Listening Club - 24th June 2012

Greetings and salutations!

Listening club preamble today comes to you live from Mr.Monkeytypes living room in Brighton, being tapped out on @dingsters iPad. Yes, that's right folks, there's been a little LC meet up. Much alcohol, music and gesticulation was involved, as you'd expect, and a splendid time was had by all. So here I am, getting this sorted while taking alternate swigs of Purdeys and leftover lager (yay, go me!) before we head off to find a cracking Sunday lunch...

So, casting my mind back, last week I had the pleasure of curating LC myself, and threw two albums at you due to my procrastination. And donchajustknow, it all turned out splendidly. First was Salyu X Salyu's "Sound Beams", followed by AM & Shawn Lee's "Celestial Electric", both of which, I'm delighted to say, went down very well. Forgive the lack of cover artwork representing them in this post, but it's going to take all my effort to cut and paste the next bit, which is what you're waiting for, so over to @fraserlaeto for this week's intro...

"I never believed that this would be a difficult choice to make, but it has been. I've had about 5 dead-certs that I abandoned over the course of the week.

I thought about albums that have been on this before, and the thread seems to be that they're not just a barrage of a particular style for 45 mins; they tend to have some variety, be proper peaks-and-troughs works. I thought about why other people had played what they did, that it probably wasn't their favourite album, that it wasn't necessarily something they thought everyone should hear. It seemed not to be about impressing your music tastes on others, so much as offering something up that's an entry into your world.

I've rejected the choice that was funniest to me; the last Harvey Milk album 'A Small Turn of Human Kindness (2010)', an absolutely desolate, sparse club-to-the-head of a noise-rock record that I love, and find real emotion in despite the fact it's clearly supposed to irritate me.

I've rejected the statement album, which might be Sunn O)))'s 'Monoliths & Dimensions' or something, a real "this is something you've never heard before".
I decided against Slint's 'Spiderland' - the 'everyone needs to hear this' option, and probably my favourite album, really.
I abandoned Deerhoof's 'Offend Maggie', which would have been perfect, but was a bit close to the choices of last week.
The favourite right up until the 11th hour was Jim O'Rourke's 'Insignificance', a really nice accessible jangly acoustic rock album with an undercurrent of mean spiritedness-ness that only really reveals itself after a good 10 listens, but you're only hearing it once, listener.

In the end I remembered this record and thought "yeah that's a good choice". The undercurrent of mean-ness and discomfort reveals itself pretty much straight away in this one, but it's a varied effort that sits well and flows like a real album should. It's got definite head-nodding 'everyone has to be into this!' moments, but there's also a fair bit of difficult listening in there too, and that's the part of this that appeals most to me."

Download is here (Dropbox link) or the Mixcloud link is here.

Start time, as always, is 8pm BST (GMT+1), search #listeningclub and follow @listeningclub to see what's going on. See you then!