I don’t know if Taylor Swift has a Dirty Computer or Karuki Zaamen Kuri no Hana in her, but it feels like she’s tip-toeing in that direction. I doubt she’d ever go fully weird because her branding is too big to fail.
Judy Tenuta, Buy This, Pigs!
I’ve known about Judy Tenuta since high school, but my media consumption somehow managed never to cross paths with her stand-up. YouTube has since rectified that, and upon hearing the news of her passing, I felt compelled to seek out her comedy debut album, which has so far never been reissued on CD or fully digitized on a streaming platform.
Huey Lewis and the News, Picture This
Sports is the 800-pound gorilla in the Huey Lewis and the News oeuvre, but Picture This is no slouch either. I rather thank it’s been unfairly overshadowed by its immediate descendant.
Hajime Chitose, Shima Kyora Umui
It’s taken me 20 years to purchase an actual physical copy of this album. Hajime’s major label career has mostly ignored these earlier youthful recordings, but they’re super informative on her singing style, let alone how well she adapted it to a pop setting.
Royal Wood, What Tomorrow Brings
Wood calls this album the first he’s didn’t abandon, paraphrasing the quote: “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” It definitely shows. He makes some slight but adventurous tweaks to his sound, incorporating more synths and drum machines without losing his folk crooner vibe.
Miami Sound Machine, Primitive Love
The singles from this album were ubiquitous at the time, which dissuaded both my brother and me from staking claim on it. Enough time has passed to reveal those singles to be incredibly durable and fitting well with the album on the whole.
The Dismemberment Plan, Emergency & I
You kinda need to have this album if you remotely like Changes.
I spent years filing The Dismemberment Plan’s albums at Waterloo Records, and I don’t think I ever listened to their music. So I picked up Change at the thrift store purely out of curiosity. Listening to this album transported me back to those record store days in the early 2000s.
The Ordinaires, One
I owned this album on cassette, and I actually liked it at the time. The only problem was I liked a lot of other albums at the same time a bit more. In a crunch for cash, I sold it. But the band’s cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” has haunted me ever since. So I picked it up on vinyl at the Northwest Record Show, then eventually on CD.
Anton Bruckner, Symphonies Nos. 1-9 (Staatskapel Dresden, Eugene Jochum)
I had an unofficial goal of collecting Bruckner symphonies on my visits to thrift shops until this budget boxed set showed up at Lifelong. ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED! I learned about Bruckner in college, but I didn’t feel compelled to explore his work because of a joke: he wrote nine symphonies at one time, or one symphony nine times.
Soundtrack, Death Note
I’ve been dragging my feet on getting this soundtrack for nearly a decade now, but what finally spurred me to take action was a vinyl reissue from Tiger Lab.
Gary Numan, The Pleasure Principle
I bugged my mom to buy me the 7-inch single of “Cars” when I was 8 years old, but by the time I started collecting on my own 5 years later, Gary Numan felt like ancient history. The Pleasure Principle has grown in stature since then, so it was high time I followed up on that single purchase.
Clipse, Lord Willin’
Yeah, I went through a Neptunes phase in the early 2000s, but this album slipped through my grasp. 2002 was a fruitful year in music, so it faced a lot of competition.
Billie Eilish, WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?
Now that everyone else has published their best of 2019 lists, I get to play catch up with everything I’ve been ignoring. So far, only Billie Eilish has managed to punch through.
Peter Gabriel, Us
I probably wouldn’t have come around to this album if I hadn’t run across Secret World Live first. Us got middling reviews, but I find it hits more than it misses.