Man, exams always drive me into music buying overdrive to relieve the tension.

RZA - Bobby Digital in Stereo (Vinyl)


Aretha Franklin - Aretha's Greatest Hits (Vinyl)


Keiji Haino - Nijiumu (PSF 7)(CD)

A whole lotta retail therapy goin' on:

Cheval Sombre - "Cheval Sombre" CD
Keith Fullerton Whitman / Geoff Mullen - "July 19 2006" LP
Keith Fullerton Whitman - "Dream House" 4 x cassette
Marble Sky / Earn - "Behind" cassette
Cometa Fever - "Dead Light" 1-sided LP
Furisubi - Three Armed Mary CDR
Furisubi - Cosmic Loom CDR

Monks - Black Monk Time. Absolutely Essential Shit.
Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavillion. Not sure if it stands up with Feels and Strawberry Jam yet, My Girls is a great pop song though

I'm feeling the need to hit the record stores tomorrow. Will report back.

Tom Waits - Rain Dogs (vinyl)

My first-ever copy.

Nice! Definitley one of my favourite Waits albums. The only one I have on vinyl is Blue Valentines, which is amazing too. I need to track down Nighthawks At The Diner on wax...

 

did people in the early 80s actually think jazz fusion was a good idea?
this album must have cost a million dollars to make; bill withers,steve gadd,eric gale,marcus miller,randy brecker,grover washington jr, wynton marsalis, john faddis etc. appear
there's a cheesy track about a kid wishing he could be playing basketball instead of being in church that makes the lp worth the $2


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Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique & Check Your Head on new vinyl

I kinda feel like I purchased some Holy Grail LPs today. My CDs got beat to shit because my daughter in high school took them to all her parties and passed em around to her friends. I found one Check on her car floor one time, out of the case.

These are two of my all-time favorite records. I would say that Check Your Head is in my top 10 favorite albums.

I've only really been into hip-hop for a short while, having never really put the time in to getting it as a genre before. The only Beastie's album I have gotten around to getting so far is that Paul's Boutique reissue, which I like quite a lot, but feel I need to explore further, as it's so dense I've still barely begun to get my head around it. I'm guessing you would suggest I get Check Your Head soon too?

Yes! And I'm not a hip-hop fan. At least not yet. Just a Beasties fan. Though I do like De La Soul quite a bit.

I suspect you'll like Check Your Head even more. It feels more relaxed to me, and more like rock, in a way, probably because the Boys are doing a lot of the instrument parts themselves this time. It has more of a "live" feel to it versus sampled.

It took me forever to get into it. I kept trying, but while I always appreciated why I should love it, I just never really did. The album that finally did it for me was "Madvillainy", followed shortly by "Illmatic". After that it just flowed naturally. I went from ambivalence to joy in about 2 weeks.

Thing is, I never really thought of the Beasties as hip hop. I know they are, genre-wise, but I think they crossed over enough into "alternative" in their time that I've always seen them as sort of "alt-rock." Does that make sense? I know that beyond the Beasties and De La Soul, I have not been able to make the leap of faith.

I get your point about the Beasties. Especially their more "punky" stuff. Paul's Boutique is pretty much straight hip-hop though, and De La Soul definitely is. But yeah, as someone else who really struggled to make the leap, I always recommend MF Doom as perhaps the easiest way in for people into more 'out' music. Was for me anyway. How do you feel about the Anticon stuff?

Completely unfamiliar with that.

Oh, they're pretty interesting. It's this label/collective of (mostly white) avant-garde-kind-of-hip-hop artists, who often inhabit some sort of weird unclassifiable space between hip-hop, folk, drone and rock, among other things. Also, they come out with lyrics like:

there's something to the fading of faith.
my whole childhood was the broken guitar
and my sister's silly yellow blanket.
now i carry slender and sexy curved sledge hammers
to break the bricks i bought.
i should have never went to college,
but took a trip to costa rica to cut rainforests to choke myself.

...which definitely isn't your "typical" rap writing. Worth looking into anyway. "cLOUDDEAD" is probably the "classic" project from them, but there's tons of wildly different stuff released under the Anticon banner.

OK, thanks.