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243 Armageddon The Album 241023 Wikipedia link for this movie soundtrack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armageddon:_The_Album https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz8TZrGAoiU The HD version of the video for Aerosmith's I Don't Want To Miss A Thing. The video is just a compilation of clips from the movie. Another thrift shop find. Does anyone else find it somewhat creepy that Steve Tyler is singing a romantic song about... um.. his daughter? Whatever, the song long predates the movie, and Liv Tyler was able to establish herself as an accomplished actor in her own right. I have never actually seen this movie, but do I need to? The premise is basically dumb, so I guess it's a B-movie for some night. I've been thinking about including an Aerosmith album at some point, but I'm not certain. Maybe one will show up at the next thrift shop I visit.
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Nov 18, 2025 11:22
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244 Mumford and Sons - Babel (Deluxe Edition) 241030 https://www.mumfordandsons.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWza_On7ajs Official video for the title track of this album. Another one I found in a thrift shop, shrugged, and said to myself "Why not?". I'm fairly ambivalent towards Mumford & Sons, but maybe this will grow on me. I certainly don't hate it. They sound to me like a time-displaced group of 60's folk singers. Or something.
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Nov 18, 2025 11:28
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245 Dua Lipa - Future Nostalgia (The Moonlight Edition 241106 https://www.dualipa.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUVcZfQe-Kw&t=1s Official video for Levitating (featuring DaBaby). This is the video that first introduced me to Ms Lipa. Have I talked about one of my favourite music books here yet? Back in 2024 I read This is what it sounds like by Drs. Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas. The book is an exploration of pop music, by a former record producer (Dr Rogers previously worked with Prince and The Barenaked Ladies, among others) turned neurobiologist, and her encyclopedic yet hidden co-author. I know basically nothing about Dr Ogas, beyond a handful of "Ogi prefers [X]" comments by Susan. Chapter 6 is about Rhythm, and among discussions of back beats, the book mentions this recording as an example of a strong and clear beat structure. It took me a very long time to read the book, because on almost every page there is a song mentioned, that I had to google and listen to, most often on Youtube. When I watched Levitating, it was the first time I'd ever heard or heard of Dua Lipa. I was immediately impressed (eye candy galore, in addition to excellent music and a voice that just gets right into me). Then I looked at the stats for the video - at the time, something like 640 million views, and tens of millions of subscribers. Somehow I'd managed to be introduced de novo to a true global superstar. Through a book written by a pair of academics. Does my nephew know he's related to such a nerd?
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Nov 18, 2025 11:51
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Jedit posted:Nice to see you back, I was starting to wonder if everything was OK. I saw the movie shortly after it came out, when I was 18 or 19. I have forgotten most of it but I do remember enjoying it. That is an excellent suggestion, thank you. duckdealer posted:Heck yeah, I love this thread. Thank you very much for this, it's great to feel like my posts are not simply dropping into a void.
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Nov 19, 2025 04:44
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246 Blur - The Magic Whip 241113 https://www.blur.co.uk/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo55vzpL85w Lonesome Street, the first track on this album. Every so often, I follow a link in an email I occassionally get from Warner Music Australia, and buy one or two CDs. By coincidence, I did this exact thing about 20 minutes ago. Anyway, Blur is famous for a few hits, and when this one showed up for a reasonable price new on the Warner site, I thought why not? I hadn't thought about Blur for a couple of decades, what have they been up to? Living and working in Hong Kong, for a while, is the answer. All of the official videos for tracks on this album feature Chinese script, sometimes including subtitles. To me, these songs do not sound dramatically different from what I remember (Song 2, mostly), and from this snapshot, it looks like Blur has successfully persisted as a band, writing and recording new music and, I assume, touring from time to time.
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Nov 28, 2025 03:07
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247 Panic! At The Disco - Pretty. Odd 241120 https://panicatthedisco.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f3K2sEHuIM That Green Gentleman - the first official video for a track on this album I found. I had heard about Panic! At The Disco much more than I had heard Panic! At The Disco, I think mostly because of the unusual punctuation in the band's name. When I got around to listening to this album, I made a note about the singer: tremulo singer forward. As I write this, I'm watching a Youtube video about the rise and fall of P!ATD. The thumbnail and description mentions this album specifically as the turning point. This album was a number-1 hit here in Australia, and seems to have been a distinct shift in style.
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Nov 28, 2025 03:30
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248 Billy Talent - Crisis of Faith 241127 https://www.billytalent.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mlGOGfoYNM End Of Me featuring Rivers Cuomo - once again, the first official video for a track on the album I found. I'm also pleased to use the one track that includes a collaboration, with Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo. His voice works quite well positioned against Benjamin Kowalewicz's distinct singing voice. I have an inherent collector's urge for completionism, and I try to rein it in for this project to avoid subjecting my nephew to endless live/acoustic/benefit concert oddball recordings that somehow 'complete the set'. I let the leash out a bit for Billy Talent, one of my all-time favourite bands. With Crisis of Faith I have in my own collection every studio album they have yet made. If my nephew tells me he likes these guys, I'll bonus gift him the rest. All of their stuff is on their Bandcamp page.
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Nov 28, 2025 03:43
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ExecuDork posted:Thank you very much for this, it's great to feel like my posts are not simply dropping into a void. I'm also really enjoying the content of this thread! After spending many years now listening almost exclusively to playlists on streaming services, it's nice to see a collection of albums shared and the reasoning behind them. I'm going to be on a trip for almost a month without any internet or my smartphone, and I am getting a lot of inspiration from this thread on what albums to load up and take with me on a little clip-on MP3 player.
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Dec 1, 2025 20:25
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/\/\/\ Fantastic. I am very happy to hear another postive opinion about my weird preference for owning music rather than streaming. Once again, I would like to recommend Bandcamp. This Friday is another Bandcamp Friday, in which the company, Bandcamp, foregoes its usual cut of sales and sends 100% of the money spent to the artists during the 24 hours. They run a Bandcamp Friday most first-Friday-of-month, but not all - there wasn't one in early November, for example. And on Juneteenth they take their usual cut but donate all of it to a number of charities fitting the general theme of Juneteenth and music (typically, at least one of their beneficiaries will be a non-profit working to help young musicians in ethnic minorities obtain instruments and musical instruction).
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Dec 2, 2025 07:30
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249 Tambourine Girls - Waiting for Pleasure 241204 https://thetambourinegirls.bandcamp.com/album/the-tambourine-girls - Bandcamp page https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quKqH5zKSno You Don't See Me - the fourth track on this album. I saw The Tambourine Girls at the Armidale Big Chill in 2024. The Big Chill is a local festival in May that celebrates the autumn and imminent winter in Armidale, NSW, Australia - where I live and where these band members also live. The Big Chill started in 2021 as a kind of weird defiance of the pandemic. We could walk around a local festival, focused at the time more on beer and BBQ than on music, without serious social-distancing restrictions while the rest of the world (including much of Australia) suffered in particulate isolation under lockdown. By 2024 the festival was much more a music festival with a private-event BBQ competition attached, and every local-ish food vendor set up on the fair grounds. The music tends to be one big headliner, usually Australian, at least one widely-touring cover band (gotta have somebody to play a mix of boomer favourites like a live version of classic rock radio circa 1995), and a handful of local bands from this region (the northern part of NSW, basically, not Sydney). I have another album by these guys that I'm waiting for at least a year to include in this project as per my try-not-to-overwhelm-my-nephew-with-any-one-band rule.
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Dec 13, 2025 03:03
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250 Cool Groove 241211 https://music.apple.com/ng/album/cool-groove/579733731 - the link to this short album on Apple Music, the only place I could find it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Js5_MB_QT9c Elemento - the fourth track, and the only one I could find online. This CD came from my next-door-neighbour. When they moved out, in November of 2024, they left a pile of belongings on the front lawn for scavengers to pick through. My wife and I are not above such scavenging, and we found a few useful items and I grabbed a few CDs. This is one of them, an odd little album of only seven tracks by a mysterious musician also named "Cool Groove". This is an impossible term to search for effectively with current search engines (or my Google-fu is weak). I cannot find the CD right now, my home office is a mess and it's buried in a cabinet under an unstable stack of disks. Part of this project is very magpie-like, in which I include albums that are found in this kind of haphazard way. "Gas station CDs", discount-bins, garage sales, abandoned in some public place, copyright-infringing low-traffic websites in some weird corner of the web, all are fodder for my weird little project. Found music is music, after all. I don't include 100% of the stuff I find in this way, there are a few CDs kicking around this messy hoard-esque place that I will simply return to the wild by donating to my local thrift shops. Similarly, those thrift shops are full of CDs that I have no interest in buying, from endless religious music, repackaged minor-city-orchestra recordings of long-out-of-copyright classical music, through to every thrift shop's crucial certification of being an actual, donations-are-what-we-sell non-profit second hand goods store: Susan Boyle's I Dreamed A Dream (no Australian 'opp-shop' is complete without at least two copies of this album).
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Dec 23, 2025 03:51
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251 Various Artists - Australian & Loud 241218 https://www.discogs.com/release/8025137-Various-Australian-Loud - Discogs link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwD_fcWnX3k Defryme - Pure Killer - the first track on this album. Another thrift shop find, and the kind of thing I assume is easy to find here in Australia, and very rare in Canada where my nephew lives. On a side note, I will be searching for second-hand CDs in thrift stores and (if they still exist) second-hand record stores the next time I'm in Canada for exactly this kind of thing, in which some minor label or music-industry opportunist buys a bunch of licenses for cheap and throws together a compilation album, but from the other side of the Pacific and the Equator. I've been trying to keep up with this project by making an effort to listen to these albums. I don't have a habitual time of day or activity that goes with listening to music, aside from some household chores, so I've been keeping a constantly-updated list of albums from this project to make an effort to listen to from start to finish. My note to myself on this album in that list - I listened to it a few months ago - is "surprisingly diverse" and a comment to follow up with a few artists here. That is also a key priority with this kind of compilation album, it helps me to find artists.
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Dec 23, 2025 04:05
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252 Various Artists - Christmas Cocktails 1, 2, and 3 241225 https://www.discogs.com/release/569409-Various-Christmas-Cocktails - Discogs link for the first volume. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2cGIju_euU Billy May - Rudolf, The Red-Nosed Reindeer Mambo, first track on the first volume. Whenever a Wednesday includes a notable day, such as Christmas Day, I like to include a theme-appropriate entry in this project. Christmas day is arguably the biggest such notable day, and certainly the one with the greatest volume of themed music. I had been pondering which of the zillions of possible Xmas albums to include at this landmark Wednesday when the first three volumes of this collection almost fell into my lap - these were from the same pile of discards that my next-door-neighbours left when they moved away as the Cool Groove compilation in position 250. I like these albums because they are not simply re-releases of tired old classics. I don't like these albums because they include some boring, or very simple, or verging-on-offensive tracks (Baby It's Cold Outside has always been about sexual coersion). The next time Christmas falls on a Wednesday is 2030, two years after the planned end of this project in 2028. However, I might keep this project going, I'm enjoying it very much and since my nephew was born, my wife's other sibling has produced some sprogs of his own - neither is yet 8 years old so I have time to ponder. I'm happy to be the weird uncle who lives on the other side of the world and sends random music.
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Dec 23, 2025 04:19
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253 The Offspring - Let The Bad Times Roll 250101 https://www.offspring.com/home - The Offspring's home page, with (at the moment) an annoying mouse-pointer thing! Yay! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6vpedfGPwY Let The Bad Times Roll official video. New Year's Day is always 1 week after Christmas, so this fell on a Wednesday to start 2025. New Year's Day is a good time for a perspective check - are you feeling nostalgic? hopeful? optimistic? The Offspring are here for you if you're feeling pessimistic with this album about embracing the bullshit, from 2021. Remember 2021? When we were all complaining about COVID and social distancing and so forth? Why don't we talk about that stuff anymore? I watch TV shows from that time, set in that time, and nobody is wearing a mask, nobody is losing an argument with Zoom settings, nobody is working from home or collecting inadequate furlough payments from an unpopular government. Anyways, after a few thrift-shop finds and weird compilations, I felt the need to get back to some bands that my nephew has almost certainly actually heard of before and I love The Offspring and I'm happy to inflict more of that on my nephew.
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Dec 23, 2025 04:32
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254 Midnight Oil - Diesel and Dust 250108 https://www.midnightoil.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejorQVy3m8E Beds Are Burning For most albums I include, I discover the biggest single from the album or the only one that has had a video made for it, but for this album, it's the other way around. This is the album that includes by far Midnight Oil's biggest international hit, Beds Are Burning. When I was in high school in Canada, this song - only this song from this band - was frequently played on the radio. I never heard anything else from this band until I moved to Australia. I picked this CD up in a thrift shop so my nephew can approach Midnight Oil in a different way than my own introduction. The Oils are moderately controversial in Australia. Despite this track (and therefore, this album) being one of the most Australian-as-gently caress songs I have ever heard*, opinions about this song and this band are divided here. Every Aussie I've talked to about this (not that many, admittedly) is 100% willing to agree that The Oils are very much Australian, but do they represent Australia? Do they speak for Aussies? Do you wish to see them live, or find more of their music? Often, the answer to those questions is "no" and a shrug. * The most Canadian-as-gently caress song I know of is At The Hundredth Meridian by the Tragically Hip. Beds Are Burning is right up there at the same level in my head for Australia.
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Dec 31, 2025 06:58
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255 Health - Rat Wars 240115 https://www.youwillloveeachother.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZL1_sImzKY&t=2s Ashamed (Of Being Born) - a video for one song that appears as two separate tracks on the download of this album from Bandcamp. Not sure what's up with that. Uncharacteristically, I took no notes when I purchased this album and the two starting February in my big file for tracking this project, but I did enter them into relevant dates in early 2025. I say "relevant" because, as we will see in the pair of albums after the next two albums, the fact that Health is a band from Los Angeles is important. When the fires were still ravaging southern California in January of 2025, Bandcamp ran a charity campaign fundraiser for relief efforts, donating some (or perhaps all, I can't remember) of their profits to support relief and rebuilding in LA and nearby areas. I had never heard of Health before, but they showed up when I searched for bands from LA (Bandcamp's search feature includes specifying geographic areas as well as genre and other aspects) and after a short listen I clicked "buy".
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Jan 1, 2026 07:34
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256 The Long Winters - The Worst You Can Do Is Harm (Extended Edition 250122 https://www.thelongwinters.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B84tkqsQz2E Car Parts I was given a set of 5 tracks by The Long Winters years ago, from a friend or coworker or someone else I can't remember in detail. Car Parts was one track that I've had on my computer for decades, and I decided to legitimise, in a small way, part of my music collection from before this project, and I bought this album on Bandcamp. I've been exploring a bit of a network of artists and bands, mostly from Seattle, starting from my long-ago enjoyment of Harvey Danger and the subsequent activities of some of the band members when Harvey Danger ended. I think the other network I've been looking into, based in Winnipeg and stemming from The Weakerthans, represent a very similar style of music and lyrics. To complete the I-paid-for-this legitimisation of my music collection, I will eventually need to buy a couple more albums from The Long Winters, a prospect I find interesting - and I hope my nephew approves.
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Jan 1, 2026 07:48
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257 Sarah McLachlan - Surfacing 250129 https://www.sarahmclachlan.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QUq72fla3o Building A Mystery - the track from this album that topped the charts in Canada. Sarah McLachlan's music, particularly Building A Mystery and a couple of other tracks from this album, is prominent in my memory from my late teens and early 20's. I wasn't particularly fond of her music at the time, but every woman my age I ever tried to talk to would bring her up in conversation sooner or later. Very often, this would link directly to the multi-artist tour Sarah McLachlan headed, Lillith Fair. I hadn't really thought about Sarah McLachlan for a while until my wife offered me any albums from her CD collection that I thought worth including here. The other major memory I have concerning Sarah McLachlan was the online reaction to the videos produced by the ASPCA with her song from this album, Angel. Here ya go, get your tear-jerker-preventers ready! Well, this is her more tame original for the BC SPCA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gspElv1yvc I can't find a good version of the video that the ASPCA played so much that parts of the internet melted.
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Jan 1, 2026 08:13
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258 Los Angeles Rising 250205 https://losangelesrising.bandcamp.com/album/los-angeles-rising - Bandcamp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YovCWp20nJ0 Grinderman - Worm Tamer - the first actual video I could find for a song from this compilation. This is a compilation album exclusive to Bandcamp and their charity fundraiser for LA in the wake of the fires in January of 2025. Here's the first part of the album description on Bandcamp: LOS ANGELES RISING posted:A compilation of music benefitting the SWEET RELIEF Musicians Fund and their work supporting artists and music professionals who have lost their homes and instruments in the Los Angeles fires. I include charity-linked purchases in this project, partly because it provides a reason to include specific albums and separates out a lot of otherwise worthy inclusions for a defensible reason, only weakly linked to my own personal tastes. This album is mostly well-known musicians providing previous releases for this fundraiser. I like it because it's a brief introduction into some interesting and generally well-regarded musicians that I or my nephew can follow up with in future.
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Jan 8, 2026 05:44
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259 AID FOR LA VARIOUS ARTISTS who Donated 1 Song to help Raise Funds 250212 https://lonestarzrecordz1.bandcamp.com/album/aid-for-la Bandcamp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb_GnAHtBl4 There's not a full video for the track I chose, number 130 with Paul Fry (aka Outback Empire) - Don't Let Failure Stop You Again. But you can listen to the full song here; Mr Fry is Australian. I did not know this until today. https://www.abc.net.au/triplejunearthed/artist/outback-empire/ There are 355 songs on this massive compilation album, which I suppose justifies the use of all-caps for VARIOUS ARTISTS. The money raised, of course, was directed towards charity and relief efforts in Los Angeles in the wake of the major fires of January 2025. I could not see a way to listen to everything here without some kind of locked-in play order that I won't accidentally or absent-mindedly disrupt. I loaded this onto my Sony NW-E394 mp3 player and attached it to the stereo in the kitchen (Panasonic CD Stereo System SA-PM53), and listened to it whenever I was doing something tedious, like washing dishes. It took me most of a year to get through all 355 tracks in this way - I finished on 27 December with the pleasingly coincidentally named song, Let Me Out by SACRAFICE ISAAC. At one point the mp3 player lost power or just crashed, and it took me a while to find the most recent song I had listened to; most of the time, the songs were in the background while I was thinking about something else, and only a few stuck out in my mind as either good (perhaps I will follow up with those artists) or bad. This is how I discovered a major flaw in Windows Search in Windows Explorer - once it finds the file I'm looking for, it hides all information about where that file is located and what order it appears relative to other files. To find out it was track 130 I was looking for to include here, I went to the Bandcamp page and used CTRL-F for "Fry". Paul Fry can't sing. This is my opinion, nothing more, but I cannot listen to the video above, his voice grates on me like few others. So I decided to inflict him on you.
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Jan 8, 2026 06:36
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260 Noori and his Dorpa Band - Beja Power! 250219 https://ostinatorecords.bandcamp.com/album/beja-power-electric-soul-brass-from-sudans-red-sea-coast - the Bandcamp page for the quasi-label that apparently holds the rights to this album on Bandcamp. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dNTMUuYTLc A live performance of several of the songs on this album. The camera tends to linger on Noori's unusual instrument, a hybrid "tambo-guitar" (according to Wikipedia). I had wishlisted this album for a reason I did not record at some point, and on a Bandcamp Friday I bought it along with a couple of other albums I'd been meaning to buy for a while. So-called World Music is welcome in this project, but is not a key focus. However, I do like to expand the geographic range - and linguistic range - when the opportunity presents itself. Noori and his Dorpa band are from Port Sudan, making this one of the few African albums in the project, so far. Every once in a while I'll come across news about a musician or band from some place I've never thought much about, and if I like what I hear I like to include it here.
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Jan 19, 2026 08:46
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261 Franz Ferdinand - The Human Fear 250226 https://franzferdinand.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21JuGhzLcz0 Audacious - the first track from this album. This album is still front-and-centre at the band's website; I bought it on Bandcamp on the same Bandcamp Friday I picked up a few other albums around this point in the project. I had their self-titled album, shared from a friend many years ago, for decades and decided to legitalize this corner of my collection - the CD for that appears in postion 142. I like FF's music and style, and when this popped up, I thought, 'Why not'? They're fun.
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Jan 19, 2026 08:58
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262 Birds of Tokyo - Human Design 250305 https://www.birdsoftokyo.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7llHTVzcIk This is the official video for Greatest Mistakes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XBeRTtYtjs This is a live version. Watch their stage presence, this is very much a sing-along song, and the bass player is more active than most. I saw Birds of Tokyo live at the Armidale Big Chill 2024. They were on stage after the sun had set, so these live videos at other outdoor venues are less neon-and-lasers than what I saw. This song starts with the lyrics It was thirteen years ago / When I thought I knew it all, and this is the week of my nephew's 13th birthday. The line stuck with me when they performed in Armidale, and I picked up few of their albums shortly after. The others will eventually also be included in this project, but probably not associated with specific dates like this one. I've noticed while watching live music that bass players - if a band has one, nearly all pop/rock/country groups do - are very often just an appendage of the drumset, standing still at the back, turned to face the drummer rather than the audience, and usually with the head down and a hat obscuring the face. They might be trying to maintain a certain mystique, but the effect is mostly boring. With only four or five people on stage, inactive bass players are missing the opportunity to give the audience something more than a few basic chord progressions. I've been listening to Birds of Tokyo lately, and while their live show was absolutely fantastic and very high-energy, their studio albums are bit less exciting. They have a whole collection of big audience clap-and-sing-along songs, and without a few hundred fans to support, many of the songs are rather subdued. Still, I think the lyrics are pretty good and I'm hoping to see them live again sometime.
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Jan 19, 2026 09:26
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| # ? Jan 20, 2026 12:50 |
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ExecuDork posted:So-called World Music is welcome in this project, but is not a key focus. However, I do like to expand the geographic range - and linguistic range - when the opportunity presents itself. Noori and his Dorpa band are from Port Sudan, making this one of the few African albums in the project, so far. Every once in a while I'll come across news about a musician or band from some place I've never thought much about, and if I like what I hear I like to include it here. As you should. Something more conventional like Tinariwen's desert blues or Amadou et Mariam's Afrobeat might have been a more obvious entry point to African music, but there's a joy in the musicians from impoverished countries who hear rock and roll and want that sound, but have to build their own instruments out of what they have to hand. Okay, sometimes you end up with a banjo, but it all carries a love for music that isn't always obvious anywhere else.
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Jan 19, 2026 09:39
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