So yeah, looks like I haven’t posted a playlist update in a few of months. Naughty Nick. :( Not to mention the fact that I seem to be running short on amusing playlist titles. Anyway.

The last couple of months have been pretty crazy for new music. I’ve been all over the map, sampling some punk, some dancepunk, some pop, some alternative, some hip-hop… you name it.

I’d have to say that the two highlight albums I’ve been listening to repeatedly recently are AFI’s Decemberunderground and Canadian hip-hop guru k-os’s Joyful Rebellion.

Now, I was never a big AFI fan until this album, but even though they’ve been accused of selling out and going mainstream (seems like every band that makes it big generally is accused of this), they’ve broadened their appeal and I think their sound has matured quite a bit. It’s obviously more polished for radio airplay, but the energy it generates is definitely worth whatever underground cachet they’ve lost in the process of appealing to a larger fanbase. It’s not often that I find myself screaming (err, at least my version of singing) along in my car to every song on an album. If you have a chance to listen to a couple of tracks off the album, I’d suggest starting with the current single, Miss Murder, and working your way up to 37mm, Love Like Winter, and finally what I consider the best song on the album, The Killing Lights. A killer track… no pun intended.

As for k-os, I have both of his albums and I definitely prefer the latter, 2004’s Joyful Rebellion. I’d love to see this guy get more airplay in Vancouver… A couple of the singles — Crabbuckit and Man I Used To Be — get a decent amount of radio play here, but there are several other songs on the album that are worthy of note, including my definite favourite, Crucial, as well as B-Boy Stance and Dirty Water (featuring Sam Roberts — I’d even go as far as to say that it’s Sam Roberts’s best work so far.) I’d love to see this guy live, and it looks like he has a new album scheduled for October. Maybe we’ll see a Canadian tour afterwards?

Ah, I almost forgot. The playlist. This is gonna be a pretty long list, so sit back and enjoy. I’ll even split it into two columns so it’s not as tedious to dig through. Make sure to check some of this stuff out on Last.fm — you can sample a lot of tracks on there, like iTunes, but they have a lot more information about the artist, related music, recommendations, comments, and blog posts, and generally a lot of useful stuff. I’ve found myself using their latest Windows client quite a bit in the last couple of weeks; I was still using the old Audioscrobbler plugin with iTunes and I only upgraded to the new client recently. It integrates pretty seamlessly with iTunes and WinAmp and offers up a lot of helpful artist info when you open it up, plus it plays recommended music, which is a pretty nice touch. I’m considering signing up for a year membership (I think they use a donation system…) because I use it so much now.

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Posted in Music |

Tags: music, playlists, mp3, afi, k-os