"Selling England by the Pound" has its rough spots. There are moments when a great riff comes in, then the synthesizer pisses all over it by doing those oh-so-seventies swirling scales. But since it's all of a piece, I can't avoid those annoying bits.
Listening to old Genesis also changes the way I hear their later albums, like "Invisible Touch" and "We Can't Dance." Though both of these are undeniably pop-py, I can now here the influence of their earlier progressive style.
"Selling England by the Pound" also has Phil Collins' debut as a lead singer in the song "More Fool Me." Listening to that is like listening to a flower bud. I can hear the stylings that will turn Phil Collins into a king of pop, but it's a long, long way between this and "Sussudio."
Along with my newfound appreciation of Genesis, I've grown to love Pink Floyd's "Animals" and "Meddle." This makes me want to explore more of Genesis's early albums (and they have so many) and to revisit other prog rock groups, like Yes. I have Yes's 90125, by far their most pop-py album, and one the members of the group view as deeply atypical of their style.
So now I need to go out and buy a bunch more albums. Argh.
Emiliana Torrini
I just bought an Emiliana Torrini album, sight un-heard. She sings "Gollum's Song" on the Two Towers soundtrack and has one of the most interestingly creepy voices I've ever heard. She's Icelandic/Italian, and shares with Bjork that strange Icelandic inflection to her pronunciation. The album, "Love in the Time of Science," is really quite good. There are points where the lyrics make you just go "wha...?" but her voice makes it a good listening experience. I'm a fan of Bjork too, but Torrini preserves the exotic appeal of Bjork's style without being as inaccessible. So now I need to go get her other albums.
Angel
I also just bought the Angel soundtrack (hey, I'm a sucker for that $25 free shipping thing on amazon, OK?). The score itself is fairly typical. I'll add it in to the rotation of TV scores I listen to that are mostly only good because they remind me of a show I like (I mean, who's ever heard of Robert Kral?). But it has two highlights. One I've already mentioned, which is Christian Kane singing "LA song," which was composed for him for the episode "Dead End." He has an absolutely enchanting country-western voice. Too bad he's never recorded anything else. And there's the added benefit that the lyrics foreshadow the events of the next few seasons of the show.
The other highlight is "Touched" by Vast. Heavy metal sampling Gregorian chant. Can't go wrong with that. This is the second time I've come across one really good song on a soundtrack recently (the other being "Absurd" on the "Sin City" soundtrack) that makes me want to immediately go out and buy that band's album in hopes that everything they do is as good. This is a risky venture at best, but I find it's a lot less risky the farther the group is from mainstream pop. Pop lives or dies by the hook in a particular song, but groups with (for lack of a better word) more musical substance have a style that can carry from one song to the next. Or that's the hope anyway.
Everything I listen to makes me want to listen to more. I'm being very deliberate about the albums I buy, trying to educate myself. And don't even get me started on the ongoing exploration of soundtrack composers. Above and beyond the cost of purchasing all this stuff, is the time investment. It takes a lot of hours of listening to really get to know an album, and that's what I want to do: really get to know and to like this stuff. I haven't even had time to properly listen to Vertical Horizon lately, or the many albums I bought in the past but only listened to once (like all the Duncan Sheik and Swing Out Sister I seem to own). It's exciting to find new works I enjoy, but it's frustrating too.