Last 10 Years

Yesterdays post about Fenech-Soler brought back memories of other music I was listening to when I first discovered them. Basically I didn't think I was old enough to reach the 'better in the old days' stage of my life and made an effort to keep my music tastes current.

One thing I did was pick my 25 favourite albums. It was a very biased list favouring the more recent albums though, 17 of them were from the 21st century and the other 8 were from the 90s. It also included an album which had only just come out at the time.

Nowadays I'm at a point where I'm not even up to date with a lot of artists I've liked in years gone by. Some went to to make some truly dreadful music and others I just forgot about. I do sometimes seek out new music from an artist if I'm going to see them in concert, but many don't really bother making new music anymore and stick to the classics.

It got me thinking, what albums have the 25 artists of those albums I picked released in the last 10 years. Well here's the answer:

2 Many DJs - No albums

Norman Jay - 2 albums: Skank & Boogie (2015), Mister Good Times (2017)

Portishead - No albums

Massive Attack - No albums

High Contrast - 2 albums: Night Gallery (2017), Notes from the Underground (2020)

Plump DJs - No albums

Jacques Lu Cont - No albums

Erol Alkan - 1 album: Fabriclive 77 (2014)

Spiritcatcher - No albums

Various Artists - N/A

DJ Shadow - 2 albums: The Mountain Will Fall (2016), Our Pathetic Age (2019)

Tiga - 1 album: No Fantasy Required  (2016)

Air - No albums

Fatboy Slim - No albums

Sander Kleinenberg - No albums

Snoop Dogg - 6 albums: Bush (2015), Coolaid (2016), Neva Left (2017), Bible of Love (2018), I Wanna Thank Me (2019), From tha Streets 2 tha Suites (2021), BODR (2022)

Jurassic 5 - No albums

Kruder & Dorfmeister - 1 album: Johnson (2022)

Zero 7 - No albums

Mylo - No albums

Digitalism - 2 albums: Mirage (2016), JPEG (2019)

Underworld - 2 albums: Barbara Barbara, We Face a Shining Future (2016), Drift Series 1 (2019)

LCD Soundsystem - 1 album: American Dream (2017)

London Elektricity - 2 albums: Are We There Yet? (2015), Building Better Worlds (2019)

Propellerheads - No albums

Just 11 of the artists have released an album in the last 10 years and only 3 of them have released one in the decade so far. Only Snoop Dogg has been prolific with none of the others managing more than 2 albums in a decade.

This leads to another question, are these albums any good?

Just one way to find out. I'm going to give each of those albums a listen and post what I think of them here.

My 25 Favourite Albums: Spiritcatcher - Coast 2 Coast

Just a reminder that I decided what my 25 favourite albums were in 2009, and this one actually came out in 2009.

It's probably the most obscure album out of them all, if you're not into dance music then there's a good chance you've never heard of Spiritcatcher.

When I first started using YouTube I would basically binge on listening to music I hadn't heard for years. After a while I realised that I didn't have to just use YouTube to find old music, I can use it to find new music too. Obviously I had to know said new music existed to find it on YouTube, so this is what happened.

Around the same time, MySpace was still popular. I never had an account myself, but knew a good chunk of the users were musicians, or aspiring musicians. I came across the profile of someone who I saw DJ a few times at a nightclub I used to go to who would mainly play deep house and tech house. This was the sort of music I was seeking at the time, so I looked at what musicians he liked on his profile and listened to said musician on YouTube. Of those, the one which had the biggest impact on me was Spiritcatcher.

A while later I learned they were going to be releasing this album. It's a mix album rather than their own material, but it was the sort of style I was looking for and the latest music.

There are 2 CDs, one mixed and the other unmixed, containing 10 of the 14 tracks that appear on the mixed CD.

It's worth buying for the first track alone, which is "DDNA" by Soul Designer. Like with many great albums though, it's not just about the individual tracks. Basically if you want some simple no nonsense tech house music then I don't think there is any better album than this.

Being a fan of this mix album, Spiritcatcher were on the list of acts I wanted to see (admittedly a long list). One day in 2011, the night of the Tottenham riots to be exact, I was in the Ministry of Sound and saw on the flyers inside that Spiritcatcher were playing there the following week.

Unfortunately I'd reached the point of my life where doing an all nighter would make me knackered the whole week after, so decided against doing the Ministry of Sound 2 weeks in a row and thought maybe I'd see them another time. However it doesn't look like they've played in London since then, that coupled with the fact my clubbing days are pretty much over it looks like that was my last opportunity to see them.