Since my library's gone totally digital, this is the world I love: shuffling playlists. One of my favorites is my Never Played playlist (play count=0). It's often massive (1800 songs currently); made up of huge imports of mp3 CDs from Limo Crazy, catalog records and greatest hits collections of things I just wanted to have in my library, comps from places like Mojo and Pitchfork and old CDs that I finally got around to importing but hadn't listened to yet.
It's an incredible listen. It's a combination of discovery of new things, the rediscovery of old, and history lessons of sounds that I always told myself I never had time to get through. I don't get the full album experience, but because I hear it all in bits, it's much, much easier to digest, letting me hear each song as it's own thing. Every trip through the playlist brings me things that I either hadn't heard before, and had spent far too long since my last listen.
Chisel, "It's Alright, You're Okay" (1997)
(mp3 removed)buy mp3 at Amazon
Last Friday, the Never Played playlist gave me some good stuff: "Mercy" by Wire, "Olsen Olsen" by Sigur Ros (both of which I put on my muxtape), and this gem from Chisel, which was Ted Leo's old band. Chisel was a DC-based band, and I heard them through my friend Christian, who became obsessed with Chisel because he had been obsessed with The Jam, a band that Chisel was also obssessed with. Got all that?
On first listen, it doesn't sound too different than Ted Leo's solo stuff, but Chisel always had a kind of Mod cool that faded to Ted Leo's favored punk noise by the time Chisel split. Nothing against Ted Leo's solo stuff: I love it. But Chisel had a youthful innocence that often gets drowned out by the bile and bitter of Ted Leo's solo work, and it's a sound that's a little bit missed when I listen to songs like this.
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