The ever-popular "Currently Listening" thread

Fans of the Sarah sound (are there any others out there?) will eat this new band up and beg for more. 1 crazy Swede doing it all, with guest vocalists.

"Preston Park" by Celestial

The Faceless:
"Coldly Calculated Design"

http://www.myspace.com/thefaceless

Very nice.

My ! My ! Time Flies !

Enya !

Back on my gothic-doom Draconian kick, this is probably my favorite band of all time.

Draconian's Myspace

the first three songs on their playlist are from their newest album, and while the first couple stray a little from the old down-tempo, languishing dirges of the past which are what i generally like best - i love them nonetheless! Great songs.

Then they go back to the languishing dual-guitar style on the next track that i like so much. "She Dies" is a great "love beyond death" classic-sounding male/female dirge, one of their best.

Apostasy Canticle is off their second album, which was a concept cd based around the tale of lucifer's banishment, specifically "Paradise Lost". Great passage in the middle of one of the rebel angels pledging themselves to his cause, and there's a classic passage lifted right from Milton once ol luce hits rock-bottom. Towards the end of this cd, the "story" ends and there are some great male/female grief duets, but the majority is growly, slow metal that grows in tempo and double-kick drums, then back to a crawl again.

Then rounding it out is one of their classics off their first cd, The Solitude. The female ending is awesome.

"to greet the niiiiight, the night without end…."

Awesome. I love this band!

Just listening to some Spinal Tap: here's The Majesty of Rock. Lyrics are… incredible, too.

Don't really care for this group, but this tune of theirs is pretty good and stuck in my noggin.

"Only Love Can Break A Heart" by Saint Etienne

While Daniel's vocals aren't my favorite (not that they're horrible or anything), musically this song is dreampop perfection.

"Off Your Face Again" by Daniel Land and the Modern Painters

edit- after a couple days to reflect, I've come to a decision. My tunes probably get lumped in with lullabies and elevator music by many of you, and that's OK. I'm still confident in my conclusion that the last tune from Zakhary is the absolute worst indignity to ears the world over since Jaz put up Daler.

What? Did you actually compare The Faceless' prog death metal to Daler's elemental banghra brilliance?
I should be so offended…

Here's something for dte (might have posted it before, but if I did, old age dementia made me forget all about it):
Happy Boy

If it makes you feel any better dte, I am now a huge The Birthday Massacre fan now thanks to you.

Happy to be of service. There's all sorts of great music out there, just waiting to be heard by the right ears. Zakhary just isn't posting any of it. Seriously, though, somewhere in this wide, wide world there's a neanderthal living in a pool of radioactive sludge that's got a smile on what's left of his melting face because he hadn't heard of The Faceless until Zakhary linked it. Sharing is a good thing. Heck, my life was an empty shell until Jazzy shared Daler with us all. After that, it was an empty shell with bleeding ears and scarred corneas, but still…

Not a fan of technical death metal, eh?
Well… yeah, I don't blame you. That shit is pretty extreme, and I can't stomach it myself in too large doses. Didn't mean to offend anyone either, never actually stopped and thought that shit like that might actually offend someone. Now that I think about it.. I heard christian rap once.. and like that wasn't enough already - it was being "sung" ín Finnish. Now THAT offended ME (everything about it was so bad that it physically hurt). But not to worry! I mostly listen to (a bit) softer stuff than that so let's go to the other end of my musical spectrum for a while

One of my favourite songs of alltime. "Surrounded" by the masters themselves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKxTLSSCJGY

"Morning on Earth" by the swedes called Pain of Salvation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61LLjdbJtJo

"Communion and the Oracle" by Symphony X. The album this is from is an absolute masterpiece.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrC-snv5ly0

"Benighted" an acoustic "ballad" by Opeth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjtZW_FCSTo

"2084" from Ayreon (one of my alltime favourites too). Can't get enough of those eerie female vocals or the reverberating(is that the/a word?) guitars and the sweeping synths.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03UXA0dEtbA
This is the song that suffers the most from that lossy audio compression.

Hmmm.. No happy music at all, I see. Don't know what it is about that though… I can't stand happy music.

I've been on a Dargaard kick for the past day or two. Couldn't really tell ya why, but the music certainly is pretty.

"The Infinite" by Dargaard

Wow … just grabbed a *new* Anthony Braxton recording, after recently grabbing all of his out-of-orint stuff from the 70's.

Anthony Braxton - Beyond Quantum

Really amazing stuff. But, if the name Anthony Braxton doesn't mean anything to you, be forewarned … his music scares small animals.

I still don't quite understand how you get 3 talented musicians to sit down and completely ignore what the others are doing. I don't think the bass and brass are even playing in the same key, Mike.

Originally Posted by dteowner
I still don't quite understand how you get 3 talented musicians to sit down and completely ignore what the others are doing.

See - I don't hear it that way at all … they are listening at a level that allows them to exercise harmonic and rhythmic freedom and yet produce something wondrrfully musical.

Originally Posted by dteowner
I don't think the bass and brass are even playing in the same key, Mike.

And this matters for exactly *what* reason? Certainly they are not doing anything that wasn't conceived in Schoenberg's book 'Structural Functions of Harmony'.

Unfortunately the album only covers their 1st through 5th 'meetings.' - 'Course it was the sixth meeting where they actually started playing the same song!

Well, I find it fairly harmonic … what I listened to last night (had to follow my wife to drop off her work's 'mobile lab' at a co-worker's house) is a bit less so … John Coltrane's Ascension. Sort of in the same vein as Ornette's 'Free Jazz' but much further in that direction.

Currently enjoying Metallica - The Day That Never Comes of the new album, Death Magnetic, which seems ok so far.

Somehow, I missed the debut of this video. Probably the best song off the latest cd, too. Enjoy.

"Nothing's Wrong" by Tearwave

I'm currently having almost all songs from the new Enya album in my head - which is a good thing, quality-wise.