Couple of new purchases last week:

Nhu Golden Era. 60s and 70s influenced soulful nujazz with some Latin influences. A bit uneven, but still a very good album. Tasteful and quite subtle use of samples and loops that deliver smooth 70’s kind of sound. I bought this from iTMS, but this kind of stuff really should be listened from vinyl… :) Highly recommendable. The biggest fault in the album is that the last track contains ‘hidden track’. I’ve always hated them, since they effectively ruin the possibility to enjoy the album as an album. I usually split these into…

I have bought my first albums of 2006. Based on the purchases my adventures in the world of nujazz and nusoul seem to be continuing. My music taste seems to swing from one music genre to another quite unpredictably, so I wonder when the next swing is going to come and to which direction it’s going to be. Before my current phase I used to listen progressive metal and before that I had a phase when I listened mainstream British guitar pop.

Anyway, here are the first purchases of 2006:
At last. I got acquainted with Megashira through one…

Although I did bought quite a lot of albums on 2005, looking back to the year I noticed that a majority of them was actually released before 2005. So when I decided to write down a summary of the best and worst albums of the year, I actually had some trouble coming up with the list. Especially since many of the albums that I considered to be the highlights of the year were in fact released before 2005. Anyway, here is my personal opinion on the three highlights and disappointments of 2005. Do not take the lists too seriously ;)…

Finally managed to find and buy the Q-Continuum album I came across few weeks ago (http://www.last.fm/user/joosen/journal/2005/11/22/35266/). Excellent funk/soul album. I also bought two compilation albums; Diggin’ Deeper – Roots of acid jazz vols 6 and 7 were on bargain bin at a local ‘what-used-to-be-a-record-store-but-is-now-selling-DVDs-Xbox-and-PS2-games-and-same-top20-trash-than-all-the-supermarkets’ at 5 euros a piece. At that price, they are both worth every cent…

I did not get any music as a Christmas present. Apparently my music taste is ‘so weird’ that no-one dared to by me anything.

Another week, and this time just two new albums. My purchases seem to still lean towards nujazz/jazz…

-Universal Four.Teddy Rok Seven is a (yet another) project of Teppo Makynen, who is also involved with Nuspirit Helsinki and The Five Corners Quintet. Although the name might suggest it, the music does not have anything to do with Teddy Rock or Teddy Boy culture. It’s best described as being Jazzier than Nuspirit, but groovier and soulier than FCQ. A good album, that was released about a year ago but has not been marketed at all. Highly recommendable!

-…

I promised myself couple of weeks ago that I would not be buying music for the rest of the year. I managed to keep my promise for only two weeks. (Although I did cheat a little during the first week since I received the Saint-Germain-de-Prés nujazz compilations I had ordered earlier on that week.) Then I made the mistake of looking into my last.fm recommendations and decided to look further into those artists with the combination of Google, Amazon and iTMS. After couple of hours I noticed that I had (more or less) accidentially bought five albums and one EP…

No new purchases for this week. I've been buying way too much music lately and I should really try to cut back on my habit. iTMS makes buying new music too easy and convenient. On last couple of occasions that I have been buying CDs from actual record store or traditional web shop, I've been getting a feeling that there's something wrong with the process; Either I have had to drag myself into record store, phycically browse the CD cases or I have to wait for up to a week to get the CDs by mail. It just feels all…

I ordered Saint-Germain-de-Prés Café compilation vols 1 to 5 already on last week, but did not receive them until this week. So I think that they qualify for this week’s entry. I found the compilations trough Amazon’s recommendations (guided by St. Germain and Nuspirit Helsinki, which appear on vols 1 and 3), and thought that they might be a good addition to my limited collection of nujazz. The vols 2 and 3 seem to be the ones I’ve liked the most so far, closely followed by vols 1 and 4. Vol 5 seems to be the weakest of them. The…

For some reason I have lately been finding myself listening to nu-jazz/jazztronic/…, what ever you want to call the heavily jazz-influenced electronic music. (BTW, I hate labeling music into some specific genres. It never seems to work and is always subject to not only who does the classification but also to time and place of when the classification is done.) My record collection is a bit weak on this genre, so I surfed for a while and came across Kyoto Jazz Massive. Looked them up on iTMS and bought their album Spirit of the Sun, which apparently was…

Just one purchase for this week - Black and White 050505 by Simple Minds. (I'm really lousy at buying albums when they are released. I usually buy everything month to three months after they have been released.) A good (come back?) album from one of my old teenage favorites. Both material and soundwise similar to their golden era. Favorite tracks so far: Home, Different World and Kiss the Ground. Album was mentioned by many papers when it was released, but I don't think that it has received the recognition (and sales) it would have deserved.

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