Back with The Wire Tappers after just a day off: this is the 18th of the 23 to feature on the pages of Music Arcades. As I slow down in buying music — other than downloads — the covermounts I get from The Wire account for a growing proportion of my CDs: just short of 25% so far this year. Somewhere in the four years since I said I'd taken out an eMusic subscription that has become the source of the majority of the music I get. Hence a kind of hybrid subscription/ownership model has taken hold of my music collection, almost by stealth.
The proportion of acts that I'm familiar with on this CD is probably towards the top end of the 10-25% range that normally applies with The Wire Tapper. In this case, 23 Skidoo, Jah Wobble, Murcof, Fog, the very wonderful Electrelane — whose entire catalogue I've downloaded from eMusic, but that doesn't qualify them for Music Arcades inclusion — and possibly No-Neck Blues Band (Last.fm tells me I've heard at least six tracks by them before, but I couldn't have hummed any of them). There have probably been times over the eight years since I got the CD when I may have expended time and effort looking for tracks by these acts, forgetting that I already had them on a nearby shelf.
Much of this feels a bit like a John Peel programme without John Peel. A bit of wry lugubriousness spliced with minor technical incompetence is exactly what it's missing.
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 MusicBrainz entry for this albumWikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album Some metadata about this album at Last.fm |
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