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2008 -Senior Twilight Stock Replacer

April 8th, 2019 · Posted by Skuds in Music · No Comments · Music

There have been several milestones or turning points in how I interact with music. There was the point where I started owning it so I wasn’t completely reliant on whatever the radio played, there was the portable tape machine letting me listen on the move, there was the MP3 player, and then the download which shifted ownership from physical product to just the music. 2008 saw, perhaps, the biggest change. It was the year Spotify came along. I’m glad it did because there was pratictally bugger all going on for me otherwise in this year.I was lucky enough to get an early invite to Spotify and it was like magic. I can’t remember what Internet connection I had in 2008 I may have just moved from ISDN (two 64K channels bonded together!) to a 2Mbit/s broadband connection. Either way it was not tiny compared to today’s speeds, but I could type in a song title and it would start playing instantly. No delay, no buffering. It was actually slightly better than Spotify is today but then they have tens of millions more users now.

In the early years you could listen to it for free as long as you didn’t mind the odd advert and there were no restrictions. Later on there were restrictions to how many hours you coulc listen and how many times you could play an individual track, at which point I gladly coughed up the subscription fee because it was less than I would have been paying for physical CDs.

There were some gaps in what was available but I was more interested ini what was available and it was loads. I was binge-listening old music that I had missed out on. Some of it was where I had a few albums by somebody and wanted to listen to the albums I didn’t have, and some of it was listening to bands that I had managed to miss out on hearing completely for various reasons.

One of the bands I binged on was The Fall. I had heard a few early tracks on the John Peel show and thought they were OK but I couldn’t see what the fuss was about. In the many intervening years I had got into some of the things that obviously influenced Mark E Smith, like Can NEU and other krautrock bands so it started making more sense. There was a hell of a lot to catch up on because they have released at least one album nearly every year so I didn’t plough through all of it but merely dipped my toes in, but finally I ‘got’ the band. I could understand why they are hard to get into, but felt rewarded by the repetitive nature of a lot of it.

During the year there was a new Fall album, Imperial Wax Solvent, so I streamed it on Spotify and this was, therefore, the first Fallalbum I listened to all the way through at the time it was released. Since 2008 the Fall are one of my most-streamed artists, according to Last.fm which makes sense – they have a lot more tracks available than most people.

I chose to put Senior Twilight Stock Replacer on my playlist to mark 2008 because it is only right that there is a Fall track somewhere and this is my favourite off the album that helped me to ‘get’ them. It is probably the most ‘motorik’ track on the album, which explains my fondness for it.

There was really not a lot else going on for me in the year. There was the Muse live album HAARP, the David Gilmour Live in Gdansk album and the box set of Yazoo material In Your Room. The Yazoo set was very welcome. I had never replaced my old Yazoo vinyl with CDs and this set had both albums plus lots of remixes that covered the various 12″ single b-sides I once had and then even more remixes that I had never heard before.

In terms of new music, there was Death Magnetic from Metallica, their first album to feature new bassist Robert Trujillo, and their first great album since the black album. For completely new music there was Lykke Li and her album Youth Novels. I had got an advance promotional copy for review purposes and loved it straight away. It was quirky, with unusual instrumentation and percussion, but was easy to get your head around on the first listen. I’m still a little disappointed that her subsequent material hasn’t been as interesting.

Slim pickings for a year, but I was busy streaming back catalogue so didn’t really care too much.

 

 

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