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22625. (George Form­by) George Form­by — Pri­vate Com­pi­la­tion, vol.2 [33 items]
22626. (Alice in Chains) Come and Save Me [Paris, 1993 boot­leg]
22627. (Light­nin’ Hop­kins) Texas Blues [Blues Col­lec­tion #31] Read more »

22586. (As The Poets Affirm) I Want to Tell My Heart to You, But I Can­not Say Eng­lish
22587. (Piir­pauke) Piir­pauke Live
22588. (Deadmau5) Ran­dom Album Title Read more »

The tech­no-rave scene has been mori­bund for the last few years, but there’s an occa­sion­al good album that comes out. Cana­di­an DJ Deadmaus5 (Joel Zim­mer­man) pub­li­cizes him­self with a sil­ly gim­mick: he appears in pub­lic in a mouse cos­tume. But Ran­dom Album Title, which came out in 2008, is an enter­tain­ing set, though more for lis­ten­ing, as long seg­ments don’t sound very dance­able to me. The “I Remem­ber,” “Fax­ing Berlin,” and “Not Exact­ly” seg­ments, which fol­low each oth­er, stand out. It’s a slow warm-up to get to them, however.

I don’t know if this Tuc­son-based met­al band is still active, but I rather like their 2008 album What You Were, which trots along loud­ly, with grow­ly vocals by Kyle Hardy, at a steady, unrushed pace. I’m not sure if they would be called “melod­ic met­al” or “post-rock” in the cur­rent jar­gon, but there is both melod­ic and ryth­mic sophis­ti­ca­tion in most of the songs. “Eidolon”and “Falling In Per­petu­um” stand out among the tracks. The album has a fine bal­ance, sequenc­ing the songs to good effect in a genre which tends to turn albums into undif­fer­en­ti­at­ed blurs. I also have an EP from the same year, Ruins.

The first of the Bran­den­burg Con­cer­tos, cat­a­log # bwv1046, is actu­al­ly enti­tled Con­cer­to 1^moà 2 Corni di Cac­cia, 3 Hautb: è Bas­sono, Vio­li­no Pic­co­lo con­cer­ta­to, 2 Vio­li­ni, una Vio­la è Vio­lon­cel­lo, col Bas­so Con­tin­uo. It has four move­ments, unlike the oth­er five con­cer­tos, which have three. You would think that the pat­tern alle­gro — ada­gio — alle­gro — min­uetwould make it clum­sy, but for some rea­son, it works in this case. The final min­uet does­n’t seem out of place or anti-cli­mac­tic. Noth­ing could be a bet­ter intro­duc­tion to the plea­sures of baroque music. Read more »