A New Update on Old Thoughts

I've finally amassed enough bits and pieces that I feel I should update a few odd old thematic, non-band-specific posts.

I stopped to write about strange, often abrasive voices once, and there are some peculiar voices I did not mention, and one I was unfamiliar with myself, that was mentioned to me outside the comments there.

First was one I'd heard about repeatedly anyway, and then a friend told me was a perfect example of peculiar voicing after that article. I picked up a few of her albums on and around Record Store Day, and discovered that, indeed, her voice is odd, though, as is often the case with me, didn't faze me beyond recognition of its oddity: Kate Bush.

She had a huge hit with "Wuthering Heights" (which was apparently an achievement in many senses, as the first self-penned female #1 in the UK), which should make it clear enough what's odd about her voice:

It's operatic in the dramatic sense, and otherwise filled with that kind of melodrama that fits and describes her music appropriately.

Well, Son, A Funny Thing About Regret Is...

..."That it's better to regret something you have done than something you haven't."

An appropriate lyric beyond the fact that it's from the album in question: I've said that immediate first impressions are unhelpful, and so I tend not to do them--few (if any) of my rules are hard and fast. I'm breaking that totally and completely right now--or, well, near enough to it.

In celebration of an upcoming "holiday" of sorts, as well as an increase in pay and a more palatable job and things like that, I went out to the last stores I'd not visited recently, namely the Nice Price Books in Chapel Hill, CD Alley (I know, isn't it surprising I hadn't been there?) and the Edward McKay in northern Raleigh. I managed to fill a bunch of gaps as well as start myself on a few paths I'd been meaning to over the course of time anyway.

One of those, I'm going to preface with a bit of peculiarity: I have a strange relationship with labels. Record labels, I mean. I have some I trust almost implicitly (DeSoto springs to mind), some I'm pretty sure I trust, some that give me genre indications, some that make me wary, so on and so forth. But I've often developed these impressions with no overarching awareness of a label's work. I identify them with a single artist I know, or work backward from the first artist I saw on the label. In this case, that's the "problem" in question. In my days on eMusic when I first began attempts to expand my horizons, I started going alphabetically, so I ended up with one band before any other: !!!. Yeah, that's their name.