0.10.1 - I want to be well, I want to be well
I listened to For Your Broken Heart because it was the Reba album which appeared on my "list of best albums I should listen to" which I pivoted away from back in January; I like Reba's version of country and this seemed fine, but I listened to it at 3am sat in the dark in my office feeling crappy so I can't say I liked it more than Rumour Has It because this album doesn't have Fancy on it.
From there, I moved to Faith Hill, who's a country singing woman who I really only know of. Until this week, 100% of the Faith Hill music I had heard came from clips in the ToddInTheShadows video on her disastrous album Cry and I like a lot of country rock women so I figured I owed her a fair shake. By comparison to the Reba album, Breathe felt extremely safe, middle of the road, super-soft rock with nothing remotely threatening about it, which is probably why it was successful. Not something I wanted to go back to though.
One of the things I do when I am sick is watch comfort TV shows. For reasons passing understanding, I've watched the first few episodes of the first season of Angel* this week; that made me think about vampires, which made me think about the videogame Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines which in turn reminded me that one of the nightclubs in that game plays a Lacuna Coil song on repeat which is what made me listen to Lacuna Coil. However, because my brain isn't functioning right now, I didn't listen to the album with that song on (Comalies from 2002), but instead Karmacode from a few years later.
I like melodic metal - there's something incredibly pleasing about the contrast between heavy guitars, pulsing bass, and pounding metal drums combined with clear, precise female vocals over the top - it's like cold ice cream on hot apple pie. Lacuna Coil were the first melodic metal band I really got into, and I think Karmacode is their best album. Not much more to say.
From one melodic metal act to another, Within Temptation came into my musical sphere from someone giving me a bunch of DVD-Rs with like 300 mp3 albums on there in various genres, and me just picking around at random. The Silent Force is the album I initially listened to, and the one I go back to the most, and like Lacuna Coil above, it's excellent melodic metal - this is what it sounds like when you take something like Evanescence and really lean into the metal aspect of it.
Finishing our melodic metal threesome, I said I thought I would prefer an Epica album which was not a live album so I picked a studio album basically at random, and enjoyed it much in the same way as I did the two albums above. Requiem for the Indifferent did very much what Omega Alive did - felt like a battle cry for a fictional war for much of it - and since there is a new Epica album coming this year, I'm sure I'll be back to them again soon. Their albums are consistently long, I will say that.
I'm retroactively annoyed at myself for listening to Alice In Chains Dirt this week but I panicked and just picked comfort. I've got a lot of thoughts about this band, and this is the album of theirs I first listened to, but I have no time or energy here. I'll circle back for it when I do AIC properly. I spent a lot of time listening to it this time wondering about what the process of taking 'I have generational childhood trauma and an ongoing heroin addiction which is killing me' and turning it into a successful set of 13 songs looks like. More than any drug awareness campaign, this album made me pretty sure I had no interest in heroin should any cross my path (it never did). [[Editors note, I've just realised I wrote about Dirt in my 2017 ramblings, so read that maybe?]]
Finally, I listened to The Sickness both to put a button on the topic, and because I had written about it before so I can just link you to that article.
I'm not wild about the FINNEAS album, if I am honest, For Cryin' Out Loud isn't a stinker, but it's very much in the vein of kind of emo pop which you can find littered indistinguishably across the musical landscape; this is the kind of music that Harry Styles, for example, has risen above making, and Zayn Malik has not. You would think that as Billie Eilish's older brother, he'd be more avant garde and interesting in his musical production, but maybe that's an unfair comparison. Fine, but forgettable.
Both of the girl in red albums were more interesting to me. if i could make it go quiet is a bit ahead of it's time in 2021, landing somewhere between the boygenius/Mitski sound and your Taylor Swift mainstream pop in a kind of musical lane that Gracie Abrams has occupied now (which makes sense as both of them opened for Taylor at various points of the Eras tour); I'M DOING IT AGAIN, BABY! leans more towards the Singer/Songwriter side of the fence she is straddling, but honestly both albums have something interesting to offer. She's big enough to merit a Sabrina Carpenter collab on her second album, but not big enough that I had heard anything about her in passing, and this is exactly why these kind of recommendations are so valuable - both of these albums have been flagged for further investigation because I enjoyed them so much, and I'm looking forward to telling the Eldest Niece how good her musical taste is the next time I see her.
Right, I am going back to bed.
*Yes, I know Joss Whedon is a terrible person, this show was formative for me, leave me alone.
