- Little Earthquakes
- Under the Pink
- Boys for Pele
- From the Choirgirl Hotel
- To Venus and Back (both discs)
- Strange Little Girls
- Scarlet's Walk
- Scarlet's Hidden Treasures
- The Beekeeper
- American Doll Posse
- Abnormally Attracted to Sin
- Midwinter Graces
- Night of Hunters
- Gold Dust
- Unrepentant Geraldines
- Audience bootlegs: Melbourne 15 November 2014, Adelaide 16 November 2014, Perth 18 November 2014
Live - Awake: The Best of Live
Midnight Oil - 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1
Something for Kate - Beautiful Sharks
U2 - Songs of Innocence
Megan Washington - There There
Y Kant Tori Read - Y Kant Tori Read
Well, as you can see I went on one of those binges... In one mad week I went through every Tori studio album, including both the orchestral album Gold Dust and the before-she-was-famous Y Kant Tori Read band's single self-titled album, which I hadn't listened to in quite a few years. The latter does have its poor moments (I may never, ever come to terms with her embarrassing attempt to rap) but it also has some pretty good ones.
And no, I don't own a genuine copy. There are rare exceptions to my commitment to buying proper, physical versions of my music, and one of them is when something costs hundreds of dollars, might still be fake and none of the money will go to the artist.
I finally listened to my free U2 album, spammed across the world by Apple. And frankly it was difficult to care one way or the other. Inoffensive wallpaper on first listen. I will certainly give it another go, and pay more attention than I did on this first occasion.
And for Christmas, by request, I received There There.
I already flagged my interest in Megan Washington's new album in my entry for September, in which I said not to wait for the review. Well here's the review: I love it. This is one of the finest straight-up pop albums I've heard in a long time.
The truth is I don't really fall in love with that much of what is usually thought of as pop music. Much of my preferred music can be found in shops under labels like 'Alternative'. There certainly are pop acts I like hearing on the radio (not that I listen much nowadays) or on television, but rarely does that enjoyment translate to wanting an entire album's worth of material. Not unless it's a hits package further down the track.
But There There is a pop album that I was eager to own. The melodies are wonderfully smooth, and delivered in Washington's sultry voice they become a heavenly mix of sweetness and sorrow. On one level the songs are pretty simple, but it actually takes a fair bit of skill to sound this effortless. The lyrics aren't plumbing the profound depths, but there's a lot of wordplay which seems to be all about building sounds as much as meaning, making the vocals oscillate.
There's probably no better demonstration of that than the song which first got my attention, and which became one of those relatively rare songs that I played obsessively for a period. Any time I can play a song 6 or 7 times in a row, I know it's got to me.
So here's "My Heart Is A Wheel".
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The spreadsheet tells me I listened to 101 pop recordings this past year. Which is an increase on the previous year (73), but still down on the couple of years before that (134 and 116).
Obviously, having obsessive Tori Amos binges takes away time for listening to other things. Another interesting factor, though is that I've actually being making more use of Spotify to explore music that I don't own, and I'm not counting that in my total even if I listened to an entire album. If the album didn't make it into my library, that is - there were several new acquisitions based on listening to the album on the service first, including There There and Thrice's Major/Minor.
I'm still working, intermittently, on fully completing the list of the pop music that I own so I know just what is buried in the dark corners. Maybe 2015 is the year. If so, it may well still take a while to listen to it all, and there's always a growing list of other things to explore. Current interest is in the British band Elbow. Stay tuned for developments!
