The C*******s lights are already up on your neighbour’s roof, Jona Lewie’s clearing his throat on the shopping centre stereo and you are starting to get that familiar tingle in your list-scribbling fingers as the excitement rises in the days before Lodey fires the starting pistol in the AW poll…
But what’s that other niggling thought at the back of your mind? Ah yes, the recollection that in previous years you’ve chewed the ears off your mates, raving about some new timeless masterpiece which, now that you think of it, you’ve hardly played since you bought it.
I asked this one a few years back but, allowing for my own absence of new ideas and your encroaching senility, I’ll try again: are there any albums you esteemed highly in the polls of recent years which, having lived with them for some time, you feel maybe weren’t so great after all.
Or, more happily, was there something whose magnificence you failed to grasp before the deadline which has, over time, become a favourite?
I’ll go first.
Hearing the groovy new Bruno Mars/Anderson .Paak single has reminded me that it’s very seldom nowadays that I want to hear Mr .Paak’s album which I deemed my number four choice in 2016.
And, although, at the time, I couldn’t stop playing it, I somehow persuaded myself that my love of The Spook School’s Could It Be Different? was just temporary insanity and it didn’t belong on my shortlist in 2018.
Your turn, if you will indulge me..
Buyer’s Remorse
by 4 Comments
I still play it all the time..
A generational revision of a song like this.
I feel old!
Not sure whether either of these troubled any polls, but I did rave wildly about Helplessness Blues by Fleet Foxes when it first came out, so much so that I wrote a glowing Dodgers review to the effect that it was the future of music as we know it. Fast forward several years and I’ve hardly listened to it since, and now find the FFs mostly dated and unlistenable in general. (The Dodgers review was hastily deleted to save my blushes). On the other hand I hated Robert Plant’s Carry Fire when it first came out, and couldn’t find a single song on it that I liked. I recently gave it another hearing and discovered that I absolutely love it, and it’s hardly been off the shiny disc spinning machine for the past few weeks.
Music eh, it’s a funny old game.
Yup, guilty, with the last minute discs bought as I read the end of year polls, especially ours, that get the briefest love. But I fall for it every time, and will again this year…..
But isn’t the issue more anyway of time and the proportionate lack of time to listen to anything very frequently. With a handful of LPs only, the teenage me played ‘em back to back. Now I have so many that there is even a waiting list for the first bloody listen….. (Yes, this is a problem; I know it….)