Strange Noises

[hwango]

Since my musical tastes run a bit off the beaten path, I don't accumulate new music as often as I might like. I think there was a 3 or 4 month gap between the last time I got new music and when I got An Even Scarier Solstice in December. When I got Skinny Puppy's Mythmaker in late February I came perilously close to overplaying it to death, and I've been scrambling to find something else to listen to just to give it a break before I ruin it for myself. Around that time I found out that Assemblage 23 would be coming out with a new album in April, which was tentatively good news. His previous album, Storm, was perhaps my least favorite of his work, so I wasn't sure how I'd respond to Meta. I listened to some samples and it seemed like it would be good, though. I had hoped that Backandtotheleft was still together and I could expect more work from them, but poking around on the internet led me to discover that they had disbanded after a brief period with a different vocalist, who was now with SD6. The SD6 album was for sale from the Assemblage 23 online store that was selling preorders for Meta, so I listened to some song samples from them to see if their CD was worth picking up. I liked a few of them, but was pretty sure I wasn't crazy about others. Still, it seemed like it might be worth getting. Since shipping was flat rate, it made sense to poke around the store and see if I might like anything else that I could order at the same time. I tried the samples for Lost Signal's Eviscerate and didn't care for them as much as I did the samples from the other 2 albums, but one song in particular was very catchy. I figured that what would almost certainly happen was that I would get Meta and the SD6 CDs, listen to them, and wonder "where's that song I kind of liked?" So I ordered all 3 to make sure I got everything I was even halfway interested in.

I've had them all for a couple of weeks, and I'm reasonably pleased with all of them. Lost Signal's album isn't exactly what I'd call great music, but I still enjoy quite a bit of it. I like about half of the songs from SD6, but the ones I like I'm very fond of. Meta has only 1 complete miss for me and 2 others that are sort of "meh," so I call that a resounding success.

Near on the heels of all of this, I happened to learn that Nine Inch Nails had a new album. I haven't forgiven Reznor for the absolutely dreadful With Teeth, and so I refused to even consider buying Year Zero until I'd heard samples from it first. I was surprised to find that you can actually listen to the entire album online at the NIN website. I had some mixed reactions, but there were a few songs that I quite liked, and Amazon was selling it new for only $10, so I bought that too, and it arrived last Saturday. I'm actually very happy with it, and I've listened to it all the way through about 7 times and have yet to skip a song. It's nice to finally have some new stuff to listen to.