Not Mentioned In This Post: Alabama, Oranges, Grapes, Powerbars, Warm Dr. Pepper

what i'm listening to right now: Am I A Good Man by Them Two

I've been spending most of my sick day today downloading music off Soulseek. Is that an admission of illegally downloading music? I guess it is. Maybe I should scratch that. I really wanted to hear "Something Else By The Kinks" without getting up and going to the record player, so I downloaded that, and some songs by The Toadies. I was approaching this with trepidation as much as you are kinda recoiling from the thought of '90s post grunge/major label cash grab/teenage angst flashbacks. But I was kinda convinced through a mix of nostalgia and an excellent review of it I found while going through the Cokemachineglow archives. (There's also a positive review of Blind Melon's Soup that vindicated it's inclusion on my Top Ten High School Albums.) And I'm glad I was convinced. It's great. Damn. I'm really surprised by how well this has held up in the ensuing thirteen years. It's all pile driver rocking that bands today don't seem to have a handle on anymore. The last Strokes album did something similar, but to a weird conclusion. It didn't seem like they were supposed to be doing that stuff, the whole way through, it was like "Really, you're rocking this hard? Are you in the right place?" Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Then, I found what I'm going to be spending the majority of my disposable income on. The Numero Group has been releasing this series of compilations under the moniker of Eccentric Soul. They're compilations of long lost soul recordings, all the rewards of crate digging for obscure records without all the dust and actual crate digging. I've downloaded a few samples, and I've been completely blown away. It's some fantastic stuff, I'm particularly smitten with the first track off the Deep City Label disc by Them Two. It's smoky soul, like if Marvin Gaye stepped in for either Sam or Dave, and put some string drenching Philly soul behind it. The few tracks I've heard off the Twinight album are even more impressive. A sort of Chicago answer to Motown, with an amazing house band and a stable of soulful singers.


So I'm gonna go and buy these albums, unlike the Toadies or the Kinks album that I downloaded today, both of which I own in a different format (vinyl and cassette respectively, though I couldn't tell you where that cassette might be, if I in fact still have it). See, RIAA, I use downloading as a road map to what I'm going to buy. If you would just go into my living room and see all of the stuff I've bought, and measure that against what I've illegally downloaded, I think you wouldn't mind it so much. At any rate, I don't think the labels I try to support are even involved in the RIAA anyway, so maybe they're just mad that I won't buy they're ten thousandth Elton John greatest hits collection, or maybe something from that emo band that stole their name from Milhouse's superhero movie sidekick persona.