Music recommendations!

[bhakti]

Alright all,

I am seriously jonesing for a new music fix, and I have no leads.

Help!

What is the coolest music you know, that I might not know already?

(Assume that all genres are fair game. Weird stuff is welcome, but so is mainstream, and everything in between.)

Comments

[merlin_v12]

Okay, as if I'm going to let this post go by without commenting. . .

First, the mainstream stuff. I'm finding that The Who's latest album, "Endless Wire" (released last October, their first studio album since 1983) gets a lot of play, as does Rush's latest release, "Snakes & Arrows" (released this past spring). But that's probably because I'm a die-hard fan. Lyrically, I think that "Snakes & Arrows" is one of the strongest albums I've heard in years.

I've also found myself listening to a lot of Motown lately. Universal (who owns the Motown label) has released deluxe 2-disc editions of Marvin Gaye's three finest albums, "What's Goin' On", "Let's Get It On", and "I Want You", all of which are absolutely fantastic. I hate it when people dismiss Marvin's stuff as "sex music"; it's so much more than that. Even the B-sides, outtakes and instrumental versions included on the albums are gems.

I also find myself listening quite frequently to "Standing in the Shadows of Motown", which is another excellent 2-disc offering from Universal that showcases the Funk Brothers, the Motown house band. These guys played on more #1 hits than Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones and the Beach Boys combined. The album is actually a companion piece to a DVD documentary about the band, which I've not yet seen. Disc 1 is a live recording of a recent concert with a bunch of guest vocalists, while disc 2 is the "naked" versions of Motown classics, stripped of their vocals. Awesome stuff.

I've also been listening to lots of Jamiroquai lately. You may remember them as the funky English band with the lead singer who sounds like Stevie Wonder, dances like Michael Jackson, and wears a tall hat. They had a breakout hit in 1997 with their album "Traveling Without Moving" which spawned the single "Virtual Insanity". They sort of fell off the pop radar after that, but their whole catalog is uniformly great. I'm a big fan of their more recent albums "Synkronized" and "A Funk Odyssey." It's the sort of music that makes even pasty white guys like me wanna get up and dance!

For more eclectic stuff, I've lately been listening quite a bit to two albums from a band I saw at the Maryland Renaissance Faire called E Muzeki. Most people go to faires and come home with garb and swords. I came home with CDs. They're a bouzouki-fiddle duo with percussion, and draw from Greek, Celtic, Arabic, Turkish, and other gypsy-folk styles. Two of their three albums are available, "Sindh" and the self-titled "E Muzeki". Their first album, "Mavra Matia" is out of print, but .mp3 clips of it can be downloaded from their website at www.emuzeki.com if you want to get a sense of what they sound like. It's really excellent stuff, and on "Sindh" they do a killer rendition of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" (which they played live at MDRF).

There's another band that I saw at MDRF and picked up two CDs of called Gypsophilia (www.gypsophilia.com) who are excellent as well. I don't find myself getting lost in their music quite the way I do with E Muzeki's, but they're still very good, as they draw from a lot of the same musical styles (with a lot of Balkan/Yiddish/klezmer influences).

[kalisti23]

Oo! And there's HumanWyne, a bit like Dresden Dolls but a bit more Kurt Weil/ dark carnival merry-go-round/ cabaret.

And if you don't own the album "Where's Neil When you Need Him?" go out and buy it NOW!
It's a compilation of stuff inspired by Neil's writings, featuring Voltaire, Tori, CruxShadows, and a celtic tune by a German band. It's really freakin' awesome.