[series] Fifteen for Thirty - Part Four

04. "Muzai Moratorium" by Shiina Ringo





Shiina Ringo at age 20, following the release of "Muzai Moratorium"

Those eyes, the possessive way she's clinging to the guitar, and that riot grrl haircut... we'll just move on from here now that you have some minor indication of what we're dealing with.

( Words cannot do this cut justice. )

Hint for Part Five: When Tiffany asked me for songs to put on a World of Warcraft playlist, pretty much every song came from this album. That's how epic it is.

[series] Fifteen for Thirty - Part Five

05. "Black Holes and Revelations" by Muse




I begin to wonder, five albums into this series, why the latter half of the 00's saw me discovering my favorite albums. I was certainly a music lover before then, right? I downloaded scads of music I'd never heard of from various p2p sites just to try it out, borrowed random CD's from friends, feverishly recorded songs off of the radio, sifted meticulously through my parents' old vinyl collection spinning everything I could, etc etc. And then it occurs to me: starting around 2005, the days of the sampling form of musical discovery were mostly over for a good chunk of five or so years. Luckily the tide has turned once again with the easy access of satellite radio, but once Napster and Kazaa died, YouTube began ot get privatized (hello, VEVO. Fuck off, VEVO), and radio was already in its dying gasps, there was very little to be done about discovering new music other than to take your friends' recommendations. To that end, I was left with little choice but to download entire albums. I could no longer go to Kazaa and grab just the tracks I had fallen in love with, leaving me to figure out the rest later.

Surely, there are a lot of bands I discovered in the late 90's and early 00's that merit also-ran status in this list, and I'd like to tip my hat to them after all this is said and done. Still, my days of discovering albums were relegated to my early-to-mid teens (during which I discovered most of the standard building blocks of anyone's music appreciation library - The Beatles, David Bowie, Velvet Underground, bands I don't feel I have enough unique and personal feelings on to include here) and my mid-to-late twenties. I leapt right from classics to contemporary artists, skipping that whole time in between, with a few exceptions which appear on this list.

For the most part though, it's staggering to be compiling all of this and see what an effect the years of 2006-2010 had on me, musically.

Which brings me to Muse.

( A love letter nearly seven years in the making )

Hint for Part Six: My mom called it "that scary sheep record"