It’s the holiday season. It’s time for something having nothing to do with work. While I’m working, I enjoy listening to music. Some things hold up and some don’t. Here are somethings that have held up for me. And by hold up, I usually mean at least months. While I’ll give some basic hints as to their style, that’s generally where they start.
First, some things you can find in the magic YouTube box:
- The Emergent Order – Fear the Boom and Bust (Dead White Economists Rap). Got a nod from a big name hip hop star before her handlers drug her away.
- Zenga Zenga (Dance remix of a Qaddafi speech). My 9 year old daughter fell in love with this about 15 seconds into it. I’m known to loop the thing.
And then some full albums
- Josh Garrels – Love & Ware & The Sea in Between – I backed into Christianity Today’s article giving this the album of the year. They termed Josh ‘Weird Folk’. Hmmm… Christianity Today complimenting something by calling it ‘Weird Folk’. My ears perked up. When I hit ‘free download’, I grabbed it. Unlike most free downloads, this was a keeper. Zip over to http://joshgarrels.com and download it. Just do it. Only have time to download or read the rest of this list? Do the download.
- Rodrigo Y Gabriela – 11:11 (Dueling/cooperating spanish guitars). Their previous albums are good with originals and covers of rock standards but nothing to write home about. On this album they’ve come into their own (it’s unlikely you’d mistake them for anyone else).
- Patrick Watson – Wooden Arms (Folk? Weird? Something else?).
- Irfan – Seraphim (World/spiritual).
- Anonymous 4 – 1000: A Mass for the end of time (Original Work in the style of Midaevil Choir). I believe this is the only choir work by the performers that I own.
- P.O.D. – Greatest Hits (Rap). This is an old one I’ve put back into play in the last six months. A little unusual in that it’s a Christian Rap group that broke over into major play on MTV (back when they still played a lot of music) including a featured slot at one year’s MTV Beach Party. And, surprisingly, it still sounds great.