Today’s Random Album of the Day is Clear Skies Over Black River from Liam the Younger, aka Liam Betson. This is melancholic singer-songwriter stuff. Rate Your Music lists it as Slacker Rock. It lists so many different things as Slacker Rock it seems. I think of it as Indie Folk.
This is heartfelt material. It’s quite good and appealing. A lot of the lyrics evoke powerful imagery or melancholic thoughts. The music is minimalist acoustic guitar mostly. It complements the emotive lyrics well. I like it. I’m an emo girl…
I like the album enough I played it twice!
Rating: 9.6
Favorite Track(s): “Leaving Black River” is sweet and sour and good. “Country Wide” evokes such imagery. I like that. “By The Pines” is also evocative. Love the perspective sung about in “Walking”. I won’t comment on every song, overall the album is very evocative. Even the closer “Clear Skies” hits my mood aptly. This album just works well for me.
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: