Today’s Random Album of the Day is a compilation called Some Women featuring 54 songs performed by 39 artists. It is 2.5 hours long. So putting this album together was quite the undertaking!
The premise is interesting. All of the songs are composed based on a column written by a journalist for Portsmouth, NH’s The Wire newspaper. The columns are collected into a book here. That is all I know about it but for some reason why is it that compilations are often structured wrong so that they don’t flag as compilations or they don’t list the artists correctly. I had to copy the artist information into the artist tags for all 54 songs.
It’s hard to pick a favorite song. With 54 songs I’d need to listen multiple times and I don’t have time for that today. So I’ll just say this album is really quite good. Lots of good songs. Really impressive how they turned the columns into songs – and good songs. It’s almost entirely Folk (maybe Indie Folk) for what it’s worth. But good Folk. Good Indie Folk. With a scattering of non-folk. In fact some of the best songs are the non-folk stuff.
The sound quality is excellent. I think it’s impressive to get 54 songs together with good sound quality into a compilation project like this. I can’t imagine the logistics of it all. Just having to communicate with 39 different artists is a lot of work. But compiling their work, stitching it together, etc.. is all a major project.
Of course with 54 songs, you’re bound to have a couple of dud songs. And you do. But very few considering how many songs there are and how many different artists.
Rating: 9.8. High for concept well done!
Favorite Track(s): Maybe Luella. So many good ones though.
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: