Poll - Top Albums of 2023
(lemmy.ca)
4
Invidious link to listen for free.
It’s time for album club #5! I'm a few days late with this one, and have also decided to switch the format to monthly instead of every 2 weeks. If we start getting more participation I might look at increasing the frequency again.
This week I went with a Canadian classic. D.O.A.'s Hardcore 81. The album that lent it's name to a genre. Released in 1981, this was D.O.A.'s second album. Formed in 1978, by this point in their career the band had already opened for the Clash, and toured extensively around California with some of the other founders of hardcore punk. They would soon lose a drummer to Black Flag, and go through some lineup changes of their own. In the middle of all of that, they released what is likely their best album, Hardcore 81.
This post will stay pinned for a month, in order for anyone interested to leave their thoughts on the album. December 31st will see the launch of Album Club #6.
On the punk side of things, with kicking off the first Album Club, the top pick goes to Mush by Leatherface.
Outside of the genre though, colder weather often brings a lot more black metal/blackgaze into my rotation, so I've been revisiting Diorama by MØL. And of course it wouldn't be October with the Ghastly Ones making a fairly regular appearance.
Turns out Sunday Album Club #1 won't go out until Monday night, since I'm out of town/away from the internet this weekend.
Do you ever have those bands, where the name floats around forever, but for some reason you never actually get around to listening to them? Leatherface is one of those bands. This is the first time I've listened to an album start to finish, and it's really good! Don't know why it took me so long.
The Adverts - Crossing the Red Sea with the Adverts (1978)
I always have a hard time with favourites. It depends so much on mood or day of the week, and I could probably come up with at least a couple for every genre and sub-genre. However, the Adverts debut full length has always been near the top, ever since I first heard it in my early teenage years.
Since I'm not going to vote for my own pick for our first Album Club, I'll just throw my thoughts on the release in this first post here. Sort of a preview of the type of thing I'm hoping the album club threads will contain I guess.
1978 was an interesting year. The Sex Pistols abrasive angst kept going strong with bands like X-Ray Spex, Billy Idol was practicing his radio friendly pop in Generation X, and the Clash put out what might be my least favourite of their albums in Give em Enough Rope.
At the time, something about those original 11 tracks on Crossing the Red Sea, just seemed different. Better written, more poetic, deeper or something. Tracks like Safety in Numbers were already getting bored with the state of the current UK punk scene, as it started morphing into something different. Tracks like No Time to be 21, though nothing super original conceptually, just seemed to hit different. And of course they had a few of their previously released standard singles like One Chord Wonders.
Start to finish I think this is a solid album, and it's still in the regular rotation today. I've sadly never owned an original pressing, but finally picked up the 2011 gatefold reissue earlier this spring, which must be my 4 or 5th copy of this album over the years.
Awesome vocals!
I have a lot more indexers than that, and not much better luck. You really need a private torrent tracker if you want to automate books. Every few years I look into a way to automate it more like movies & TV with just usenet and public trackers, but every few years I don't turn up much. I have Readarr running, but it rarely finds anything except the most mainstream bestseller type results. Just doing things manually with something like Anna's Archive or Libgen is really the only thing that works well. Results for comics work better, but I can't stand Mylarr's interface, so have always just manually done that too when I have the urge.
This is not entirely uncommon due to versioning. The network TV version might have aired in a different order from the later released DVD boxset, or the US version aired in a different order than the EU version, etc. Instead of refreshing metadata, try using the Identify option. Under each of the results it will show the source, so pick the one that matches the episode order you want.
Spotify's model is basically how can we screw everyone, and keep the maximum for ourselves. Bandcamp is probably a better example, where artists actually get the bulk of the sales.
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This was the first time I actually sat down and listened to this album. After leaving Epitaph, I found Ixnay On the Hombre to be more miss than hit. After hearing Pretty Fly (for a White Guy) on the radio, I more or less wrote off the Offspring as a band I'd enjoy listening to anymore. I thought The Kids Aren't Alright was a pretty solid song, but it wasn't nearly enough to make me want to pick up the album.
That said, looking at it all these years later, it's not a terrible album. I still wouldn't put it in regular rotation, but it does have a few decent enough tracks. The Kids Aren't Alright is still probably the highlight for me, but the opening track, Have You Ever isn't bad, and No Breaks has a little of that old Offspring sound coming through. Overall, probably a 4/10 for me.