Meaningful title to follow

More listening based waffle :-

Nirvana - ‘In Utero’

Like everyone who passed through the age of fifteen in the last ten or fifteen years, I went through a Nirvana phase in my early to mid teens, so it’s kinda hard to separate the music from the teenage mindset it reminds me of. Though to be fair, at that age I wasn’t actually all that into the ‘noisy stuff’, much as I might have acted otherwise, tending to prefer the acoustic or more melodic end of the spectrum. Plus I only owned the Greatest Hits, a fairly pointless disc for a band that only recorded two great records and yet it still managed to throughly miss both a large number of great tracks and, more importantly, the point. Still, now that I do like the ‘noisy stuff’, well more than I did anyway, ‘In Utero’ stands out as astonishing approachable and tuneful for a record famed for it volume and abrasive tone. Cobain may not be a demi-god, or that much better than some of his contemporaries, but he was sure as hell onto some seriously impressive shit.

Sun Kil Moon - ‘April’

I got into Sun Kil Moon/Mark Kozelek/Red House Painters/Multiple Names for the same bloke with the same instrumentation through his album of Modest Mouse covers ‘Tiny Cities’, which was interesting and actually worth listening to as an album, unusually for a covers record. Anyway, seems he tends towards John Darnielle levels of prolificism, so finding a starting point is tough. Also, with both of his records I’ve tried so far, this one and ‘Ocean Beach’, I tend to get stuck on the first track and miss out on the rest of the album. Not because they’re bad, quite the opposite, they start with two of the most astonishingly beautiful pieces of music that I’ve ever heard, in the case of ‘April’ the nine minute plus ‘Lost Verses’ which could be the most comforting and touching song I’ve heard well.... ever, actually. Rest of the album isn’t too shabby either.