April 14, 2025

#213 It’s Been...

Hey folks!

It’s been one week since I opened up nominations for the upcoming Best Album of 1989 tournament, which means you have one more week to get your ballot in! Make a list, check it twice, then go here and enter it. Thanks!

If (somehow) you’re still looking for titles to listen to, you could check out One True Poster’s extraordinarily comprehensive overview of metal & heavy rock, or you could go here and check out some classical recommendations, or perhaps you could go here and get some jazz recommendations or if you want the really good stuff, you could listen to my Top 13 of 1989. But if you’re a true diehard, here’s a crowdsourced master list of every 1989 album people could remember/find. As of this writing, there’s 744 titles on it, and it’s still probably not complete.

That master list is currently maintained by @lanna.bsky.social, who is also spearheading another project: The Best Album Brackets Website! This is going to be the one central storage place where all the Best Album stuff is contained, all the info, all the results, all the stats, hopefully the Designated Cheerleaders, just anything and everything Best Album. When this goes up, be sure to thank Lanna, because I’m too dumb and computer illiterate to do something this awesome. More on this as it develops.

EMERGENCY RECOMMENDATIONS

Here’s some titles I’m nominating that I think are cool cool stuff, and maybe you will too.

Michael Nyman, THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER: SOUNDTRACK TO THE FILM BY PETER GREENAWAY. It’s great. It’s the theme from THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER. It gets you really high.

Steve Reich, DIFFERENT TRAINS/ELECTRIC COUNTERPOINT. The first half, DIFFERENT TRAINS, is a piece performed by Kronos Quartet punctuated with Reichian samples of people interviewed about World War II. It’s cool! But ELECTRIC COUNTERPOINT is truly awesome, a guitar piece played by Pat Metheny that’s a joy to listen to. You may have heard some of it; the third piece was sampled for The Orb’s “Fluffy Little Clouds.”

Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Panaiotis, DEEP LISTENING. Droney/spooky/cosmic/Blade Runner-y/beautiful.

Henry Threadgill Sextett, RAG, BUSH AND ALL. Threadgill’s sextett (sic) is alto sax, trumpet, trombone, bass, two drummers and a cello. A motherfucking cello, y’all. And when it comes in, it feels like hearing ODB for the first time on ENTER THE 36 CHAMBERS, just muscling in, taking over, all eyes on it. Terrific stuff. And I’m told this isn’t even technically one of the good Threadgill albums! Jesus!