Today’s Random Album of the Day is An Introduction to Elliott Smith featuring, well, Elliott Smith. I haven’t listened enough to Elliott Smith so here is an opportunity. Elliott Smith’s music is aptly described as melancholic. But it’s melodic and delightful too. I guess it’s Indie Folk or Indie Folk Rock.Whatever it is it is well regarded and for good reason.
I do enjoy his music. I think I tend to lose focus on it quickly. It’s not grab your attention music. It’s more I’m having a shitty day and let’s listen to some sad music that helps me somehow feel better music. And it works. It’s all unsurprisingly excellent. Definitely music I could get more into with more listens.
Rating: 9.5
Favorite Track(s): “Ballad of Big Nothing” is a good opener. Anthemic feeling. “Waltz #2” is just a good song. “Pictures of Me” is good unsurprisingly. By “Between the Bars” I’m good and depressed but in a good way. I really like “Last Call”. “Twilight” is gorgeous. “Angel In The Snow” is a song I think I knew before. But I like it. “Happiness” has a nice upward tilt to it.
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: