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| Track List: 1. Animal Collective - My Girls 2. Sons And Daughters - Silver Spell 3. The Kills - DNA 4. Anna Calvi - Blackout 5. Dirty Projectors - Stillness Is The Move 6. Four Tet - Love Cry 7. Villagers - Becoming A Jackal 8. Arctic Monkeys - My Propeller 9. Cass McCombs - County Line 10. Wild Beasts - Albatross 11. Steve Mason - All Come Down 12. King Creosote & Jon Hopkins - Bubble Running time: 56 minutes Released: 2011 |
So hot on the heels of one Amazon freebie comes another. Domino are a label that have produced some of my favourite artists at one time or another, so when I stumbled across this free sample I snapped it up and... promptly forgot about it and did not follow up with the things I did not already know about. Such is life.
I know of most of these artists but could not put a sound to all. I have albums by 5 of them - 4 of them containing the song featured here. Those will definitely be disappearing after the listen, as I do not need duplicates. I do not expect this to suddenly make me want to run out and buy material from the other artists, but who knows, maybe my prejudices are not fairly based and I have been denying myself genius the past 3 years.
The sampler starts with a song from an album that I will almost certainly be cutting in its entirety when I get to it. I bought Merriweather Post Pavilion based on some extremely strong reviews but found it lacking in structure, harmony and music. Animal Collective seem to be adept at generating noise, but then so are toddlers. I hope that coming in ready to listen might show me another side to them, but I still fail to see any merit in My Girls - there is just nothing pleasant, nothing agreeable, about the cacophony my ears behold, it is just a din that extends way past comfort distance. Totally not to my taste.
I also own a Sons and Daughters album (This Gift), and I did not really get on with that either, if my gut feeling and memory are to be believed (and for the umpteenth time, they probably are not!). This tune sounds very different to what I was expecting though. Sparse and simple sounds with a vocal that is much chanted as sung - this is an interesting track and conjures images of urban fantasy/modern occult film, TV, literature and games (a genre I like to roleplay in a lot, but do not tend to follow too much otherwise; I'm burned out on The Dresden Files). I shall keep this.
The Kills do not ring any bells for me, and looking them up on LastFM reveals a band I would not expect to like by their "Similar Artists" listings. However this song reminds me a bit of a slightly darker She Keeps Bees - more rock, less blues (and less good as a result) but it is pretty catchy. Certainly catchy enough to keep, if not to make me look up the album. It is followed by Anna Calvi who I think I always got mixed up with someone else, because I was expecting vapid pop styles rather than a female Richard Hawley with bigger sound. I like her delivery, even if the pattern of expression sounds unusual with a female voice, lots of timbre change being something I correlate more with male vocalists. However the song (much like what I have of Hawley's) is missing something for me. Cut.
This sampler is pretty varied, showing off Domino's diversity a bit, everything has been different - a trend which is reflected later on, too. Dirty Projectors are on the Animal Collective side of things for me, too much electronic experimentation to call this a tune that I would ever want to listen to, and the Four Tet number is getting cut because I have the album (There Is Love in You) to listen to when I get there in a couple of years time. I should just clarify at this point - this project is far from the only listening I am doing; commuting gives me plenty of opportunity to listen to physical discs, but my listening to just stuff on random plays has died away a lot in the face of a structured approach to my library. I do not think that I had previously given Four Tet anything like the attention I should have done, instead being mostly familiar with his work as producer/remixer for others. I quite like the patterns presented here, though I do struggle to look forward and see myself listening to a whole album of it... one 9 minute track is trying my patience by half way simply through repetition. There is more going on over the top, and that is varied and more interesting, but the basic rhythm persistence has me tuning out.
Villagers are completely new to me, in that I do not seem to have ever scrobbled this song before, let alone anything else; I rather like it as a one-off but it does not have enough for me to retain. I will certainly be ditching My Propeller too. I do not hear anything other than a very bland riff there. Huh. I was expecting Cass McCombs to be, well... female, on account of the name. There is a nice lazy lilt to this track and it brings up melodic associations with an array of other artists and songs that I have still to come, but like the Villagers track, it makes for a pleasant one-off listen, but is lacking anything to make me want to come back to it. Wild Beasts ring a bell name wise though I could never have put a style to the name. I do not like this song though, and it is the vocal that is the barrier to enjoyment. The light key line and the stronger percussion mesh nicely, but the singing is a poor fit with them, and there is definitely something lacking as a result. Cut.
The last two songs here are both getting cut as duplicates but I do like both a lot. Steve Mason's Boys Outside is an album I really like. I find his voice pretty soothing when he goes for a softer style, and I liked him in The Beta Band and as King Biscuit Time - less so as Black Affair. All Come Down is not one of his better songs and I think it is better in the context of its parent album, but it is a relaxing number. Oh, that is interesting. This version of Bubble may get kept - this is the "single edit" apparently and it is actually pretty different from the version that my mind plays back from the masterpiece that is Diamond Mine, at least in its opening as there is a very clear second voice singing along with King Creosote. I have not consciously noted the duet when listening to the album version. A stay of cutting until I play back that version of Bubble then.
I think this sampler is pretty decent, even if I am not keeping that much, and unlike the last Amazon sample, I think this was well worth the time to investigate. A quick change of heart gave stays to Villagers and Cass McCombs' efforts and a quick check of Diamond Mine confirms I was hearing the opening duet for the first time with this version, so I will keep Bubble too. Along with The Kills and Sons and Daughters that is 5 of 12 kept, 7 ditched. Even then, the ditchied tracks were not all without merit.
The sampler starts with a song from an album that I will almost certainly be cutting in its entirety when I get to it. I bought Merriweather Post Pavilion based on some extremely strong reviews but found it lacking in structure, harmony and music. Animal Collective seem to be adept at generating noise, but then so are toddlers. I hope that coming in ready to listen might show me another side to them, but I still fail to see any merit in My Girls - there is just nothing pleasant, nothing agreeable, about the cacophony my ears behold, it is just a din that extends way past comfort distance. Totally not to my taste.
I also own a Sons and Daughters album (This Gift), and I did not really get on with that either, if my gut feeling and memory are to be believed (and for the umpteenth time, they probably are not!). This tune sounds very different to what I was expecting though. Sparse and simple sounds with a vocal that is much chanted as sung - this is an interesting track and conjures images of urban fantasy/modern occult film, TV, literature and games (a genre I like to roleplay in a lot, but do not tend to follow too much otherwise; I'm burned out on The Dresden Files). I shall keep this.
The Kills do not ring any bells for me, and looking them up on LastFM reveals a band I would not expect to like by their "Similar Artists" listings. However this song reminds me a bit of a slightly darker She Keeps Bees - more rock, less blues (and less good as a result) but it is pretty catchy. Certainly catchy enough to keep, if not to make me look up the album. It is followed by Anna Calvi who I think I always got mixed up with someone else, because I was expecting vapid pop styles rather than a female Richard Hawley with bigger sound. I like her delivery, even if the pattern of expression sounds unusual with a female voice, lots of timbre change being something I correlate more with male vocalists. However the song (much like what I have of Hawley's) is missing something for me. Cut.
This sampler is pretty varied, showing off Domino's diversity a bit, everything has been different - a trend which is reflected later on, too. Dirty Projectors are on the Animal Collective side of things for me, too much electronic experimentation to call this a tune that I would ever want to listen to, and the Four Tet number is getting cut because I have the album (There Is Love in You) to listen to when I get there in a couple of years time. I should just clarify at this point - this project is far from the only listening I am doing; commuting gives me plenty of opportunity to listen to physical discs, but my listening to just stuff on random plays has died away a lot in the face of a structured approach to my library. I do not think that I had previously given Four Tet anything like the attention I should have done, instead being mostly familiar with his work as producer/remixer for others. I quite like the patterns presented here, though I do struggle to look forward and see myself listening to a whole album of it... one 9 minute track is trying my patience by half way simply through repetition. There is more going on over the top, and that is varied and more interesting, but the basic rhythm persistence has me tuning out.
Villagers are completely new to me, in that I do not seem to have ever scrobbled this song before, let alone anything else; I rather like it as a one-off but it does not have enough for me to retain. I will certainly be ditching My Propeller too. I do not hear anything other than a very bland riff there. Huh. I was expecting Cass McCombs to be, well... female, on account of the name. There is a nice lazy lilt to this track and it brings up melodic associations with an array of other artists and songs that I have still to come, but like the Villagers track, it makes for a pleasant one-off listen, but is lacking anything to make me want to come back to it. Wild Beasts ring a bell name wise though I could never have put a style to the name. I do not like this song though, and it is the vocal that is the barrier to enjoyment. The light key line and the stronger percussion mesh nicely, but the singing is a poor fit with them, and there is definitely something lacking as a result. Cut.
The last two songs here are both getting cut as duplicates but I do like both a lot. Steve Mason's Boys Outside is an album I really like. I find his voice pretty soothing when he goes for a softer style, and I liked him in The Beta Band and as King Biscuit Time - less so as Black Affair. All Come Down is not one of his better songs and I think it is better in the context of its parent album, but it is a relaxing number. Oh, that is interesting. This version of Bubble may get kept - this is the "single edit" apparently and it is actually pretty different from the version that my mind plays back from the masterpiece that is Diamond Mine, at least in its opening as there is a very clear second voice singing along with King Creosote. I have not consciously noted the duet when listening to the album version. A stay of cutting until I play back that version of Bubble then.
I think this sampler is pretty decent, even if I am not keeping that much, and unlike the last Amazon sample, I think this was well worth the time to investigate. A quick change of heart gave stays to Villagers and Cass McCombs' efforts and a quick check of Diamond Mine confirms I was hearing the opening duet for the first time with this version, so I will keep Bubble too. Along with The Kills and Sons and Daughters that is 5 of 12 kept, 7 ditched. Even then, the ditchied tracks were not all without merit.
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