Are you listening?

Listening to: A Stitch in Time-The Twilight Singers, and Cure for Pain-Morphine

When writing the 'Listening to', I can never remember if I put the album or artist first. Does anyone take note of it anyway?
I would like to think someone has discovered their new favourite band through my listing it and encouraging intrigue by naming semi obscurity, but I doubt it. I'm the only person I know who listens to some of the stuff I do, but that goes for pretty much everyone who has a serious music habit I think.

Here's how the Department of Conservation tells you a link from their website is bad:

I love it.

Speaking of semi obscurity, I picked up The Afghan Whigs retrospective "Unbreakable" last weekend, at the Warehouse of all places, an outlet not especially known for eclecticism in its wares. Saved me fifteen dollars though. Despite this, the warehouse is really not my favourite place to score sounds. Selection is poor (invariably involving a single CD title stacked many deep on a shelf, making you think there are more CD's available than there actually are), service is worse, the only attraction is the price. No lectures about mp3's and buying on the internet please, I'm not into that at the moment.

I'm not sure it adds anything to the stuff I was saying about greatest hits collections here, but I am now of an age where the bands I spent my late teens and early twenties listening to are or have put out best ofs. As I have the Whigs back catalogue, I get the luxury of knowing the tracks anyway. As compilations go it isn't bad. It isn't chronological, and the tracks cover all era's of the bands sound, from the early post-punk to the latter soul and funk influenced. There is a nice fade from 'crime scene part one' into 'faded' to close, which are at opposite ends of their source album.

A couple of half decent unreleased tracks are included (which I think is written in some law somewhere "thou shalt have previously unreleased material on thy retrospective compilation, or thou shalt suffer the consequences of mediocre review and poor word of mouth expectation" or something more legal and less biblical sounding). The chosen tracks are good ones, some are my favourites.

For the sake of being a whining fan I would have liked 'Honky's Ladder' or 'My Curse' (the only Whigs track with a female lead vocal, and a damn good one at that), or the instrumental 'Closing Prayer' to have been included.

In the 1990's, the Afghan Whigs were just the right band in the right place at the right time for me.

I like this collection, it works. Unlike the Thompson Twins compilation I picked up in Masterton (for all of five dollars) a few weeks ago, which is diabolically bad. All of the best known tracks are on it.

As awful 80's remixes. Yerrrgh.