Your current favorites and musical journey
 

(starting really well with a spelling error in the thread title... *facepalm*)

2017, while only halfway over, has already proved a very important yeah for me when it comes to music. Not only have I found a LOT of good artists, but many of them squeezed their way into the favorites section of my CD shelves. It used to be that in a good year, I'd maybe find 2-5 new artists that I would consider among my favorites, but in 2017 it's been absolutely amazing. I partially give credit to a few good websites and partially to me realizing I don't give much of a **** about metal anymore, so I've started looking after different kinds of things instead.

Anyway, here's all of my current favorite artists, along with a note for all the newly discovered ones.

I feel like I'm going through a personal musical revolution. Apparently I really dig a lot of world music and singer-songwriter stuff. Even a tiny hint of jazz, perhaps.

I'd like to know where everyone else is right now, personal musical discovery wise - as well as what your all-time favorite artists are.

My favorites, alphabetically:
- 88Kasyo Junrei
[NEW]- Alsarah & the Nubatones
- Arc Iris
- Arkona
- Artizan
- Arven
- Barbra Streisand (Really only for the 'Classical Barbra' album)
-[NEW]- Bebel Gilberto
- Be'Lakor
- Bent Knee
-[NEW]- Beth Gibbons
- Bryan Ferry
-[NEW]- Camila Meza
-[NEW]- Carly Simon
-[NEW]- Carole King
- Céu
- Charlotte Martin
- Christian Mistress
- Crisis
-[NEW]- Cristina Branco
- Crystal Viper
- Depeche Mode
- Dir En Grey
- Doughnuts
- Dreaming Dead
- Esperanza Spalding
- Faith No More
- Faun Fables
- Fiona Brice
-[NEW]- Flavia Coelho
- Gorod
- Ihsahn
- Indica
- Islaja
-[NEW]- Jane Birkin
-[NEW]- Jane Siberry
- Jenny Hval
- Joan Osborne (because of the 'Relish' album)
- Joanna Newsom
-[NEW]- Joni Mitchell
-[NEW]- Judie Tzuke
- Kate Bush
-[NEW]- Kendrick Scott Oracle
- Kittie
- Kobra and the Lotus
- Kylie Minogue
- Kärtsy
- Loreena McKennitt
- Lydia Ainsworth
- M.I.A
- Madder Mortem
-[NEW]- Madredeus
- MasterCastle
- Megadeth
- Midnight Oil
- Mike Oldfield
- Nneka
- Non-Fiction
- Olga Bell
- Pharaoh
- PJ Harvey
-[NEW]- Rickie Lee Jones
- Roxy Music
- Sarah Slean
- Stam1na
- Sukekiyo
- Suzanne Veja
-[NEW]- Teresa Salgueiro
- The Agonist
- Tori Amos
- Vashti Bunyan
- Velcra
- Waltari

I can't see a real pattern in my own musical preferences yet, so finding new music is always hard. I can see I like female singers, but other than that, I feel like my list is a mess.

Bolded: I never ever thought I would meet another Judie fan here! :beer:
Carly and Carole rock too. And Kate, of course.

I found her only like a month ago and I've already got 3 albums. 'Shoot the Moon' is a great disc. 'The Cat is Out' is an impossible album to find on CD it seems, but holy crap do I want it! The first track on that album, 'How Sweet it Is', turned me into a Judie Tzuke fan right away when I first heard it on Youtube.

Ah yes, I've been there from the start. Welcome to the Cruise and on. You know I once met and interviewed her? She's a whole lot shorter than you would think: really tiny. But a lovely woman. Mike Paxman was really nice too. Solid people.

I'd probably rate the albums as follows, best to worst (of what I've heard; a lot of her newer stuff, post UTA I have not yet heard but I do have)

Welcome to the Cruise
The Cat is Out (have this on vinyl) :)
Turning Stones
I am the Phoenix
Sportscar
Road Noise
Left Hand Talking
Wonderland
Under the Angels
Ritmo

(I haven't actually listened to Shoot the Moon: somehow I never got the album when I was collecting originally. I have it now but again, have yet to listen to it)

Cool! I am at least a little bit jelly of you having met her.

Whatever albums I've gotten so far has been dictated by what I've found cheapest on amazon.uk, so what I'm getting next will probably be a double CD with 'Sportscar' and 'I Am the Phoenix'.
I am glad you say 'Turning Stones' is good, because that one also seem like it will be easy to get on disc.
I have 'Left Hand Talking' too, but I'm not sure what I think about it yet. It's getting a bit more adult-contemporary than I'd like, but I'm not hating it. Maybe a few more listens will help me warm up to it.
You should totally give 'Shoot the Moon' a go one of these days. I think there's several really solid songs on it. Not least Heaven Can Wait and I'm Not a Loser.

Yeah, I know both those from the Road Noise live album. Solid songs. Turning Stones is excellent: I'd definitely rate "We'll go dreaming, Sound of my sister's tears, Don't go, Everything will come" as great tracks but the standouts are the title and the anti-whaling anthem "Modern killers." Superb. If you need me to shoot you digital copies of anything you can't get or want, let me know as I have them all.

I keep slacking off, but currently I am supposed to explore post-hardcore bands that still sound punk. 4000 album results on rateyourmusic for the genre, yet so little albums are what I'm looking for it is really frustrating. Luckily the forums helped me out, but I stil gotta listen. Currently I'm listening to frodus and digging it.


https://rateyourmusic.com/list/dylst...pdated-6_7_17/ describes my issue with post-hardcore. It's a love hate relationship, because some of the most awesome bands I know fall under this, yet otherwise it is dominated by things I am not interested in. **** my music taste sometimes.

Way back I was exploring entirely new genres to me ( funk, jazz and hip hop) but I got lazy and forgot about it. It takes quite a while to get myself to fall in love with unfamiliar music. After a lot of trying I really dig aesop rock now, even the electronic instrumentals, and I'm not a fan of electronic music.

Hopefully I'll get around to that album inside a month or so. Can't wait to hear it!

And thanks! I'm still hoping I'll be able to actually get a disc of all the studio albums, but if I have to give up on a few, I may throw you a message :)

I'll read that RYM link after this. I can definitely relate to the task of having to listen through a mountain of albums. I tend to go a bit by intuition though. It seems to work well for me to pick out the ones that have cool covers, interesting song titles or something else that catches my attention. If it looks like completely by-the-numbers genre fare, it probably is.

About getting into new things, my experience has been that the more you challenge yourself to broaden your horizons, the easier it becomes.

EDIT: After reading the link... I'm not sure this is the kind of thing you're looking for at all, but I think these guys are sort of cool:

Those guys are in the metalcore/regular hardcore vein but hey, even if it's not what I'm looking for this one actually sounds quite nice. Not sure why but it has a more fun energy compared to other metalcore, Something similar I feel with Everytime I Die. Plus I like how the vocals aren't constantly in full distortion.

Anywho, I have experienced the same thing where more effort into making good or stand out album art seems to lead to the better bands. I think the bands who put more effort into the music also put effort into album art that represents them well and catches people attention to what they've created.

With every genre looking through bands can be a slog, but with post-hardcore it's even way more so because it's a big umbrella under which I'm looking for a type of band that's a small minority. I literally need to look between 4000 rateyourmusic albums. God damn. And hearing **** you don't care for over and over makes you stop wanting to listen to music, you get burnt out. So I've decided to just occasionally do some digging​.

I know get why so many normal people never dig for gold and instead wait to get fed, it's ****ing exhausting at times.

Oh yeah I can believe the genre is wide. I don't even really understand what separates most flavours of post- this or core- that, so I have no doubt the stuff I linked wasn't really what you were talking about. It was just the closest association that came to me.

For the moment, I kind of outsource the digging to Ted Gioia. I found his music blog with several best-of-the-year lists, featuring all sorts of genres. I have found unbelievably much good stuff here, even though I didn't think my tastes would align with his. There's jazz, world music, singer/songwriter, classical, pop, rock, and more... He just seems to have interesting taste, so I'm just along for the ride and enjoying the hell out of it. It says in his about text that he listens to around 900 new albums in a year... I can't beat that, so I'm happy to follow his lead. When that blog runs dry for me, it's back to the coal mines!

I personally stopped digging so hard in one specific style long ago. I did it with thrash metal years ago and... it really did feel like it burnt me out on the very concept of music at times.

I'm curious what you thought of some of her more recent output? I haven't heard the Director's Cut album, but I heard the other few post-2000 things she's done. Aerial was allright, 50 Words For Snow is the best she's done since The Hounds of Love! I love it.
The new triple disc live show, Before the Dawn... is oddly disappointing to me :/

I haven't completely warmed up to Aerial yet, and I haven't really listened to her other recent albums. But I adore the rest of her work, and own all of her albums from The Kick Inside to Aerial.

I feel like the time from The Kick Inside to Hounds of Love is the golden era. After that, I'm a bit more mixed about her stuff. Never Forever, Lionheart and the Dreaming might be my favorite albums. Favorite song, just for the hell of it, is probably... In Search of Peter Pan, I think.

My favorite songs are Violin, Waking the Witch, The Wedding List, Hounds of Love, and every song on The Dreaming. :thumb:

It's just that every genre has great things to offer that are easy to find, but if you want more you gotta search really deep and you get burnt out easily, even though you could've looked at any of the bajillion other genres.

I like all of those a lot too. Especially Violin and The Wedding List.

That's true. Being really interested in something specific is hard work!
Well, hard work and random chance. A lot of the best stuff I know, I just kind of bumped into.

Reminds me of love. Music is love confirmed.

2017 has heard the release of some amazing albums for me:

5.00 stars
* Sufjan Stevens, Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly & James McAlister - Planetarium
* Ayreon - The Source
* Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell Live
* Mike Oldfield - Return to Ommadawn

*High-fives Mord for his sig*

I'm afraid to listen to the Oldfield album. I really dig a few of his early albums, most of all Discovery and Crises. His later music kind of losts something and I really didn't like the AOR vibe of the second newest album he did. Maybe it's time I gave him another chance.

And for whatever reason, 2017 has been a bit disappointing for me when it comes to new albums. I've found a ton of gold from previous years, so I'm doing fine anyway. At least I found the new Depeche Mode to be way better than I dared to hope for.

.

I'm too lazy to list all my favorite artists like everyone else. But I will say that I used to be much more into prog rock than I am now.

Any prog rock that still seems just as exciting as ever, or is it the whole genre you've fallen out of a bit?

There's a LOT of artists here that I've never heard of.

Fixed.

Thank you so much! It was bugging the hell out of me every time I looked at it!

Recently it's been terribly difficult for me to devote a decent amount of time strictly looking for new artists; I do that plenty on youtube of course but on Spotify I end up only seeking out things solely for the purpose of putting in my 20+ themed playlists, so. (But this is partly because Spotify often works horribly on this computer, and takes foreverrrr to load when I'm clicking around looking for new things, as opposed to when I'm just loading my own playlists.)

Anyway, my newer favorites are bolded; others are old favorites for the most part.

ABRA
Moonface
Sylvain Chauveau
K. Frimpong and his Cubano Fiestas
Arthur Russell
Laura Cannell
Wooden Veil
Nils Petter Molvær
Roy Montgomery
Mieczysław Weinberg
Jan Jelinek
Meredith Monk
Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou
Colin Newman
Mercury Rev
Wendy Rene
Miharu Koshi
Akiko Yano
Lawrence English
Iannis Xenakis
Ryan Teague
OOIOO
Bill Callahan/Smog
Henry Flynt
Christian Ravaglioli
Wade Ward
Starving Weirdos
Bob Desper

I've been meaning to check out Meredith Monk. People say her new record is really good, so I'm pretty sure I have it bookmarked somewhere.
EDIT: Scratch that. I just realize I've confused Meredith Monk with Shirley Collins. I've heard a very old song by Meredith Monk that I really liked once, though.

Otherwise a lot of artists I don't know much about here.

I'm really intrigued by the name Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou. What do they sound like?

I have to say, it's great to see people posting so many things I've never heard of—all the more for me to check out!

They were an afrobeat group from Benin in the 1970s. I love, love LOVE 60s-70s afrobeat; I never tire of it (same with any and all afro-cuban jazz/African psychedelic funk and blues from that same time period)
I think I first heard them on the African Scream Contest compilation here which is of course excellent.

Damn, that's a weird coincidence—I kid you not, I just downloaded African Scream Contest this morning.

Oh wow, that's crazy :0
Did you get a chance to listen to it yet?

I haven't. I was super sick yesterday and not in the mood for music but I'm looking forward to it.

Alright, now I've listened to it—great comp! Do you know who the hidden track is by?

Oh good!
No, I'm afraid I don't; I remember googling a while back and trying to see if anyone else knew but it doesn't seem like anyone else does, either.

Oh well. I wonder if it's in the liner notes of the physical album or something. But yeah, I really enjoyed it! I liked the Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou track a lot and really... everything. I remember the track right after the Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou one really standing out as well. I'm curious to hear some more comps from this collection and curious to check out whatever I can find by Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou. Do you have any recommendations?

Hrmmmm, well, I've only heard maybe three or four of their albums-- two of which are on my dead laptop (I don't recall the names and I don't believe they're on youtube), but in terms of compilations Analog Africa also has a really great Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou-specific collection called Echoes Hypnotiques that I'd definitely recommend. It's the one I ended up listening to the most.
https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a2061003620_16.jpg

Nice! I'll definitely look for that. Thanks! :)