Tuesdays, I plan to discuss the albums I’ve been listening to, music-related sites that I’ve come across recently, and ask a question or two to whatever readers might be out there…hence the self-explanitory title. Which sounds like eerily like the name of some conservative radio station’s morning segment, in retrospect. Erm…carry on! Read the Intro if you’re new, first.

My current progress on the 1,001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 36%.

I started this quest in April, at the 15% from albums I had already heard. I plan to continue on until I’ve heard them all, bwa ha ha! I’ve most recently listened to Ride’s Nowhere, commonly referred to as the 2nd-best shoegaze album, beaten consistently by My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Although they both have a hazy, drifting atmosphere, they are actually quite different from one another. Nowhere would be a great CD to listen to travelling in a car, or maybe while on a beach lazing about in the sun. Loveless is more of a strung-out, distortion filled mindtrip…and a blip seen on a poster in the background in Final Fantasy VII (see image above)

My main point in listening to all of those albums is to discover great bands, and gain some music history along the way. It isn’t complete in scope: where are INXS, Donna Summer, and Oingo Boingo, for instance? But, it is the broadest and most definitive of any, and I’d say that anyone who started from 0% and listened to all of them would have quite a broad understanding of rock, pop, and subgenres, and likely gain a lot of new favorite artists. The book has been out since 2005, so I might as well buy it if I’m going to continue on with this, and also so I can show it to someone and say “HA! I’ve listened to ALL of these”, when I’m done. I’ll probably wait until this lovely item comes out and just order them both at once. ;) You can check out the list at Rocklist.net, and listen to most of them at Radio3net.

• I’ve noticed that there are only a select few artists that I have been able to fall asleep while listening to, and not at all because they are boring! They are some of my favorite artists and I think they must really put me at ease, since I’m a bit of an insomniac: The Beatles, The Kinks, Blur, U2, Brian Eno, Television, The Magnetic Fields, and…Iggy Pop, surely known widely for his soothing vocal tone (?!).
• JamsBio is a website with a nice concept: a place for people to share memories attached to songs, albums, and artists. You can make your own collection of stories, and peruse those of others. When you want to share a memory, they make it easy to search their databse of songs by year, plus allow you to hear brief audio samples, then write it out and publish. I like the purpose of JamsBio and will definitely be checking it out again soon, maybe typing up some memories of my own. Also, I rather like their JamsMatch Music Memory Game, a perfect brain-racker and major time-waster.
• Last month, MeeMix (a Pandora-esque streaming radio website, but with a hipper interface and different recommendation system) introduced artist registration. Though still a strong believer in promoting my music on Last.fm, MeeMix boasts some features not available there, such as being able to your sort your fans by country and a hot-or-not meter widget by which your coolness can be voted on and gauged as a percentage. What’s more, their radio offers a twist: not only can you generate streaming stations based on an artist, track, or genre, but by mood and pulse. I have submitted my catalogue of instrumental tunes already, and it will be some weeks time before it starts getting integrated into their stations because it has to be analyzed so they can sort it properly.

SO…
Anything critical missing on that list of 1,001 Albums? Find any cool, potentially revolutionary, music-related websites lately? Leave a comment; do tell!