An Album a Day: Week 3

I’ve completed a third week of my little experiment of listening to more complete albums instead of shuffling endlessly through “content”.

If you’d like to catch up on the journey so far, you can check out the posts for week 1 and week 2.

Otherwise, let’s “dive in” (haha) with…

15/366: Oceanic

I was still feeling instrumentally after M83 and Turbo Knight, so day 15’s pick was Oceanic by Vangelis, Vangelis’s 1996 meditation on the sea. This is definitely one I prefer to enjoy later in the evening, as a relaxing prequel to floating away on a voyage of slumber. The “Composition” section of the Wikipedia entry describes the flow of the album well enough, so I’ll spare any recap here, but like many Vangelis albums do, I love how Oceanic engages my imagination, particularly in “Dreams of Surf”, “Spanish Harbour”, “Fields of Coral” (which made an appearance in season one of Stranger Things), and “Song of the Seas”, which is probably one of my favorite Vangelis closing tracks. Close your eyes and enjoy.

16/366: Paranoid

What can I say about day 16’s selection, Paranoid by Black Sabbath, that hasn’t already been said, and better? It’s solid as hell, a true classic, groundbreaking, a seminal work, essential listening. This thing friggin’ rocks! Turn it up.

17/366: QE2

For day 17, I revisted QE2 by Mike Oldfield, which on reflection I should do more often. I think I’d lumped this in with Oldfield’s (IMO, lesser) 80s albums that steered away from epic instrumental compositions into more base pop territory, but QE2 isn’t one of them. It’s entirely instrumental (okay, minus some nonsense lyrics on “Celt” that are just there to add atmosphere), and though there are shorter pieces that presage the coming changes, there are still two longer works (“Taurus 1” at a bit over 10 minutes, and the title track at nearly 8 minutes). If I hadn’t checked the Wikipedia entry I would never have noticed that two tracks – “Arrival” and “Wonderful Land” – are covers. The whole thing flows really nicely, and though it’s not Tubular Bells, Hergest Ridge, or Ommadawn, I think QE2 deserves to be heard more often.

18/366: Rabies

Day 18 was Rabies by Skinny Puppy, my introduction to the band in my high school years. “Worlock” was my gateway song, which I first heard at a friend’s house. Before too long I picked up the CD and discovered that Ministry’s Al Jourgensen had been involved (which I thought was kind of cool – it somehow hadn’t yet dawned on me that musicians might cross-pollinate like this rather than just being in one band forever). Apparently Jourgensen’s involvement has a lot of baggage that I only learned about recently, but to me this will always be the milestone album that sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before and opened me up to a lot of new musical ideas. Also, I’m a total sucker for all the 2001 samples in “Rivers”, a track that remains in regular rotation in my “Angry at Computers” playlist.

19/366: A Saucerful of Secrets

For day 19 I listened to A Saucerful of Secrets by Pink Floyd, the second album by one of my all-time favorite bands. It’s a classic, of course, but one that I haven’t paid as much attention to, and it seemed like a good occasion to revisit it. It marks the exit of founder Syd Barrett and the arrival of David Gilmour, and (as I learned from the Wikipedia entry) “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” (one of my favorite early Floyd tracks) is the only song on which all five core band members make an appearance. It’s an album of spacey psychadelia, cascading from the alien encounters of “Let There Be More Light” into fairy tale reminiscence in “Remember a Day”, the haunting tranquility of “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”, the anti-war sarcasm of “Corporal Clegg”, the title track’s epic avant-garde instrumental (said to describe a battle and its aftermath), the dreamy (but possibly blood-soaked?) whimsy of “See-Saw”, concluding in the folky madness of “Jugband Blues” that serves as Barrett’s farewell. If you’d like to go deep here, I definitely recommend not only the main Wikipedia article linked above, but also click through on the track list for specifics on each song.

20/366: Transatlanticism

Day 20’s selection was Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie, an album that I like a lot but for whatever reason have only listened to a handful of times, and probably not for 15 years or more. I’d been thinking about a different pick, but the opening lyrics of “The New Year” (“So this is the new year / And I don’t feel any different”) were too on the nose to evade a January listen. The whole thing’s good, but “The Sound of Settling” and “A Lack of Color” in particular hit harder in middle age. The title track remains unmissable, and still gives me goosebumps throughout. The Wikipedia article is thorough, and even explains the origin of crow on the album cover.

21/366: Upstairs at Eric’s

On day 21 I picked Upstairs at Eric’s by Yaz, mainly so that I could hear “Winter Kills” while the world outside is covered in snow. It’s a lovely little album, pairing the analog synths of Vince Clarke (a founder of Depeche Mode and later one half of Erasure) with the rich voice of Alison Moyet. There’s not really any big theme here, just a lot of interesting, beautiful synth-pop experiments. The Wikipedia article is worth checking out for more of the history (especially if you jump through to the entries on Clarke and Moyet). Well worth your listen, zero regrets.

22-28/366: ???

Stay tuned, or follow along day-by-day on Mastodon, for my next selections. I’ll hit the end of the alphabet this week, and haven’t decided yet if I’ll start a fresh cycle at “A”, or just start mixing things up. (The “alphabet game” does give me a little bit of structure which I confess makes the project a little easier for me – constraints yielding inspiration, and all that.)

I would like to figure out how to make the blogging part of this more efficient, though. It just takes more time than I’d like for me to attempt being thoughtful.