Today’s Random Album of the Day is Tending Fires. This is a split record between Wood Spider and Niko and the Juggler Meadow Family Band. These bands are primarily folk punk.
Wood Spider have various stringed instruments and also qualify as Chamber Folk. It’s quite good stuff really. A weird mix of vocal aggression and harmonization with lovely string instrumentation. I think some songs could go on longer to be honest. Others are just right.
Niko & the Juggler Meadow Family Band is much more subdued. Still folk punk but less yelly and less tight as well. Much more violin or it at least sticks out more. I liked them and they fit my morning mood better to be honest. But they are less melodic and rhythmic. Which isn’t to say that they lack these things. Just not as smooth a sound as Wood Spider. The recording quality is not as good as for Wood Spider.
There is a “Hidden Track” from Wood Spider that I didn’t love but my wife didn’t hate it at first. Then said she was over it half way through. Then said she liked it. Which is about right.
Rating: 9.0
Favorite Track(s): City Song (Wood Spider). Dark Eyes (in New Orleans) (Wood Spider), It’s Been Colder (Niko & The Juggler Meadow Family Band), When I have Just Learned to Sew (Niko & The Juggler Meadow Family Band)
Keep or Trash: Keep. Good stuff. My wife was also a fan of this album which factors in obviously. She did prefer Wood Spider.
Background
Every day, or nearly every day anyhow, I will randomly select an album from my collection of digital music, listen to it, and share it here. – Jayne
My wife and I are board gamers and we gamify nearly everything in life. This includes our music listening. We use a dice catapult to roll dice and then use the dice results to pick our vinyl listens. So why not do something similar for the blog?
I have made the randomizer table I use for picking the album of the day available! What? It’s a simple table but uses some weird dice. If you are not familiar, if you say D30 that means a 30 sided die. These are the dice the randomizer table uses: D30, D4, D8, D10, D12, D14, and D20. The D14 and D30 are unique but you can buy cheap packs of dice with those in them off the internet.
The basic steps are to 1) roll the D30. That picks the starting letter or if it’s a number. 2) Then use the chart roll the die associated with the first letter to pick the second letter. If you get “Other” that means numbers or some other weird character. If none of those exist re-roll. 3) Once you have the second letter you can use that to roll for a third letter if needed. 4) That should get you down to a few artists and from there you pick dice based on the number of artists. 5) finally for the artist selected you roll a die for the number of albums listed. Then you have your Random Album to listen to….
Download the Random Album Selector Table here: