The Audacity!

The trick is to not do that, or listen to one of the thousands of radio stations that only play the highest rated songs in their genre’s charts on a set loop all day. The same song three times in less than two hours is not good DJ-ing, guys!

I have been listening to a lot more music these past couple of weeks though, and a pretty varied range of music at that. It is my firm belief that if your iTunes library doesn’t at some point go from chiptune to rock opera to heartbreakingly mellow piano refrain to true Scottish pirate metal and back again — without the use of the shuffle feature — then you have taken an extremely wrong turn somewhere along the line. As such I’ve never really felt comfortable recommending music to people, because half the time I end up harping on about something a little too… subjective would probably be a good word. Not obscure, not eclectic (which is to say certainly eclectic, but no more than anyone else’s tastes), but just a little too far out of the other person’s idea of noises they want in their ears.

I do feel fairly confident in recommending one band I’ve been listening to with increasing frequency of late, mainly because I also feel fairly confident that many of you may have heard of them, in some form or other: The Real Tuesday Weld. In particular I’ve kinda fallen in love with their album The Last Werewolf — it has an incredible mixture of tunes ranging from beautifully melancholic to upbeat and swinging, and is wonderfully paced overall. If you’re looking for a listen, the little “Click to Listen” button at the top of their site will let you play 5 songs from the album, which act as a good taster for it as a whole. (I’d especially recommend checking out “The Hunt” but be warned: language!)

And if you still aren’t inclined to click through to give them a listen, this snippet from their bio page should help paint a picture of what you can expect:
“Originally inspired by a dream of British 1930s crooner Al Bowlly and the American actress Tuesday Weld, Stephen Coates and his band of dreamers began to try to re-create the music he heard in his childhood home – ‘the crackling of radios playing swing and early jazz in a distant room.’”

Yeah. Also that’s another reason I don’t often recommend music to people: I tend to go on a little longer than I probably ought to. And then I get looks.