Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Perfect 10....Music

Quick question for ye! What album/s in your collection would you give a perfect 10 out of 10 to? If honest with yourself it's a slightly more difficult prospect than you'd initially imagine. What album can you turn on, listen to from start to finish and love each song just as much as the last? What album are you always in the mood to hear? I can only at the moment think of two perfect albums, I'm sure I have more, but at this moment these are the ones that stck out. 1 'Sea Sew' by Lisa Hannigan and 2. The Soundtrack to 'Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain' by conductor Yann Tiersen....Perfect perfect CD's both of them.



On a separate point...remember the good 'ol days of the cassette tape, (I imagine if I were old enough that last sentence could equally have read "the good 'ol days of the vinyl record") when you'd play an album from beginning to end. When the only thing capable of snapping you out of your wonderfully glorious self inflicted music coma was the crickety click of the tape as it wound to a stop? Now with my mp3 player. it's just too easy. I can litterally listen to anything I want. Any album, track or playlist. I occasionally find myself with itchy fingers, it's almost as if the mere knowledge that I can skip to any other song fills me with the urge to do so! Is it necessarily bad, or just a new way to experience music? I consider it a '6 Degrees of Separation' kind of thing. I'm listening to one song, which reminds me of another....so I scroll around and click PLAY. This song then reminds me of a third, then a fourth, so on and so forth. Before I know it, Muse's 'Knight of Cydonia' has led me to Norah Jones. Is this the way of the future? I mean with the dawn of digital downloads one can buy any single track on an album they want. Will future generations miss out on the joy of listening to an album of songs, created in their entirety by the artist, as an emotional response to a specific period of their lives? I'm not sure. It seems we are editing our music collections before we even buy the music, granted some tracks are destined for the B-side, but that's all part of the journey. 

So whats your perfect 10 out of 10 album or albums? Do you still listen to albums from begin to end or is your mp3 player chock-a-block with individual tracks, and carefully crafted playlists?

1 comment:

Patrick Semple said...

I would agree with the Amelie sound track, that is truly amazing and if you asked me what i was listening to about a year ago thats what it would have been.

At the moment Fever to tell and It's Blitz by the yeah yeah yeahs and T by Justice. To be honest and thats what you were asking it all depends on your mood. sometime you can just not be in the right frame of mind for something or it doesn't suit what you are doing.i would be more inclined to have what i consider perfect albums for situation like party's, drawing, working, walking around etc.