One of the biggest shifts in my music knowledge in the last year has been my now-obsession with The Blue Nile – I’d owned a couple of their albums for years, but never really listened to them much until going through my iPod earlier in the year finding undiscovered gems and fell completely in love with Paul Buchanan’s bleak-yet-optimistic take on the world.
So today, I’ve completed my collection of their album releases, by buying Peace At Last from the Amazon.com download store, but more interestingly, I also managed to find a couple of Paul Buchanan solo tracks on a compilation album called Seasons Of Light on eMusic.com – they are, as expected, beautiful. If you’re a Blue Nile fan and want another 8 or 9 minutes of glorious loveliness to help ease the years til they next put an album out, these two tracks are a great way to do that.
Been having a lot of fun on eMusic today – Lo. and I were going through the site looking at all the industrial, metal, grunge and punk stuff we loved in our teens, from Helmet to The Melvins, Prong to Black Flag, but found that in our advanced years, we were much happier with gentle old lady music, so settled on Tanya Donelly’s achingly beautiful Whiskey Tango Ghosts – and she used to be in the Throwing Muses, so is sort of alternative-ish, right? right?
Sometimes you just gotta embrace becoming an old lady… though the Therapy singles collection, and the first Fudge Tunnel album both sounded pretty damned fine – guess I’ll have to pick them up as part of next month’s 50 tracks, and feel all young and dudeish again…
(oh, and my eMusic tip of the day is to set up your computer so m3u files (the files used to play the previews on the site) open with Quicktime – it handles them SOOO much better than iTunes and doesn’t litter your iTunes playlist with redundant entries… )
On the subject of Tanya Donelly, I absolutely loved the first Belly album, and still do, especially the track “White Belly lie in the sun..etc”
I’ve got Star, which I think was the second one, and really like that – you should try Whiskey Tango Ghosts, it’s gorgeous!