Jimmy E's Music List Mania

Good tidings, folks and friends. I’m not trying to get away from Spotify or anything, but I’d be stretching the truth to suggest I wasn’t more than a little obsessed with the statistics. In some ways I tried to game it a bit, making sure I played the catalogues of a sprinkling of artists who are, at the very least, severely under-listened to on streaming services. I have a whole “deserve more love” playlist for several bands with fewer than a thousand monthly listeners, but the handful I made sure to play every week of the year were Suns of the Tundra, Ensemble 1, Laura, and Ro (as well as Life Coach (with Jon Theodore on drums), Fox Wound, and Five-Way Split at various points). This proved no problem with Laura and Ro, particularly with the latter’s new album from January this year, but I confess I got bored doing it with SOTT about June time, at least until the new record came out. Nevertheless, SOTT was my top artist on Spotify Wrapped – apparently, I spent 136.5 hours listening to ...

See “Best of 2008” for a general introduction. As I wrote in my “Best of 2000” entry, you’ll see that as I move backward in time I am starting to run out of a good stock of records from these years that I have memories and opinions and any sort of knowledge or interest in. With the possible exception of Natalie Imbruglia’s Left of the Middle, albums from 1997 that I like would have been listened to years later. I was only 12 and so my formative years weren’t quite upon me yet. 1997 had plenty to be famous for, with records like Radiohead’s OK Computer, Daft Punk’s debut Homework, Bj ö rk’s (best album) Homogenic, The Prodigy’s The Fat of the Land, Deftones’ Around the Fur, Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s F# A# Infinity, and Foo Fighters’ The Colour and the Shape still being raved about (in niche Facebook groups or mainstream music magazines) today. Dream Theater’s fourth album Falling Into Infinity was meant to be a bit more commercial sounding. I suppose it is, but I still have a ...

See “Best of 2008” for a general introduction. As I wrote in my “Best of 2000” entry, you’ll see that as I move backward in time I am starting to run out of a good stock of records from these years that I have memories and opinions and any sort of knowledge or interest in. Like for 2000, I only have 31 albums on my longlist for 1998. Of these, I was into precisely one at the time – Garbage’s Version 2.0 (maybe The Cardigans – Gran Turismo too, but that could well have been the year after). I would have been aware of a few others, at least the singles on the radio, but that’s all. Everything else is retrospective! There are a few classics from this year that I certainly recognise as such, albeit they’ve passed me by a little too much or just haven’t quite made the top cut. Or really, any of the long list could form a credible shortlist. Things like UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction, Elliot Smith’s XO, Botch’s American Nervoso, Hole’s Celebrity Skin, Beastie Boys’ Hello Nasty, Raised Fist’s de...