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1996
When I did a thread for the best albums of this year, I initially was thinking that it would be easy because it wasn't a very good year for music. And then I did it and realized there were several wonderful albums released this year, it's just that the vast majority of these wonderful albums were small releases while the mainstream went to utter shit. So recent posts of Gorky's and Neutral Milk Hotel (Elephant 6) have made me nostalgic, I'm going to save this list from the mofo oblivion:
Tortoise - Millions Now Living Will Never Die
Stereolab - Emperor Tomato Ketchup
Gorky's Zygotic Mynci - Introducing....
Olivia Tremor Control - Dusk At Cubist Castle
Neutral Milk Hotel - On Avery Island
Cibo Matto - Viva La Women
Belle And Sebastian - Tigermilk/If You're Feeling Sinister (who can choose?)
Guided By Voices - Under the Bush, Under the Stars
Cat Power - What Would the Community Think?
Nick Cave - Murder Ballads
Maxwell - Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite
Low - The Curtain Hits the Cast
Outkast - ATLiens
Trans Am - s/t
Beck - Odelay
Gastr del Sol - Upgrade and Afterlife
Dirty Three - Horse Stories
Bjork - Telegram
Smog - The Doctor Came At Dawn
Ghost - Lama Rabi Rabi
Kool Keith - Dr. Octogonecologist
DJ Shadow - Endtroducing
Ween - 12 Golden Country Greats
Fiona Apple - Tidal
Digital Underground - Future Rhythm
Me'shell Ndegeocello - Peace Beyond Passion
Built to Spill - The Normal Years
The Lilys - Better Can't Make Your Life Better
De La Soul - Stakes Are High
The Melvins - Stag
Neil Young - Dead Man (st)
That's my initial top 30 (although I think it might be 31), and then I remembered a bunch of others and linked some vids:
dEUS - In a Bar, Under the Sea
Cul De Sac - China Gate
Quickspace - s/t
Rasputina - Thanks For the Ether
Magnog - s/t
Flying Saucer Attack - In Search of Spaces
Bowery Electric - Beat
Critters Buggin - Host
And crumbsroom pitched in his list:
Neutral Milk Hotel - On Avery Island
Tragically Hip - Trouble at the Henhouse
Soundgarden - Down on the Upside
Porno For Pyros - Good God's Urge
Sloan - One Chord To Another
Beck - Odelay
Screaming Trees - Dust
REM - New Adventures in HiFi
Weezer - Pinkerton
Lemonheads - Car Button Cloth
Wilco - Being There
Belle and Sebastian - If You're Feeling Sinister
Smashing Pumpkins - The Aeroplane Flies High
And as for the rest, I guess Nick Cave's Murder Ballads deserves a nod.
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So what's the Best of 2023? I dunno. No clue. I'm not sure if I got more than 10 new albums this year. So my answer has to be my own album, Starboard. Followed maybe by my excellent remix collection Solid Ghost Soul '23. If anyone took the opportunity to grab those while they were posted, maybe they can either corroborate or commiserate.
So instead, let's look at the music that has occupied my ears this year, the vast majority, I must admit, from the far-flung annals of yore.
There's been a lot of Zappa on my playlist this year. His estate has proven to be prolific, possibly overwhelmingly so, and I've taken the opportunity to try to catch up on a number of his legacy releases from recent years. The Hot Rats Sessions is a 6 disc box from 2019. A lot of these studio outtake collections are interesting to hear Zappa's method and demeanor, not always performing but always guiding and leading the band and utilizing "drop-in"s or edit pieces, as montage is one of Zappa's pioneering signatures. The number of variations, whether in arrangement or multiple overdubs or alternate mixes, are likely more interesting based on the familiarity to the original releases, but then again, Hot Rats remains one of Zappa's most popular records. Obviously there's quite a bit of arcana as well, but something like an isolated vocal take from Captain Beefheart on "Willie the Pimp" is as welcome as anything. (I could have sworn he said "hot tits" somewhere in there, but apparently not.)
The above Funky Nothingness was released last summer, and is a 3 disc set that covers sessions between Hot Rats and the formation of the new Mothers band (the Flo & Eddie incarnation) later in the summer of 1970. Some of these recordings did appear on '70's Chunga's Revenge, which debuted this new Mothers band, and this set has early versions (in very different tempos) of "Chunga's Revenge" and "Sharleena". Because Zappa was in the habit of constructing his proper albums from multiple sessions and band line-ups, sometimes over a number of different years, it is fascinating for me to hear more condensed and chronological session work to appreciate the real-time development of his ideas. For the Zappa newbs, his legit releases during this era - 1969-1971 - were Burnt Weenie Sandwich and Weasels Ripped My Flesh, which are both examples of albums that were assembled from a variety of unused studio material from throughout the original Mothers' existence, live recordings and some newer stuff, all spackled together in a collage of Zappascapes.
In 2020, Zappa's estate released The Mothers 1970, and 2022 saw the release of The Mothers 1971. These box sets - 4 and 8 discs respectively - document the newer, more heavy-rock but still giddily juvenile period of those years. Rather unusually, most of this material is taken from various live shows, but it isn't so unusual when you consider that this band was primarily presented at the time by the live records Fillmore East - June 1971 and Just Another Band From L.A.. For what's considered, by some fans, as one of Zappa's creative peaks, this band did relatively little studio recording. Instead, either through radical reworking of older material or brand new stuff, the focus was on mixing long rock-jazz fusion jams with comic pieces, either sketches from Flo & Eddie or cock-rock parodies with lyrics like, "I am endowed beyond your wildest Clearasil-spattered fantasies". I picked up both of these sets this year, but there's long been a ton of similar stuff, from bootlegs (obviously) and also previous Zappa-estate releases like Playground Psychotics and The Road Tapes. 2021 had a 6-disc release for the 50th anniversery of 200 Motels, which was the tentpole project for this incarnation of Mothers, but I have not yet been able to track down a copy of this set for myself. The film and soundtrack, which have been restored and available for several years, is about the Zappiest document you can find. Although performed live, you could consider this the primary studio recording from this band, even though it is a testament to the constantly touring unit. This nearly two-year tour had a number of unfortunate surreal moments toward the end. In December 1971, the Montreux Casino caught fire while they were playing and causing an emergency evacuation, and a week later a fan rushed Zappa onstage, knocking him several feet into the orchestra pit, and putting him in a wheelchair for a number of months.
In 2022, another 4 disc set, Waka/Wazoo came out. After recuperating from the fall, in 1972, Zappa assembled a new band (with some loyal members like George Duke and Ian and Ruth Underwood) to simultaneously record two records, the jazz-fusion focused Waka Jawaka and a (more or less) narrative musical called The Grand Wazoo, both released that same year. This new set combines these studio sessions with a live performance. I also just picked this one up this year.
Relentlessly, in addition to last summer's Funky Nothingness, 2023 also saw the 50th anniversery set for Overnite Sensation, featuring a newer 1973 incarnation of the Mothers, and this set consists of the simultaneously recorded Sensation and Apostrophe albums, which are likely his most commercially successful releases. Unfortunately, I have not had the time to grab this one yet though. And although he would take this band out on the road again (on the double-LP Roxy and Elswhere), and still squeezing out brand new material like "Penguin in Bondage" and "Be-Bop Tango", we'll have to wait until next year for a deluxe version of that, I guess. I did pick up one additional recent release from this tour, the Halloween '73 shows which was sold as a box set in 2019 along with a vintage cheap plastic mask. Good stuff, but, honestly, at this point it's getting hard to absorb. I'm just pissing out excess Zappa.
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David Bowie is another estate which has been quite busy keeping his fans broke and busy. Since his death in 2015 (or was it early 2016?), there have been impressive and extensive box sets covering his major periods: Five Years (1969-1973), Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976), A New Career In A New Town (1977-1982), and two others covering the next 20 years that I haven't bothered looking into. (Sorry) These sets generally include all of the officially released material, with some bonus tracks which were already standard extras on the respective discs.
More recently, the Estate has begun issuing more in-depth box sets to commemorate each album's 50th anniversery (although the pandemic has thrown off the releases by a year or so), starting with 2019's Conversation Piece, a 5 disc breakdown of his 1969 Space Oddity (Man of Words/Music) album, including a number of demos and alternate takes and mixes. Man Who Sold the World was remixed and released under its original title, Metrobolist, and a 2 disc set, Width of a Circle followed in 2021. In late 2022, a 4 disc set called Divine Symmetry was released as a "journey to Hunky Dory", featuring that album along with demos, BBC and live performances. Happily, many of the demos have not previously been bootlegged. And the concert, presented in full, which has been booted, has here been given a much-needed fidelity-lift. It's the earliest known available recording of a show by Bowie, from Sept. '71 in Aylesbury, and significant as inaugurating Bowie's "relaunch" on the eve of Hunky Dory's release, making this the public debuts for that album's material. This is another set that I only got around to picking up this past year, and about the only quibble I have is the question: do we need both mono and stereo versions of his John Peel appearance? Whatever, any such issue was compansated with a surprise second "Quicksand" demo.
Perhaps due to the pandemic-related delayed schedule, there hasn't been any similar Ziggy Stardust box released yet, but instead we did get a 50th anniversary reissue of the famed final show of Ziggy and the Spiders from Mars from July 1973, which also comes with a surprise. No previous release of this concert (other than boots) has included the extended "Jean Genie" encore with special guest Jeff Beck, but now that Beck has passed as well, perhpas the legal issues are rendered moot, so for the first time we finally get everything in the finest multitrack quality.
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Time Out Of Mind is already considered perhaps Dylan's strongest late-career album, but, quite honestly, I've never been a fan of Daniel Lanois' production, and apparently neither was Dylan. The remix presented here is warm and earthy in ways completely foreign to anything Lanois' glistening cold spaces could allow. It is my humble opinion that this new mix will soon be regarded as definitive, and the original will be seen as an unfortunate, but possibly necessary (commercially), compromise to the then-standard of '90s "adult-contemporary" tastes which Lanois represents.
I wasn't nearly so captivated by the remaining outtakes and live tracks however. So for me, I'd rather skip a lot of that and move straight on to Dylan's "new" record of 2023, the live-in-studio Shadow Kingdom, as an excellent companion to Time's newfound peaty flavor, reworkings of a number of Dylan's classics in a voice which I've come to describe as "happy mortician".
I recently already brought up my reaction to the recent Beatles remixes. Despite my initial disinterest in the prospect - where's my goddamn Rubber Soul box, you mangy curs? - I did give it a mild recommendation which is entirely contingent on the inevitable future remixing of the entire pre-1966 catalogue, which would then make these new Red/Blue releases completely irrelevant. But as a teaser for that inevitability, it does provoke some excitement. The latter 67-70 has less to offer, if only because everything here (except the Magical Mystery Tour tracks and some singles) has already been issued in the more impressive album-oriented box sets of the period. And given the rather harsh response to some of the slight deviations in the ending of "I Am The Walrus", I think enthusiasm for an MMT set have dropped dramatically.
It's in the 62-66 set where the real potential of the new Peter Jackson-developed AI audio mapping technology shows its promise. The handful of Rubber Soul stereo mixes here sound amazing, and while I'm willing to accept some of the less successful mixes (Why are the vocals so low on "She Loves You"?) as dry-runs for more extensive archival work, I greatly admire the potential of restoring the parts of the Beatles cataogue which have long been severely limited by two-track technology, or worse those tracks (like "She Loves You" and "Twist and Shout") where the original tapes no longer exist. And this only begins to hint at what future projects could accomplish for even lower fidelity tapes, Star Club, BBC, etc.
And although I'm not so excited for any future "frankenstein" creations using this same technology, I will say that I'me certainly not offended by "Now and Then", and I think the AI filter does an incredible wonder on Lennon's vocal, making it far superior to those '90s Anthology attempts. And although I don't see it as the blasphemy that its critics do, I also am not moved to find it as transcendent as its champions. It's a nice song. But stop making Youtube reaction videos pretending to cry.
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There's nothing particularly special or new here. This set, the complete Prestige recordings, has been available in some form since 1980. It's just new to me, as I recently picked it up. For someone who considers Miles as the one of the handful of pre-eminent musical geniuses of the 20th Century, it may seem weird why I wouldn't already have such a common release. Well, truth be told, I'm not much of a Prestige guy. I think that their sound engineering quality is well below such other labels as Blue Note, Atlantic or Impulse. They also have had a bad habit of crappy endless mutations of their catalogue, in all manner or hodge-podge selections and poorly designed covers, which makes one automatically suspect their output. Their Coltrane supply is similar, and I'd like to grab the Coltrane "complete Prestige" as well, rather than wade through all of their individual Coltrane product, with all of the redundancies and overlaps and packages and programs without any input from the artist himself. (In fact, most of Coltrane's Prestige releases were after he left the label, timed to compete with his later releases on other labels.) So outside of what is self-evidently essential, such as Miles' 1st classic quintet LPs (Workin', Steamin', Cookin' and Relaxin') and maybe a couple of other collabs with folks like Thelonious Monk or Milt Jackson, I've just largely have left his Prestige records alone.
Until now, when I felt that maybe I could do some good by pluggin up some of these more obscure holes in my collection. And while I still don't find the quality of these recordings to be on par with his Capital or Columbia output, there are enough pleasant surprises to make it all worth it. In addition to Miles' own records, there's also some side gigs that he did for others, such as playing (piano!) on a Sonny Rollins session ("I Know"), having Charles Mingus (playing piano!) on another ("Smootch"), and other side sessions with folks like Lee Konitz and Al Cohn. Special interest also to a session with both Sonny Rollins and Charlie Parker, which unfortunately ended badly (Miles and Bird were both ripped to the tits) and ended up being dropped unceremoniously onto a relatively obscure LP, Collector's Item, where Parker was listed as "Charlie Chan" instead. The resulting tracks are nowhere nearly as disasterous as the session's reputation.
So far, Miles' Bootleg Series, as well as his box set collections, have been uniformly high quality. And this release isn't cheap exactly. It's simply another example of a period in Miles' career where I have little enthusiasm. These 80s records - Star People, Decoy, You're Under Arrest - are not ones that I enjoy listening to under any condition, so I definitely did not have the most inspiring time listening to three long discs of outtakes and rough rehearsal jams from these sessions. Sure, that's how it happened, all right. Glad I wasn't there.
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Off the top of my head, these are the albums from this year I've listened to, in order of preference.
I like to love all of them. A few I've only been able to listen to a couple of times though.
100 Gecs - 10,000 Gecs
PJ Harvey - I Inside the Old Year Dying
Antony and the Johnsons - My Back is a Bridge
Joanna Sternberg - I've Got Me
Jaime Branch - Fly or Die
Kara Jackson - Why Does the Earth Give Us People To Love
Lonnie Holley - Oh Me, Oh My
Arthur Russell - Picture of Bunny Rabbit
Black Country, New Road - Live at Bush Hall
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I was going to wait to post the true new albums, but I think I can cover a top five.
Since I'm still catching up with several groups over the past few years, I got this year's Animal Collective along with their previous, Time Skiffs, and both have gotten a bit of playtime, but I prefer Isn't It Now enough to feel safe saying it's my favorite album of 2023.
Maybe it's the old fogey in me, I've long considered the first 1972 Paul Simon record as the undisputed classic of the man's pure essence, and after years of still being crazy, trying to keep up with all of the contemporary musical trends, he finally decided to go back to that acoustic guitar and make another record of that pure essence, unsung as one of the finest guitar-pickers, and his sweet intuitive gift for melody and rich sentiment. Thank the Lord for his fingers.
I also noticed that I hadn't gotten any new Oh Sees since 2018's Smote Reverser, so I rectified that. (I also realized that they changed their name to 'Osees'.) Although their 2020 Metamorphosed is my favorite of these newer albums, the 2023 offering, Intercepted Message, is more of the same psych-synth-skronk, and they remain one of the more exciting no-quarter savages on the market.
After releasing a rather middling Covers album in 2022 (her third such all-covers record), Miss Chan Marshall decides to up the cover game by covering the entire Dylan "Royal Albert Hall" concert. The gesture itself has a built-in appreciation, but she handles the first, acoustic, half with as much grace and gravity as could be expected. Unfortunately, her band is nowhere nearly as dynamic as The Band ("but who is?", you ask?), and the by the time of the well-cued "Judas!", the gimmick does start to wear thin.
What are you going to do? It's a "new" album, right?
As for PJ Harvey, I found her new one interesting, but the sound palette never cohered for me. But on that note, Harvey has also spent the pandemic releasing a series of "demo" versions of her albums. Her excellent demo recordings are long-known from various B-sides and the great 4-Track Demos of the '90s. I only have about three of these new releases, but I'm very interested in hearing the ones for her more recent albums, or in other words those albums which I have no singles B-sides or demos, to hear however they may be recontextualized.
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I already wrote a bit on this one in the "Listening" thread, but now that I've finished it, I can say that it is almost a disappointment. The saving grace is still the concert accompanying it, a terrific show with Prince flapping his slick thing in thin peach leather. The outtakes and remixes are pretty dull. Prince may still have been writing a song a day, as it was alleged, but not every whim results in genius. And his preoccupation with House production may have been laudable for 1991, but sounds extremely dated today, as is typical for these trend-chaser tendencies. Revisiting the D&P album itself doesn't really change my thoughts on it. It's a good mid-range Prince effort, with about four true bangers. I still think, among these '90s albums, that Come and Gold Experience give it a run for its money.
I understand some of the cool response to this. First off, why do we need yet another Who's Next deluxe reissue? Well, the simplist answer is because the previous ones have been pretty shit. And I'm not exactly saying that this one is perfect, but it maybe betrays a cynical method of cutting these vaults with the commercial music industry equivalent of baby laxative, slowly doling out slightly more expanded editions over a period of 10-20 years, so that when you finally get down to the brass tacks, it's little wonder why much of the audience is wary.
I don't really care about the LP itself at this point. I already have my audiophile options, as I assume most people do. So the strength of this set is based on the quality of the remaining 7 discs. The 2 disc representation of Townsend's Lifehouse is about as definitive as you could want, culled from Pete's homemade recordings (and, ftr, he happens to be an excellent amateur engineer bar none) and giving us the clearest and likely most complete form of what that whole thing was about. It's also never sounded better, so even if you got that one 8 disc boot set, you're missing out. I will say, greedy man that I am, it would be interesting to see if Townshend would be willing to release a collection of his other home recordings from this time, including his privately pressed Meher Baba tribute LPs, his aborted soundtrack work for unrealized films like Guitar Farm and Double Pisces, and all leading into his eventual first solo album, Who Came First, which although sweetened in the studio was also mostly a homemade endeavor.
One surprise from the outtake discs is a collection from the Record Plant in New York City, sessions which have become notorious in the lore of the breakdown of the Lifehouse project. These recordings are actually quite good, if maybe not on par with the final releases (although at least "Love Ain't For Keeping" is arguably superior). There's certainly nothing here to suggest the tone of what we've read in the various bigraphies, so the ill-fate of these tapes boils down to Townhend's nervous breakdown at the time, where he has described very seriously considering tossing himself out of a 12th story window.
The set includes two live performances. The first, at London's Young Vic, were shows that were filmed, intended to be integrated into whatever the eventual Lifehouse motion picture was supposed to be, and had the band debuting much of the Lifehouse material. Many of these performances have come out on various comps before, but again the question is why wait till now for the full thing? The second concert, a proper show from San Francisco following Who's Next's release, is a good example of the strength of the touring band at that time. Some audiophiles have complained about the sound quality of the show, and, I'm not sure, maybe it's a two-track soundboard rather than a more professional multitrack (at this time, at least 16-24 tracks), so maybe there are some compromises which can't be alleviated, but, maybe I'm so ruined from hours of far lesser quality live recordings, it doesn't sound too bad to me, and anyway The Who live was always more about visceral power than anything.
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It's delightful how these kinds of unexpected, unknown tapes happen to come out of the woodwork every so often. This tape, recorded shortly before the release of the Coltrane/Dolphy collaborations Africa/Brass and Ole Coltrane, and a couple of months before the more legendary Village Vanguard residency down the street, is also not quite a professional standard. In fact, it opens abruptly on a "My Favorite Things" already in progress, and although all of the instruments are clear, there is a distance in the horns, suggesting that remixing was not an option. Also, it's almost hilarious to hear how nonchalant this beatnik-hipster crowd is seeing these absolute legends in such a small club proximity. At least they didn't snap their fingers instead of clapping, but, jesus, show some love, folks.
Both Coltrane and Dolphy are still reliable for a steady stream of "new" releases, and it's remarkable, at this point, how much quailty material remains to be released from two men nearly 60 years deceased. From the immediately recent years, we got the surprise Love Supreme in Seattle in 2021, the only known full-length recording of Coltrane's masterpiece featuring the expanded line-up with Pharoah Sanders. And even as recent as 2018 and 2019, they were still finding entire concept albums in the vaults, with Both Directions At Once and Blue World respectively. Maybe not so surprising considering how, in what must be the heavyweight championship of productivity, Coltrane recorded nine original albums in 1965 alone.
And for Dolphy, the most recent 3 disc set Musical Prophet from 2019, which collects the entirety of his summer '63 sessions which resulted in LPs like Conversations and Iron Man, is still one set that continues to elude my mitts.
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Perhaps the sweetest surprise of the year, here's a previously unknown concert recording that dropped at the end of 2023. At least none of my Hendrix resources even suspected, or hinted at, the existence of this tape, which was made by a local L.A. radio station for broadcast of his August 1967 Hollywood Bowl show. I had mentioned in my Hendrix thread my disappointment at the complete dearth of live Hendrix recordings, post-Monterey, during his two-month summer sojourn in America, even the poorest of audience recordings don't seem to exist for this period. So this definitely adds to the treat here, finding Jimi and the band riding high on their fresh American fame (Experienced had finally just been released in stores), being the toast of the L.A. rock scene at the time.
The recording itself is nice. There's evidence of some patchwork, but, being a SONY, rather than Dagger, release, they have to elevate the standard. Hendrix is in strong voice. Noel isn't as bitchy. No splashing. No Monkee mothers rioting. Obviously not as magical as Monterey, but an excellent live document between that and the later Stockholm and Paris shows from the rest of 1967. About the only significant deviation of the setlist is the brand new inclusion of "Catfish Blues", Jimi's delta blues amalgamation.
God knows what else these people are sitting on.
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Throwing back to 1994
My Top 50 Albums:
Tortoise
Ill Communication
Under the Pink
Tatay
Do You Want More?!?!?
Crooked Rain Crooked Rain
The Sea and Cake
Blowout Comb
Bee Thousand
Piscis Iscariot
Chocolate and Cheese
There's Nothing Wrong With Love
Mars Audiac Quintet
Hex
At Action Park
Bakesale
Welcome to Sky Valley
One Foot in the Grave
Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik
Dummy
Grace
Return of the Space Cowboy
Chocolate Synthesizer
Illmatic
Selected Ambient Works pt. II
Mighty Joe Moon
Distance
Come
Prick
Muse Sick In Our Mess Age
Superunknown
Brother Sister
Grassroots
Experimental Jet Set and No Star
Crookt Crackt or Fly
Take a Look Inside
Rusty
Stoner Witch
Bonsai Superstar
Terminator X and the Godfathers of Threat
Downward Spiral
Orange
Genocide and Juice
Natural Ingredients
Whipsmart
Hard to Earn
Lord of the Harvest
American Thighs
Ambushed
Resurrection
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Maybe I should have added the artists....
Jinnistan wrote:
Tortoise - Tortoise
Beastie Boys - Ill Communication
Tori Amos - Under the Pink
Gorky's Zygotic Mynci - Tatay
The Roots - Do You Want More?!?!?
Pavement - Crooked Rain Crooked Rain
The Sea and Cake - The Sea and Cake
Digable Planets - Blowout Comb
Guided By Voices - Bee Thousand
Smashing Pumpkins - Piscis Iscariot
Ween - Chocolate and Cheese
Built To Spill - There's Nothing Wrong With Love
Stereolab - Mars Audiac Quintet
Bark Psychosis - Hex
Shellac - At Action Park
Sebadoh - Bakesale
Kyuss - Welcome to Sky Valley
Beck - One Foot in the Grave
Outkast - Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik
Portishead - Dummy
Jeff Buckley - Grace
Jamiroquai - Return of the Space Cowboy
The Boredoms - Chocolate Synthesizer
Nas - Illmatic
Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works pt. II
Grant Lee Buffalo - Mighty Joe Moon
Flying Saucer Attack - Distance
Prince - Come
The Melvins - Prick
Public Enemy - Muse Sick In Our Mess Age
Soundgarden - Superunknown
Brand New Heavies - Brother Sister
311 - Grassroots
Sonic Youth - Experimental Jet Set and No Star
Gastr del Sol - Crookt Crackt or Fly
The Folk Implosion - Take a Look Inside
Rodan - Rusty
The Melvins - Stoner Witch
Brainiac - Bonsai Superstar
Terminator X and the Godfathers of Threat - Super Bad
Nine Inch Nails - Downward Spiral
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - Orange
The Coup - Genocide and Juice
Lucious Jackson - Natural Ingredients
Liz Phair - Whipsmart
Gang Starr - Hard to Earn
Zillatron - Lord of the Harvest
Veruca Salt - American Thighs
Da Bush Babees - Ambushed
Common Sense - Resurrection
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Reaching the end of the year already, and there's been some decent sets this year. Maybe not a 'best-of' technically, but some good stuff we've been listening to.
The Bowie box for his Ziggy Stardust stint, Rock 'N' Roll Star!, is the latest of his archival releases, with the album, outtakes, demos, BBC John Peel appearances (some of the best Spiders From Mars performances).
I highlighted this set in the listenting thread a couple of months ago. It's a 3CD collection of Jimi Hendrix's recordings at Electric Lady Studios in New York, the studio he invested in and only had a couple of months in the summer of 1970 to record there. This also includes the most finished recordings collected posthumously on First Rays of the Rising Sun, all mixed to the max by Eddie Kramer.
For Zappa, I'm still balancing the newly released stuff while catching up to some other things. Backtracked through the 200 Motels set, and then the more recent Overnite Sensation and Apostrophe sets which carry a chunk of unreleased and live stuff from the '73-'74 era.
Clearly, I'm not interested in spending a thousand dollars on this shit, but the music itself - liberated - is quite nice. I've mentioned my aversion to the Lennon/Ono Estate's design of locking in the original LP's song sequence. And Sean Lennon's addendum 'Meditation' mix is maybe the most creative element even when the mix vetures past a half hour from the title song.
The Police did their first deluxe treatment for their last album. The demos are mostly interesting as technological curios, and the live stuff, rather than a full show, is an amalgam from a handful of shows.