Emily's Albums A to Z

Listened: Thursday May 20

BRMC hold a special place in my heart – B.R.M.C. is an album that kept me sane in those years right out of college, those years where you flail around trying to make your way in the Real World.

BRMC are high up on the Loudest Shows I Have Ever Seen list. I also have memories of a short burly English guy in front of us when they opened for Spiritualized at the Warfield, rock-jigging happily through all their songs and howling for more when their set ended. The band was immediately very popular in Britain (I recall that Oasis talked them up a great deal so that helped), so I think this guy was really happy to be enjoying their show at the front of the crowd, since they were too popular for him to do so at home.

I love all the waves of reverb in their music, the propulsive tempos, and the spiritual feel of the lyrics. “Salvation” is one of my favorite songs ever.

Listened: Thursday May 20

Before you even get to the music, the cover art on Axis is just awesome. Jimi as Hindu Deity? Sweet!

This album is full of amazing sounds coming from Jimi’s guitar – Wait Until Tomorrow, Little Wing, Castles Made of Sand, Bold as Love. The band as a whole also sounds like a more cohesive unit than on their first album as well. This record is like a painting in sound, so the cover is completely appropriate.

Despite having some degree of writing ability – I was an English major at UC Berkeley, though my subsequent career path has never required much regular exercise for my writing muscles besides writing clear emails and occasional process documentation – I have never tried even once to blog in the past.

I just didn’t believe I would keep it up or have anything interesting to say for any length of time and I couldn’t fool myself into thinking I would, enough to actually get over the hump of creating a site.

I knew it would take some kind of conceit for it to have any chance of it working out and when I was trying to consciously think of a conceit, I couldn’t.

Yesterday I randomly decided to listen to all my albums I’ve ripped to my work computer (which represents 80-90% of my collection – I have a few CDs I didn’t rip and about 40 or so albums on vinyl) in order from A to Z.

I am an album person, I always have been. Of course there are some songs I can fixate on, like anyone else, but I really don’t enjoy setting my iPod to random. Never have. Once you get into the groove of a song, you are ripped away to some entirely different era, style, sound, or tempo. Maybe my collection is just too eclectic for the “random song” kick.

Today I considered that it might be fun to log the progress and comment as I go along (maybe not on every album, but just a couple of impressions per day as I progress through them). So here I am.

I really think this is going to take forever. It has been 2 work days and I am not out of the letter A yet. But we will see how it goes. I hope to keep it somewhat interesting, though it might devolve into my own stream of consciousness inside-joke nostalgia thing, I suppose.