7 of your most listened to acts over the last year

Edited by Logan - August 02 2023 at 10:21

Edited by Logan - August 02 2023 at 12:34

Ok, I'm realizing belatedly I should have skipped Purple Kiss and gone with Leprous and "Castaway Angels"

Some of my current faves. Subject to change. 

Thanks Will, Jared, Kees and Drew whose post I just saw because I was composing this one as he posted that. And an excellent job with the descriptions, Kees. I may be a pretty detail-oriented guy, but I commonly end up being scant on the descriptions. I want to work on that because my brain does not function adequately anymore and it might help with much needed cognitive abilities or stuff.

Jared wrote: I'm not going to make a list of albums Greg, because they need no introduction, but if I think of the 7 bands I have listened to most over the past 12 months, they would be: Camel - VDGG - Renaissance - Jethro Tull - Pink Floyd - BJH - Mike Oldfield

Mentioning albums and a track from each artist is not a requirement, but it does add a significant dimension to me (and because I want listen to what people especially like from artists/bands). There's lot of variety to those bands.

With Camel, my favourite album is The Snow Goose (and I love A Live Record), but I love lots of Camel. My choice of track likely would be either "La princesse perdue" or "Nimrodel / The Procession / The White Rider", and another person's might be "No Easy Answer" (maybe not so much at a Prog forum).

With VdGG, my favourite albums are Pawn Hearts, The Least We Can Do, and H to He. "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers" is one of my very favourite tracks, but to be a bit different and a bit shorter I might go with "Darkness" which I also love.

With Renaissance, "Song of Scheherazade" and "Ashes Are Burning" are awesome tracks to me, and at one time "Bullet" from the debut was my favourite and the debut was my favourite Renaissance album (Annie Haslam can be bit too nasally for me).

With Jethro Tull, I most return to the pre-Thick as a Brick albums. I'd go with "Sossity; You're A Woman" off Benefit. Always loved that song and hardly see it mentioned.

With Pink Floyd, I tend to favour the pre-Dark Side of the Moon albums but love all up to and including The Wall. Some favourite tracks are "Atom Heart Mother", "The Embryo", "Echoes", "Fearless", and "Cirrus Minor" I might go with The Embryo from the BBC sessions.

Barclay James Harvest I don't know well. With Mike Oldfield, I have heard a few of his albums, but there is no point there in me talking tracks as even if divided into two parts, it is the album. I should give Oldfield more of a try again, it never became a favourite but I know many who I share so much in common with musically who love Mikey O.

^ Thanks. Lewian. I really like the live version of The Glowing Man on Deliquescence, and I really appreciate that version of The Hanging Man. The Hanging Man is a particular favourite song of mine on leaving meaning.. And my choices are not dictated by what I consider to be best or even good. I just happen to like great music. And not that I listened properly to your selection yet, but I appreciate all of that. I did listen to all of the Nik Kershaw and I really like it. It's quite reminiscent of Cardiacs to me. I could imagine Tim Smith and company performing a version of that. And Mammal Hands is great.

Last year, I discovered the music of Steven R. Smith and his extensive projects released under various names (Ulaan Passerine, Ulaan Khol, Hala Strana, etc.) as well as his own name. He’s a guitarist/multi-instrumentalist who also builds and plays his own instruments. All instrumental, his music ranges in a blend of drone, ambient, psych, post-rock, east European folk, field recordings, …. He has an extensive catalogue of over 40 releases going back over 20 years. I digitally purchased his catalogue on Bandcamp and I’ve been digging through that over the past year. Really hard to pick one album/track. The album that I first heard was Sun Spar by Ulaan Passerine. Each monicker has a slightly different flavor. Ulaan Khol I would say tends to be more guitar dominant. I’ll suggest a track from his most recent album as Ulaan Khol.

https://youtu.be/bi7nN2iZDrY

With a lesser catalogue of only 2 albums is Korean band Black String. Named after the Korean zither, geomungo, as the lead instrument, combined with percussion, bamboo flutes, guitar and electronica. The music is a mix ranging from Korean folk to jazz/rock. Could be considered post-rock. Mostly instrumental, with a few tracks with vocals (mostly traditional chanting). I’ve posted tracks by them here before. This is a live performance of a track from their first album Mask Dance.

https://youtu.be/kawOPq0jgOA

Staying on the instrumental side, I’ve been listening to a good amount of music by SONAR/Stephan Thelen. A lot to dive into. Seems like a limited selection on YouTube but the name makes it hard to search for. I’ll suggest the title track from the album Black Light.

https://youtu.be/s3nv2jvyO68

The Tea Club is a band I learned about on PA maybe 6 years ago or so, starting with the album Grappling, but really took hold with me with their 2019 album If/When. I saw them as the opening act for Thank You Scientist and the highlight was the 25+ minute Creature. Too long for a playlist so I’ll go with Rivermen from that album.

https://youtu.be/Xd6WP1_9aLQ

I’ll stop for now as I got to get back to real life. Ha. A couple of artists that would be in top 7 have been mentioned above, Swans and Motorpsycho. Also, because Lewian mentioned and posted some tracks by them in another thread earlier this year, I’ve been listening to a fair amount of Kong and got their digital catalogue from Bandcamp. Some longstanding prog groups that are among frequent listens are King Crimson, Yes, Rush, and Marillion. I recently went through attempting to listen to all of Yes’s releases from the last 40 years and there’s some bad stuff there (first time at Open Your Eyes). Makes the recent album seem more than okay. It’s all relative, but that just made me listen more to their 70’s stuff. Kind of like cleansing the palate.

Wow, the playlist has 52 entries now. Again, not a requirement, but Drew, if you want to add specific tracks (one per album) for your band choices (one track per act), I would love to add those to the youtube playlist I posted and listen to them. I like the added interactivity that sharing specific tracks can bring. I love communal listening room type topics, The Interactive Polls, and I love those recommendation thread type topics where the recommendations are commented on. I know for some, especially audiophiles listening to youtube is not ideal, some like full albums, and some have technical issues with playing videos on youtube. With a topic like this and so much music, I would not expect anyone to listen through the whole playlist and there are no expectations for anyone to check out that music (definitely nice to see the back and forth discussion on the choices, be they the bands, track or albums, when it happens. The usual for discussion threads)...

^^ Thanks very much George. Loved reading through that and I hear-forward (if that is a term) to listening to your selections.

^^^ Thanks, Jared very much. It's quite a bit of effort to respond like that and I appreciate all the people here for taking the time to mention these favourites.
I love the insight it gives me into others, and feeling like I am sharing in that experience. I love the kind of communal listening room type topics and ones where I feel people share their passions and experiences in a way that goes beyond just a simple list. I get the fuzzies from this topic, or maybe that's just my furry costume (I'm not a furry; just being silly)

Your listing helps to demonstrate the diversity of listening when it comes to those bands (at least to me). I had hoped that some might take the time to comment on other people's selections and mention their own favourites, by the way.

I really like Obscured By Clouds and More (which I have argued for as underrated), but a lot who know Floyd's bigger releases will have missed or ignored those soundtrack albums. I have pretty much ignored the post The Wall ones despite Pink Floyd having been my favourite band for several years.

Camel's Beyond Today is nice. I have not listened to Camel that much beyond the first four studio albums and A Live Record. And actually I have not listened to Camel much in almost two decades because my tastes were then shifting to more experimental progressive avenues. I plan to return more to Camel again.

With VdGG, I have listened to Present once before in full, I think, and that would have been much closer to the times of its release than now. The year that came out is the year I started to get into VdGG in any serious way. It had started with me hearing and loving House With No Door and Man-Erg in 2005. My most listened to album by VdGG surely has been The Least We Can Do Is Wave to Each Other followed by Pawn Hearts (with Plague my the pinnacle of VdGG for me) and then H to H. I have not spent nearly so much time with any of the other albums and those are the only albums that I feel I really have internalised. I have given multiple spins to all up to and including The Quiet Zone / The Pleasure Dome. Present is a rather lowly rated album in VdGG's discography, and of course not one of the best known. Anyway, that track I do rather remember, the name for sure, and having listened again, it is terrific! Really glad to have listened to that so early this morning (thank God for insomnia).

Renaissance's Golden Thread: I love this and had not given Illusion the time I perhaps should have. I like the Jane & Keith Relf version of Renaissance. And this immediately has become my favourite Renaissance song.

Jethro Tull:   Great choice, I had not heard the live album before, but Aqualung definitely has been my most listened to Jethro Tull album. I only included the Dambuster March segment in the playlist sadly. The whole live album is on youtube.

Pink Floyd: I'd like to hear that boxset. I like the Relics compilation a lot, and More and Obscured by Clouds, but have not heard Endless River. The first album I ever bought, by the way, was the compilation album Works.

BJH: I like that choice of track an awful lot. Very glad to have checked it out.

Mike Oldfield: I did not listen to all of Taurus II yet, but I enjoyed it.

As for embeds, there's no need. That's why I made the playlist. Hyperlinks are great if one can do it, but it's very easy to search on youtube. Lots of embed videos can make threads really difficult or impossible to load, so I had asked people not to do embeds. No harm in the ones being here that are methinks, but I wanted to minimise it. I have had complaints before with topics with lots of embeds that people can't open them. I have very good internet service (both with Wifi and cellphone) so I had not experienced that, that is until I got an iPhone recently. It was an issue I have since worked out.

Again, huge thanks and appreciation to all who have posted here and I do plan to get around to listening to all of the mentions at some time, but I don't expect to comment on all. Just a time factor and that I rarely have much of substance to say.

Edited by Logan - August 03 2023 at 08:10

suitkees wrote: - Of TheGazzardian, it is the Devin Townsend and Major Parkinson's tracks that I enjoyed the most.

Edited by TheGazzardian - August 03 2023 at 13:25