Today’s Random Album of the Day is Outside, the Great Drought from Hyena. I forgot how I acquired this. And I haven’t listened in years so this will be good to hear.
I wasn’t able to find this on Rate Your Music but I did find it on Discogs. I found a review on Soundohm but no stream. Sorry for lack of a stream. So far I’d say this is experimental rock and somewhere between noise rock and folk rock. Definitely indie rock on all fronts.
This album has a good kind of weirdness. I see the 60s inspiration referenced in the Soundohm review. It is definitely there. It’s weird in a good way though and in the end I liked the album. Even when songs have parts I don’t love, they tend to rebound into something I do like. It isn’t exactly a melodic album. More chaotic with occasional melodies mixed in. But if you like experimental rock this is really quite exquisite.
The more I listen to this the more I like it. Yes it’s complicated in a sense. In a very good sense. And definitely a work of art.
Rating: 9.1
Favorite Track(s): “Salutations” is interestingly fun, “Portraits” is good, “I Eat Your Words” is spectacularly complex, “Stilts” because of the weird bit about oil lol
Keep or Trash: Keep. Mainly because I’m 90% sure we have this on vinyl. So I don’t want to delete the digital version because I like having both for stuff in our collection. Plus I liked it. And it’s very much a work of art worth keeping as well.
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: