Today’s Random Album of the Day is another one from XDS (aka Experimental Dental School). This one is their latest album, Bicycle Ripper – their first album in 14 years. Facts like this make me feel as old as I am. I just bought this album recently actually. After 14 years they sound similar but different as one would expect. Still good is what matters.
XDS is noise rock or experimental rock. It’s both of course. This album brings a little less volume to it it feels like. But it still brings the noisy sound and a very experimental approach. Not disappointed at all. Very good.
Rating: 9.6
Favorite Track(s): “Hot Panther Cold Moon” evokes old school XDS to me. “Octave Cat Rainbow” has some good riffs. “Bicycle Ripper” unsurprisingly ripped. It’s got good tilt to it. “Dune Mellow” was excellent. “Worry Doll’s Blues” has an almost chill feeling to it – in a good way. “Shake Shadows” is good. etc…
Keep or Trash: Keep.
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: