I don’t think any CD I ever wanted enough to buy was less than $16. My family was poor so cassette tapes were still a thing for quite a while.
By the time I could start thinking about affording CDs, I’d already seen the movie Hackers (1994) and was convinced everything would be digital really fucking fast.
It’s 1999 and I’m standing in a music store listening to a few new albums I might buy, while talking with the other audio nerds about upcoming releases and musicians I haven’t even heard of before.
I kinda miss it. Like Libraries, but I get to buy and keep whatever I enjoy.
There were so many shitty albums I bought for $16 in the early 90s (even worse, that's like $30 now) and had the exact experience in the meme. Things like we loved the first Suicidal Tendencies album, bought the second and were 'wtf is this?' The only way we had to pick out death metal was based on the cover art and record label... put it in the CD player, okay, good guitar sound... just have to wait until the guy sings.... that pretty much decided it.
“Fuck that shit. We’ll fire the singer that put us on the map because she was only supposed to be a back-up, and then we’ll go full techno”.
(as you may guess, I never got over it. Also, I know this full-techno song was still w/ Liv Kristine, but they stayed techno-ey and I picked a song I don’t actually hate)
I tried to listen the song and it’s not really my cup of tea. It felt almost psychedelic.
I for the most cases , don’t enjoy any screaming and neither vocals for that matter. That’s why I mostly will only listen to instrumental pieces of the metal genre like the doom ost. Nothing else matters is an exception but that song is more of ballad.
The part from 1:09 to 1:18 was a pleasant surprise to my ears. The woman seems very talented and I totally understand why you’d feel like a it was a huge waste to fire her.
The start of the instrumental transported my mind into a bandit filled wasteland world. It’d fit soo well into ashe 2063 ( a free doom full conversions game that I highly recommend ) or at least watch a playthrough of. I guarantee you’d play it after watching a few minutes.
If you like that at all, their Aegis album features her much more heavily, if with somewhat less “growl”. She also has had a few bands since that did “okay” in Norway. Leaves’ Eyes does gothic twist on some traditional celtic.
Also, “Beauty and the Beast” death/doom are hard to find, but Cradle of Filth had a few phenomenal songs of that genre. Nymphetamine Fix is my favorite of theirs. It’s so hard to find good death or doom that fit my tastes.
I watched a little LP of ashe 2063. FPS’s don’t work well with me, but it seemed interesting. Me with gaming seems like you with music :) I don’t like “vocals” (action reflex games)
The dude growling voice wasn’t that bad the first time he sang. Later parts weren’t as good tho. The part at 1:22 till 1:45 was my favorite. Really digging the folklore feel.
I actually have really bad reflexes but most games allow to toggle the difficulty and juste enjoy the story with the exploration as the reward, not passing the challenges. I wish it was as easy to toggle the vocals off. So many songs I deeply enjoyed until someone sang and removed any joy listening to it, so i end up playing that first part over and over.
Yeah, IMO it’s definitely a step down from the growl voices I like, ex. Peter Steele or Raymond Rohonyi (but had to look him up, which shows how much more I respect Liv Kristine than him)
As for vocals. I’m so attached to vocals it’s hard for me to relate. Most music I listen to are the type of person you can immediately recognize if they sing a totally random song acapella. Everything from Enya to Celine Dion, Maynard to Trent Reznor to Peter Steele. Even bands I “kind of like” have that in common.
“Oh my god, that sounds like…” <–if I can’t say that if they do a cover or new release and I didn’t know, then I probably don’t like it.
We’re polar opposite. Nevertheless, I don’t hate all vocals, Celine Dion is indeed a phenomenal singer , but not everyone is a good singer nor have a good voice, and even then, the lyrics can be a turn-off. I have hyperphantasia and my mind tend to wonder whenever I listen to any song, vocal more often than not disrupt the process. My favorite genre is chiptune music.
With a new band you never know. It could be a low, murky graaar like Immolation or Bolt Thrower… or a higher pitch like most Entombed (I prefer Clandestine where some bassist from another band sang, but most people don’t, for some reason). Or it could be like Deicide where the singer is mainly good then they cheapen it with this cheesy high pitched thing…. Carcass where the singer is h medium pitched and sounds good, then they also have a low guttural voice thrown in here and there, which was alright. Or maybe all is well and it’s the perfect Morbid Angel vocals.
Fucking Death metal was my counter to shitty alternative albums with one hit…30 years later I’m still a fan of grindcore/death metal/stoner metal…thank god for Relapse Records.
Discovery of new music is so much easier now with Spotify/YouTube/etc. In the past you had a slim-to-none chance of coming across a band/artist/album outside your local scene, no matter what the genre. Back then you kind of had to be “in the know” for that to happen.
Spotify maybe, I’ve never used it. And Google Play music used to be the best for this, but YouTube music has me stuck in a loop of my last 10 or 20 songs and I hate it.
If I’m listening to some techno, and I change gears to old school country/bluegrass for awhile, then, YouTube will never ever recommend techno to me again. Not unless I manually remember some of my favorite songs, search for them, and retrain it that I like techno. But then of course country slowly dies. God forbid I mix in hard rock, punk rock, or rap. It just confuses it more.
And it’s not just a genre problem, even within a genre of repeats the same dozen or two songs every time I open the app.
It’s not just me, I have a family plan and my brothers have both separately complained to me about the algorithms being worse than Google Play music, which is what we used to use.
I literally created a playlist called YouTube music sucks, where I save my most liked songs, so I can reseed the algorithm when I want a change of tunes. I need the playlist because I have a terrible memory and can’t remember all the songs I’ve liked.
Why don’t I change? Because I’m cheap, and it’s bundled with YouTube premium for the whole family. And it has no right to be as bad as it is. I keep thinking they’re gonna fix it, but I guess maybe people like being spoon fed their last 20 liked songs?
Spotify is really good with recommendations. I think they use different algorithms for the different personal playlists: the Release Radar seems to use my followed artists and all my playlists, while Discover Weekly uses my recent listening history.
Me too. That is when I discovered the rarest Nirvana song of all time. It was Freak by Silverchair. It took me an hour to download it.
I also had the entire collection of songs Bill Clinton sang about blowjobs and Monica Lewinsky. Like, literally that’s all the dude sang about. Talk about being obsessed.
I could go on. What a great time it was to be alive.
I bought 3 Monster Magnet albums for Sugar Ray’s Mean Machine…on the plus side FUCKING Monster Magnet led me to The Atomic Bitchwax, Nebula, Kyuss, Low Rider, Fu Manchu, Orange Goblin, Dozer, Spiritual Beggars and more Stoner fun.
I dubbed mix tapes off the radio in the early 90s and got into burning CDs in the late 90s. I was a cheap ass pirate even back in the day. Also ripped a LOT of my friends CDs to cassette tape. My dad used to buy packs wholesale.
Reminds me of boxed software, too. You check the compatibility, the features that included one must-have new feature. Buy it and discover what vaporware is. It started me on the ethics of pirating, finding out if it actually works, and then, and only then, buying a real copy. I donate to developers on Linux, now.
I mean, it really only started to take off with eDonkey. napster was still very slow and so much malware disguised as mp3 files.
You didn’t even have to think about storage solutions. Even if i had my ISDN Connection bundled ( no phone line free for calls then ), the speed was max 128 Kbps.
Sorry, i suddenly remembered these details, from a long long time ago.
50% were laid off. This after Songtradr had commited to keep the Bandcamp experience the same.
The union was for nothing. Epic just sold, before any agreement wss made and again a few made a lot, while employees must endure whatever comes.
This fucking sucks big time.
The Internet as we knew it, is fading away and we just can hope that our privacy and an open internet are not only things we remember fondly, in a few years.
I just got to college in 2000 and had highspeed Napster. From there I found some sketch Russian site I could get music from for a few years in the early 2000s but there was also a huge used CD store in my college town with reasonable prices I used to frequent. Now days if I want to find a bunch of new music I dont know, Usenet for the win. But honestly most of the stuff I like is on bandcamp usually and I will go buy the bands I find on use net. My best discovery has been Brant Bjork (he played drums in Kyuss but makes chill ass rock) and PallBearer and Arkansas doom band that is pretty great. I have since purchased their catalogue on Vinyl, mostly on band camp because it is hard to find in stores.
In the 2000s i was always looking for music and found a Forum from Ukraine called FunkySouls that covered all new releases and was active until a few days after Russia invaded. There were some threads with excellent taste and i really miss those guys.
After i found that Moon Wiring Club was on Bandcamp, i took a look around and found a lot of good music. When i buy something, it’s usually from Bandcamp.
I saw Kyuss live a loong time ago, thanks for the tip. This made me think of Boris’ new EP “me when the when i”. They were always a tad too experimental for me to keep them on repeat. Their newest album though, is a very very smooth release - chill ass rock describes it perfectly.
I also stumbled on the label subsist on Bandcamp some time ago and have gotten almost all releases and eagerly waiting for new releases. Excellent raw electronics.
Oh, they weren’t mp3 files. Iirc it was stuff like darude-sandstorm-live-mp3.exe or eminem-without-me-mp3.exe.
It wasn’t Napster’s fault, ISDN at the time was what most people had. 1 internet + 1 phone line. You got online with max 68 Kbps. Bundling both lines got you 128 Kbps, then the phone line would be obviously busy giving you more speed, rendering the phone unusable.
Those were fun times in households with more than 1 member.
The sad truth. I threw out my CD binders at least 10 years ago. I still have some of that uploaded to the cloud, but I’ve swapped provider a few times and probably lost some.
And more often, I Just listen on spotify or youtube music.
discogs is the shit. fuck spotify, and their corporate plants in every other “personalized” playlist they generate. at least you have something to show for your money 25 years later and a company can’t decide to arbitrarily stop offering the music etc.
Oh I would listen the shit album 100 times and memorize the lyrics for each song. It might have been bad album, but it was mine and I was so excited to bring it home.
Alternate take - spend 3 minutes downloading a 3 minute song. Buy the album. The rest of the album blows. You just worked for two hours to pay for it in your minimum wage after school casual job
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