Gamingforce Music Exposure Club™

I've been listening to this as of late; it's good fun. I think it may have been uploaded before, but I don't care.

Supertramp - Breakfast in America
A&M :: 1979 :: Rock



1. Gone Hollywood
2. The Logical Song
3. Goodbye Stranger
4. Breakfast in America
5. Oh Darling
6. Take the Long Way Home
7. Lord Is It Mine
8. Just Another Nervous Wreck
9. Casual Conversations
10. Child of Vision

Download here

AMG:
With Breakfast in America, Supertramp had a genuine blockbuster hit, topping the charts for four weeks in the U.S. and selling millions of copies worldwide; by the 1990s, the album had sold over 18 million units across the world. Although their previous records had some popular success, they never even hinted at the massive sales of Breakfast in America. Then again, Supertramp's earlier records weren't as pop-oriented as Breakfast. The majority of the album consisted of tightly written, catchy, well-constructed pop songs, like the hits "The Logical Song," "Take the Long Way Home," and "Goodbye Stranger." Supertramp still had a tendency to indulge themselves occasionally, but Breakfast in America had very few weak moments. It was clearly their high-water mark.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Radar Bros. - The Singing Hatchet
1999 :: Philips Media :: Rock



1. Tar the Roofs
2. Shiftly Lies
3. Shoveling Sons
4. All the Ghosts
5. Find the Hour
6. You're on an Island
7. The Pilgrim
8. You've Been Hired
9. To Be Free Again
10. Five Miles
11. Open Ocean Sailing
12. Gas Station Downs

Download Here

I found this album for $5 in a tiny record store in Providence. Anyone already familiar with this band is going to enjoy this album, since it's similarly themed to their other albums.

AMG:
The Radar Bros.' second album The Singing Hatchet delivers more of their quietly quixotic, psychedelically rootsy songs, which roll along like tumbleweeds: shambling and seemingly fragile, yet surprisingly strong. Crackling static, solemn pianos, doleful mellotrons, and chiming guitars support the rambling, almost weightless melodies of songs like "Shifty Lies," "You've Been Hired," and "Tar the Roofs" and the clean production shows off the songs' expressive arrangements -- "Shoveling Sons"' guitars sparkle like dust motes in the sunlight. Musically and lyrically, The Singing Hatchet often manages to be poignant, spooky, and funny all at once; Jim Putnam's mournful upper register makes vaguely disturbing lines like "All the Ghosts"' "Eyes are painted shut and we won't come clean" even more unsettling, while "Open Ocean Sailing"'s lament "fight the ways of a slow production day" hints at emotional truths without tipping the entire hand. Somnambulistic reflections like "The Pilgrim," spaced-out spaghetti western soundtracks like "Five Miles," and sweeping epics like the aforementioned "Open Ocean Sailing" and "You're on an Island" make this release a surprisingly diverse album, while the songs' relatively concise lengths make it surprisingly coherent. A shabbily majestic, subtly accomplished work, The Singing Hatchet doesn't wear its heart on its sleeve, but it's in the right place.


Blonde Redhead - 23
2006 :: 4AD :: Rock



1. 23
2. Dr. Strangeluv
3. The Dress
4. S.W.
5. Spring and by Summer Fall
6. Silently
7. Publisher
8. Heroine
9. Top Ranking
10. My Impure Hair

Download here

I recently saw this group in Chicago; watching the band jump around the stage to the music was quite a sight. It's great music to move to, since there's so much energy to feel.

AMG:
With each album since Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, Blonde Redhead has made huge strides forward with their sound. Misery Is a Butterfly pitted fragile melodies against dark, swirling arrangements, and its tragic glamour turned the album into a cult favorite. On 23, the band trades the cloistered chamber rock of Butterfly for tone-bending dream pop and subtle electronics; while the wide open spaces sound a little bare at first, this streamlined approach ends up making this Blonde Redhead's loveliest and most accessible work yet. The group begins each album with a bold statement of purpose, and 23 is no different. The epic title track's delicate electronic rhythms, swooping, shimmering guitars, and majestically bittersweet melody pitch it somewhere between My Bloody Valentine and Asobi Seksu, showing how a more restrained Blonde Redhead can still sound lush and haunting. "Spring and Summer by Fall"'s streaming, comet-tail guitars and "Silently"'s thorny melody hark back to Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, while "Heroine"'s vocoders sound surprisingly fresh, giving the song a fairy tale-meets-sci-fi vibe. This more whimsical, if not exactly lighthearted, feel flows through much of 23, especially on "Dr. Strangeluv," which boasts playful percussion and sparkling synths, and "Top Ranking," which layers Kazu Makino's vocals into futuristic girl group harmonies. However, Blonde Redhead hasn't ditched the brooding beauty of Misery Is a Butterfly entirely. "The Dress" is just as darkly stunning as any song on that album, with looping gasps and insistent guitars circling lyrics like "the fear starts creeping up when you have so much to lose," while "SW"'s melody and psychedelic brass interlude have a Butterfly-esque intensity. And as always, Blonde Redhead has a flair for haunting melodies, particularly on "Publisher," the chorus of which sounds peculiarly like Aerosmith's "Dream On." 23 is stunning -- in fact, its only flaw might be that its track listing is a little top-heavy, resulting in an album with an amazing first half and a flip side that is only very good. Nitpicking aside, 23 is mysterious and modern, with an artfully strange beauty that is more memorable than perfection.


Destroyer - Ideas for Songs
1997 :: Granted Passage Cassettes :: Folk/Rock



Side A
1. A Month in the Country – 2:06
2. Song About Disappointment – 2:01
3. Spring Cleaning – 2:23
4. No One Needs to Know – 3:16
5. Death to the Northern Man – 2:06
6. Child of Styx – 2:31
7. Marrying the Hammer – 1:40
8. Nothing Against You (Bored Spectre) – 3:46

Side B
9. Song About a Girl Up to a Point – 1:31
10. The Terror Serves a Purpose – 2:42
11. Leaving London – 1:38
12. Untitled – 2:50
13. Forget America – 1:06
14. Stuffed and Sick – 1:29
15. The Leg We Stand On – 2:33
16. Why Banacek Doesn't Love – 5:24

Bonus Tracks
Idea 17 (You Can't Go Home Again)
Idea 18 (It is Me Who Will Rate You)
Idea 19 (These Times)

Download here

This album (a cassette release, actually) is about as "Destroyer" as you can get. Stripped down to nothing more than an acoustic guitar and Bejar's vocals (and little else), the album stands entirely on the highly descriptive, highly cryptic lyrics. It's tough to get into; even I had reservations the first time I heard it (and I love Destroyer). Now, though, I love every piece of the puzzle, the imaginative and creative world that I honestly don't entirely understand. Unless you don't like Destroyer at all, giving Ideas for Songs a couple listens are all it takes to get into it.

How ya doing, buddy?

Bruce Cockburn - Stealing Fire
1984 :: Columbia :: Rock



1. Lovers in a Dangerous Time
2. Maybe the Poet
3. Sahara Gold
4. Making Contact
5. Peggy's Kitchen Wall
6. To Raise the Morning Star
7. Nicaragua
8. If I Had a Rocket Launcher
9. Dust and Diesel

Download Here

There's something very '80s about this album, that for me, works really nicely. He's put a lot of energy into the album, and you can feel it. The track "If I had a Rocket Launcher" is probably one of the best songs I've heard in a long time.

AMG:
After visiting Central America, Bruce Cockburn recorded Stealing Fire, part of which passionately and eloquently details what he'd seen while in Nicaragua and Guatemala. With the opening track, the terse rocker "Lovers in a Dangerous Time," Cockburn conveys both a sense of urgency and uncertainty. There's a brief calm as the second half begins, before a triad of songs written about his time spent in Central America brings the record to a sober conclusion. These three tunes, which, like the majority of the album, sport a tight, worldbeat, folk and rock flavor, are the true highlights of Stealing Fire, and Cockburn at his very best. The first, "Nicaragua," is part observation, part commentary, and part tribute to the Sandinista-led revolution in that country. "If I Had a Rocket Launcher" follows, and is arguably Cockburn's most powerful merging of personal and political feelings. Written after witnessing Guatemalan refugees being chased across the border by gun-wielding helicopters, "Rocket Launcher" evokes not only the pain and suffering of the people, but the conflict between Cockburn's pacifist leanings, and the vengeful anger and hatred incited by such a horrific sight. The Nicaraguan, road-inspired "Dust and Diesel" closes the record with a portrait of a country whose daily contrast of beauty and violence is summed up by the images of people who are proud, hopeful, passionate, afraid, and tired. Stealing Fire, despite a few less than compelling tracks, is the work of an artist at his peak. It also contains some of the most intensely significant material by a singer/songwriter in the 1980s.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours
electronic dance :: Modular Interscope :: 2008



1. Feel the Love
2. Out There on the Ice
3. Lights and Music
4. We Fight for Diamonds
5. Unforgettable Season
6. Midnight Runner
7. So Haunted
8. Voices in Quartz
9. Hearts on Fire
10. Far Away
11. Silver Thoughts
12. Strangers in the Wind
13. Visions
14. Nobody Lost, Nobody Found
15. Eternity One Night Only

Download Here

I was in the mood for some dance music, and came across this on Last.fm while listening to stuff similar to Ladytron. It's got quite the beats, all across the album; the album itself is also great because each song blends into one another, so it feels like a consistent whole (instead of just a bunch of cool songs). It's quickly become one of my favorite albums.

Allmusic:

Spoiler:

In Ghost Colours announces itself, calmly but majestically, with a wash of hazy voices and fluttering keyboards giving way to crystal-clear acoustic strums, languid indie pop vocals, a sturdy dance-rock groove, pulsating electro-disco synths, swirling Caribou-style psychedelics, and an ethereal, vocoded chorus melody. Squeezing all of that into one song — the effervescent "Feel the Love" — is an ambitious move: in most hands it would come out sounding like a bewildering mess, or at least a hammy, hyperactive pastiche, but Cut Copy manage to keep it light, breezy, and utterly ebullient. Even more impressive is that they're able to replicate the trick repeatedly across this remarkably assured sophomore album. Colours boasts at least a half-dozen potential summer anthems for dancefloors and headphones alike, seamlessly strung together with subdued interstitial mood pieces that help make it more of a nuanced work than a straightforward collection of relentlessly upbeat dance jams. Undeniably, though, the dance jams are at the throbbing heart of the album, from the unstoppably glittery opening trio (leading up to the anthemic slow-burn disco of single "Lights and Music") to the rough-edged rock drive of "So Haunted" to the pure synth pop bliss of "Far Away." Indeed, this is in many ways a perfect summation of the dynamic, multifaceted, hipster-associated independent dance music of the 2000s, a motley interweaving of pop, rock, and electronic dance elements into a kaleidoscopic array of interconnected styles, some strands of which have been summarily, imprecisely tagged ("disco-punk," "electro-house," "new rave,") but which as a whole remain resolutely, gloriously nebulous and undefined. (Though nevertheless undeniably prevalent, and never more so than in 2008, following triumphant runs by LCD Soundsystem, Justice, and Simian Mobile Disco; the months just preceding In Ghost Colours' release saw eminently enjoyable new albums by Hot Chip, Hercules and Love Affair, Neon Neon, and Does It Offend You, Yeah?, to name a few.)

Cut Copy's music bears all the prominent hallmarks of its era: giddily omnivorous stylistic appropriation, a sensuous, sybaritic (though not, in their case, seedy) demeanor, and the distinct evocation of bygone decades, most palpably the ubiquitous post-punk/post-disco '80s, without succumbing to the pitfalls of overzealous eclecticism, empty hedonism, sugary glut, and blatant derivativeness. Or rather, they do show traces of all of these things, but they play each one off as a strength, always in moderation, and never to the detriment of the music. The eclecticism is there but it's fluid and cohesive rather than distractingly showy; their influence-dogging plays like affectionate homage rather than pointless mimicry; there's an abundance of gleaming, even gaudy surfaces, but they're just too rapturously enticing to entertain qualms about superficiality. It surely helps that they have one of the primary architects of this sprawling scene, the DFA's Tim Goldsworthy, on board as a producer and mixer. More importantly though, beneath its perfectly formed surfaces this is truly an album of songs — a surprisingly rare thing in this milieu — with simple but resonant melodies, carried by Dan Whitford's appealingly casual delivery, which help alleviate a slight tendency toward sonic sameness. This is evident not only on the gentler guitar-based numbers, like the loping "Unforgettable Season" and the oddly country-inflected "Strangers in the Wind," which temporarily scale back the dancefloor euphorics, but the out-and-out burners as well, combining with the peppy basslines and nagging chorus hooks to create something all the more transcendent. To be sure, In Ghost Colours is a triumph of craftsmanship rather than vision — a synthesis and refinement of existing sounds rather than anything dramatically new and original — but it is an unalloyed triumph nonetheless, and one of the finest albums of its kind.

Stereolab - Margerine Eclipse
electronic :: Elektra :: 2003



1. Vonal Declosion
2. Need to Be
3. ...Sudden Stars
4. Cosmic Country Noir
5. La Demeure
6. Margerine Rock
7. The Man With 100 Cells
8. Margerine Melodie
9. Hillbilly Motobike
10. Feel and Triple
11. Bop Scotch
12. Dear Marge

Download here

Did I upload this before? It's fun electronic stuff. The lead singer has a strange voice (very French) but she's cool and the music is really fun.

Allmusic:

Spoiler:

Stereolab's music is so consistent, and so consistently pretty, that it has become nearly criticism-proof; the band do what they do so completely that it's almost a matter of accepting or rejecting their music whole instead of analyzing it. But while Stereolab's mix of '50s and '60s lounge, vintage electronic music, and Krautrock may have crossed over into easy listening indie pop a few albums ago, they still can't be dismissed easily. Margerine Eclipse, the band's tenth full-length, can sound a bit like a collage of pieces from their nine other albums, but the overall effect is more retrospective than repetitive. It's arguably the most direct work Stereolab have done since Emperor Tomato Ketchup (and at just under 54 minutes, it's one of the shortest of their later albums) and it continues Sound-Dust's trend of gathering the sounds the band explored on their previous work and tweaking them slightly. All of this is to say that Margerine Eclipse is a strong album, even if the nagging feeling that the band aimed a little low with their artistic goals takes a small amount of pleasure out of listening to it. The album trades in the bright yet somehow bittersweet pop at which the group have always excelled, albeit in a more streamlined form than it's taken over the course of their past few albums. The busy beats, whimsical noises, unconventional melodies, and, of course, lovely harmonies that define Stereolab are all present and accounted for, and they're all very pretty, even if many of them are pretty similar to each other. But Margerine Eclipse's best songs are good enough that they resemble a greatest-hits collection from an alternate universe: "...Sudden Stars" is as coolly lovely as it was on the Instant 0 in the Universe EP, with its delicate, measured synth and vocal lines rising and falling in graceful arcs of sound. "Vonal Déclosion"'s twangy guitars and lush strings nod to Sean O'Hagan's involvement, and the layers of Laetitia Sadier's vocals are seamless, but on songs like this, Mary Hansen's voice is missed more than ever ("Feel and Triple" is a sweet tribute to her). "Cosmic Country Noir" is another of Margerine Eclipse's standout tracks, and indeed one of the best Stereolab songs in a long time; on paper, its percolating percussion, chiming synths and guitars, and simple lyrics about the pleasures of the country might not seem all that special, but in practice it's exceptionally beautiful.

Perhaps Margerine Eclipse's greatest accomplishment is that it isn't nearly as overcooked as some of Stereolab's other recent work. None of the songs bring the album to a halt; the closest Margerine Eclipse comes to the band's previous noodly excursions is "La Demeure," a fascinating but somewhat formless track mixing Raymond Scott-like synth sparkles with brass and unpredictable rhythmic and melodic shifts. Just as importantly, the fizzy "Margerine Rock" and "Hillbilly Motorbike," which sounds like the theme to a very stylish game show, restore some of the effortless fun that informed all of Stereolab's work before Dots and Loops. Likewise, "Bop Scotch"'s mix of surf rock and synths -- as well as the sassiest vocals from Sadier in a long while -- suggests that there's still plenty of life in Stereolab. O'Hagan's presence on the album is used judiciously, adding some warmth to the production but not indulging his own noodly tendencies either. Margerine Eclipse's final track, "Dear Marge," is heavily influenced by O'Hagan's work, both with the High Llamas and his previous collaborations with Stereolab. Its languid guitars and silky vocals threaten to slide off into a blissful haze, but then the band reprises the surprisingly convincing disco interlude they introduced on Instant 0 in the Universe's "Mass Riff." It would've been nice to hear that part of the song developed into a full-fledged track, but it still makes the song one of the freshest on the album. Margerine Eclipse can't really be called a return to form since Stereolab didn't really deviate from the form to begin with, but it still offers a reinvigorated sound that rewards the patience of fans who have stuck with the band this long.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?