I have been getting back into a few bands that I forgot about (long story short, my computer broke and wasn’t replaced, then lost basically all my CDs and stuff except an iPod Touch, then the iPod Touch died before I could get the music off), so I’m always finding out new (old) stuff.  I had a demo CD that came with the Official Dreamcast Magazine, which had a video for Jurassic 5’s Quality Control on it, loved that video and still love them today now that I’ve found them again, so I can say my eclectic taste even includes some hip hop.

On Last.fm, I’ve scrobbled 170k songs (sent them to be recorded from a music player) from 5k artists.  I have been using YouTube Music a lot recently and I just finally looked into scrobbling from a browser so I’ll be adding more and more often.

My favourite band according to last.fm, by far and away, is England’s The Fall.  I love the lyrics which are VERY hard to pin down the meaning on.  The repetitive musical accompaniment is always the same, but always different based on what era it’s from. They made 30+ albums with the only member staying the same the whole time was the vocalist, who died recently, and thus The Fall was finished.

Another band worth mentioning is The Smashing Pumpkins.  I had a few tapes and CDs in the late 90s and early 2000s, but the very first time I had digital music was when that band had a dispute with their label, and released their album MACHINA II online for all who wanted it.  I later got into file sharing and digital music eventually became the main way I listen (although I have some burned CDs for my car stereo when not using the FM transmitter with my phone).

As for live shows, my two favourite shows have been seeing Streetlight Manifesto (although the opening act was a letdown), and an amazing show done by a Winnipeg band called the SubCity Dwellers (hard to find their music sometimes, like only one album is YT Music for example).  The story for the latter one is interesting, they booked a show in a university town during Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, so barely anyone showed up.  There were actually more people in the band on stage than in the crowd, if you didn’t count the people working the bar.  Still, they played an amazing show, including some fantastic reggae/ska type takes on The Clash songs.  Maybe you had to be there…