(Gah. I ignore the blog for a mere couple of weeks or so, and it gets swamped by nefarious comment spam. Bastards.)
I’d try to count how many CDs I’ve bought in the last two or three weeks, but I’m afraid to. I think it might be more than 15. After months of relative moderation, I’ve gone kind of nuts lately on music purchases. And I’m afraid it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
Right now, I’m listening to one of the first purchases in the recent spate: Sleater-Kinney’s “The Woods” (not to be confused with Malcolm Middleton’s “In the Woods,” which I’m probably going to end up downloading from Chemikal Underground, because it’s only available on import here so far). I confess to admiring Sleater-Kinney more than really liking them; I find that I don’t even listen to “Call the Doctor,” my favorite record of theirs, all that often. That may wind up being the case with this record too, I don’t know, but at the moment, it’s exactly what I’m in the mood to hear. Even the eleven-minute song sounds good.
Just before this, I listened to “de nova,” the new record by The Redwalls. It too was superb. They’re deliberately and a little self-consciously retro, yeah, but when your retro-ness includes the best elements of the British Invasion, being retro isn’t a bad thing at all.
Next up: the Greencards, whose second (I think) album I just picked up. They’re new to me, but that’s probably just because I don’t have a reliable source of bluegrass-ish recommendations anymore; checking the archives of a twang-related list that I used to subscribe to, I see that I’m a little late to the party on this one. Haven’t listened to the record yet—it just arrived yesterday—but I loved the MP3s I heard.
And then there’s the first Malcolm Middleton record, Emiliana Torrini’s perfectly wonderful “Fisherman’s Woman,” the Wrights’ “Down This Road,” the new Karan Casey record, Dwight Yoakam’s new one, Richmond Fontaine’s superb “The Fitzgerald”…and that list doesn’t even include my likely top two records of the year—the forthcoming Son Volt record and Robbie Fulks’s “Georgia Hard.” It has emphatically not been a bad year for music.
Yeah, I’m already hypothesizing a best-of list. It is halfway through the year, after all. And the spot for “Best 2004 Record That I Didn’t Hear Until 2005″ is already nailed down: James Yorkston and the Athlete’s “Just Beyond the River.” I liked their first record, “Moving Up Country,” quite well, but the second one is in a whole different league. If James Yorkston had a really great voice, as opposed to just an okay one, it would be in serious contention for Best Record Ever. (Slight exaggeration, but only a slight one.)
From perusing the James Yorkston site, I learned about Anne Briggs, an obscure English trad-folk legend who apparently hated the sound of her recorded voice and so gave up recording, and eventually singing. I listened to all of the available clips, and I have to admit that I didn’t like her voice all that much either. But I was so distressed by the idea that there’s an obscure English trad-folkie out there whom I hadn’t heard of yet that I ended up buying two of her CDs. Music fandom is sometimes a very strange thing.
(But geez, Sandy Denny cited her as an influence. How could I not buy the CDs?)
Kathryn Williams—the Nick Drake-iest of all the singer-songwriters ever to be compared to Nick Drake (except for Alexi Murdoch, who’s almost too Nick Drake-y)—managed to sneak out a new CD without my realizing it, so it’s on order. And to my utter delight, John Doyle has a new CD coming out in two weeks, only four years after his debut. I’ll be ordering that one the day it comes out too.
I’ve also finally started knitting again, after a long hiatus. July is an odd time to start knitting again—holding fuzzy synthetic fibers is not the best thing I can think of to do on a warm summer evening—but I had to start again sometime, and this past weekend was as good as any. I’m finishing the cat bed that I started, um, last fall. The bottom piece is finished; I tried to get the cats to pay attention to it, but other than Liam chewing the loose end that I haven’t woven in yet, no dice. Maybe when it has its nice fuzzy cobalt blue sides assembled…
And yet, with all of this going on, I’m still considering buying a PlayStation2. Because evidently I don’t have enough ways to squander my leisure time.