Never let me down

I picked up a new Amon Tobin CD the other day, Foley Room, and it reminded me that I’ve been wanting to do a post about music groups that never let me down.

Foley Room

About 15 years ago, I was standing in a record store in Boulder, CO, looking for something new to listen to, and I saw an XTC album I’d never heard of. So I picked it up because I realized that I’d always liked everything by them I’d ever heard. Back then, I’d heard and loved these:

Black Sea
English Settlement
Skylarking
Oranges & Lemons

…so it was pretty good odds that I was going to enjoy Nonsuch.

Now that I’m 15 years older, I have a list of other bands that I will buy without worry:

Susumu Yokota, Amon Tobin, Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Stereolab, DJ Krush, Elliott Smith, People Under the Stairs, Rachel’s and Yo La Tengo.

(I could write about bands that have fallen off the list, but that would be depressing. Ac-cen-tu-ate the positive! Eeeeeee-lim-in-ate the negative!)

Anyway, Foley Room is amazing, you should give it a listen. Which bands are on your buy-without-worry list?

Favorite album transitions, part one

Now and then you hear people talk about how .mp3s are killing off the “album”, and that in the future folks will mostly listen to individual songs instead of 8-12 songs in a row by one artist.

That may very well be, I don’t know. But what I do know is that there are a couple of completely awesome things that can happen when one artist gets your attention for 40-60 minutes at a time, one of which is the transition from one song to another.

One of them just happened on my iPod. Yo La Tengo has a terrific album called Painful, and one of my favorite things is when “Big Day Coming” ends and “From a Motel 6″ begins, especially if it’s rilly rilly loud. Yo La Tengo sometimes perfectly blends sweet, sour, buzzy and melodic. It’s toothy. I love it. Loud.

I’m not sure why anyone would watch a Yo La Tengo video, but turn off your monitor and turn up your speakers: