Musings on music, old, new, popular and obscure. Post punk, metal, hip-hop, funk, and rock in general. A music fan with a desire to lose boundaries on what should and should not be listened to writes about experience in music from a listener's perspective, hopefully unhindered by prior expectation.

Obsessive Band Information I Love

I keep around a set of discography pages for artists I listen to a lot, when information collected from Wikipedia, Amazon, 45cat, and Discogs doesn't do the job. Usually, we're talking about things as specific as release months (and even dates), variances in cover art from country to country, or pressing to pressing, as well as simply more usefully arranged information.

This is a sampling of the ones I've bookmarked, often for bands this information can be harder to come by (usually, this seems to relate either to being obscure/semi-obscure or ridiculously popular and thus ignored for minutiae, and necessitates, almost always, having releases from the 1990s or earlier).

  • An Excess of INXS - One of the most extensive collections of INXS information around, it's got information just about every release imaginable. Wondering about obscure b-sides and other non-album tracks (of which they actually have quite a few)? Look no further!
  •  Blue Öyster Cult Singles - Wildly specific, but very informative and fully compiled.
  • Thin Lizzy Guide - Contains about everything you could want, barring hi-resolution art. But if you are curious what b-side a single had in Germany, or what the cover art looked like there, this site has it covered.
  • The Cure: Impression of Sounds and The Cure Concerts Guide - Covers studio sessions and live shows respectively, with enough information to fill out non-specific information from the series of deluxe reissues of Cure albums that has come out, as well as generally giving an interesting chronology of the band at Impression of Sounds.
  • BBC Radio 1 - Keeping It Peel - A listing of all Peel sessions ever recorded (!) with both recording and transmission date information, as producer, engineer, lineup, and studio locations. very valuable source when dealing with the minutiae of those sessions. You can listen to them in order of transmission now! Hooray!
  • Chalkhills: The XTC Resource - There's good reason for this site to be called "The" XTC Resource. XTC's old label side (Idea Records) is gone, and with it their rather spiffily arranged discography, but Chalkhills isn't exactly lacking when it comes to XTC.
  • Depeche Mode Discography - No need for a fancy name. This site is exhaustive. Hell, sometimes looking through it is exhausting. Any release is basically guaranteed to not only be listed, but to have images of front covers, back covers, gatefolds, A- and B-side labels and so on, in high resolution. As a band that explored remixing quite readily, there are pages on songs with all different versions released listed as well.
  • The Church Discography  - Another straight-to-the-point name, and a deserved one again--very complete, very thorough, nicely arranged, and with solid information on solo releases alongside all the band information. Another I keep regular track of.
  • Slade Crazee!  - It's always comforting, as with some of the other sites above, to see someone far, far more obsessive than myself in detailing musical information. There are absurd sites that surround some of the biggest bands ever in even more mind-numbing detail, like WhiteFang's Who site which manages to include single art for every iteration of every Who single ever. Still, to find it about mid-range popularity bands like Slade--especially when bands like Slade are comparatively forgotten--is heartening. And helpful for my own purposes.
  • Losering - An increasingly helpful look at a band that has achieved a good measure of popularity at this point, but spent many years in independent enough circles that details were not retained too carefully. Named, of course, for a great song on Strangers Almanac (though when that includes all of the songs, I realize that's terribly non-specific)
  • The Elvis Costello Wiki  - Functionally named, this site is an amazing resource, combining the wonderfully specific details of the Rykodisc and Rhino releases of his first through mid-90s albums with the retained details of EC fans, who have been referred to as "trainspotters" by EC himself: an indication of his own vague bafflement at their retention of details, as "trainspotters" are those who obsessively detail the movements of locomotives in an effort to see all varieties thereof.

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