various artists

All posts tagged various artists

Random Album of the Day

Today’s Bonus Album of the Day is Boozoo Hoodoo! The Songs of Boozoo Chavis. This is a compilation of bands covering Boozoo Chavis’ songs and obviously a tribute to Boozoo Chavis. Boozoo Chavis was a Zydeco musician.

I love to dance to Zydeco, or at least I used to before I became chronically ill. I have many fond memories of the all night Zydeco tent at the Great Blue Heron Festival. But those days are long past and the truth is I don’t casually listen to Zydeco. Still nice to have some around though and this seems like a solid album. But with all that said, I am absolutely no expert when it comes to Zydeco. I barely know it. So take opinions herein with an even greater pinch of salt than usual.

And so I like this. I wish I could still dance to it. Hopefully yinz enjoy this compilation! I did.

Rating: 9.6

Favorite Track(s): To no surprise, Beausoleil does a good version of “Bye Bye Jole”. Marcia Ball does an excellent job with “Dance All Night” which is a great tune. Honestly it all sounds fine to me. Steve Riley & The Mamou Playboys do a great job with “Uncle Bud”. As I said, it pretty much all sounds good.

Keep or Trash: Keep.

Continue Reading
Random Album of the Day

Today’s first Random Album of the Day is a compilation of tribute songs to Bjork called Hush. I’ve always liked this album and it is very apt as we just did a Band Jam league round with Icelandic music and of course Bjork was ever-present…

Why do so many compilations have the artist information listed weird? This is another one where I have to manually fix it. But it’s a great album. Lots of great musicians. I would have thought that covering Bjork would be hard with her uniqueness – but her songs clearly hold up with a diversity of styles and sounds. Not everyone pulled it off but none of the songs are bad.

For whatever reason several of these songs are on our Christmas list. They just have the right treble I guess for Christmas-time.

Rating: 9.6

Favorite Track(s): “It’s Oh So Quiet” from Noise for Pretend is well done! “Hyper-Ballad” is excellently done! “The Hunter” is another impressive cover. “You’ve been Flirting Again” from Corrina Rapp is great. “Human Behavior” from the Decemberists is so Decemberists meaning it’s good. “Unravel” is well done by Bobby Birdman. “In The Musicals” is also excellent.

Keep or Trash: Keep. A worthwhile compilation.

Continue Reading
Random Album of the Day

Today’s Random Album of the Day is the If a Tree Falls compilation. This is a compilation of music around saving forests. Yes, it’s hippy music. And yes we need to save our forests which are currently under threat!

Currently our National Forests, our National Parks, all Federal Lands are at risk. They are attempting to sell them, to clearcut them. to drill them, to mine them. Evil has been unleashed upon the land and they are doing awful things.

Rating: 9.5

Favorite Track(s): This is biased but I’m just going to say “Trees” from Robert Hoyt. Robert was an old friend so I’m biased. I also really like Joanne Rand’s “Never Alone”. I do like most of the album. Alice DicMicele’s “Defend the Earth” is an old favorite. And we’ve got some great guest appearances from Hank Williams Jr., Jello Biafra, and Mojo Nixon among others… And of course “You Can’t Clearcut Your Way to Heaven” from Darryl Cherney is a classic tree lovers song!

Keep or Trash: Keep.

And if you follow the second song here you can find all of the songs from the album…

Continue Reading
Random Album of the Day

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.

Continue Reading
Random Album of the Day

Today’s Random Album of the Day is a compilation from various artists. This is the Slow Rack Sampler from Badman Recording Company, I don’t ever listen to various artist compilations. So I’m glad to see them come up on the Random Album of the Day. I just don’t naturally seek them out. But sometimes they do really rock.

As a Slow Rock Sampler this is pretty chill overall. Which isn’t bad for the morning. None of these songs knock me off my chair. But only like one of them makes me want to march off in disgust either. Still, there are songs I didn’t love. There are songs I liked. I guess what you’d expect from a compilation that isn’t entirely in your wheelhouse.

Rating: 7.0

Favorite Track(s): “Home by Saturday”. I’ve always liked Hayden. “Wax Museum” from Read Thread is good. I like the guitar riff. “Hollow Heart” from N. Lannon is peaceful. I liked “Impossible” from Pleasant Grove. I liked “Brightness” from Lanterna. And it was nice to hear a woman’s voice on “Tomorrow On the Runway” from the Innocence Mission.

Keep or Trash: Trash. Honestly it’s a higher threshold to keep a various artist compilation. I have to like it more to keep it than a stand alone album. And this doesn’t meet that higher threshold for me. There is no song I absolutely love and must have. The album itself is fine but not spectacular. And so forth… If I ever feel the need to hear this album (won’t happen) I’ve reconstructed in streaming links below.

I could not find this, but I found ALL of the songs separately so here are links to stream THE songs in the order that they are on the compilation…

Continue Reading