The new load.

Of course, I would write that last post and then pile up the way I have this weekend. Not on purpose--not entirely, anyway.

When I wrote the last one I neglected to remember that I'd just a few hours before bought my first CD of 2009. It was In My Own Words, Ne-Yo's first album from 2006, which I'd only heard sparsely and in spots. I knew a couple songs but most of it I didn't at all, and while I don't subscribe to the theory of having "fucked up" by not knowing a piece of music the exact second it landed in the public eardrum, I liked this guy the second I heard him--not on the radio but on Ghostface Killah's "Back Like That," which I didn't vote for as a single that year and regret not doing. (That and Herbert's "Harmonise.") I nabbed the other two day of release but for whatever reason haven't gone back till now. (Well, the reason's obvious: he made my favorite album of last year.) Really like this a lot--not the way I do the last one, which goes deeper emotionally for me, and is more precisely written, but it's not as if he stints on feeling or fine-tuning here, either.

That's not the load, though--the load isn't even the mail. I finished the last FE shipment just in time; two new titles landed today, one of them a double-CD w/book from Rune Grammofon which is sounding tasty in a few senses. (RIYL: Hassell/Eno, Last Exit, acoustic electronica, early Crimson.) No, it's the 100+ eMusic downloads, which splits out into 10 albums: Peter Bernstein's Monk (five songs in, sounds nice--I love Monk and these guitar treatments really throw him into new light), new titles (just this week, I believe, for most of them) by Cut Off Your Hands, Antony and the Johnsons, PPP (like the previously-heard mixtape as well), Drug Rug (their name always put me off and made me curious to about equal measure--this being an EP I figured it was as good an opportunity as any), and Modern Skirts, and Tom Moon-recommended oldies by Abdullah Ibrahim, Albert King (Born Under a Bad Sign), Amalia Rodrigues, and Ali Akbar Khan.

That's a lot of music. I'll have time for it--or make time--but it's the first real roadblock I've hit with regard to SLM. I know I'll have to download at least a couple standalone tracks for It's a Hit consideration, an easy enough hump to get over; one tier for work, one for just listening. Obviously, overload crosses formats, too: I'd never be able to do this if I were to restrict myself to listening to everything exact order.

That sounds like an experiment waiting to happen, doesn't it? "I bought this CD, got two CD promos of albums I'm reviewing, downloaded five new tracks, and was sent a .zip file with a third review title. Now I have to play them in the order received." How OCD can I possibly be about this? Let's find out, etc.

Here's another experiment I'm going to try at some point to be determined: Reader Request Day(s). It's simple: I make a post asking commenters to name one recording apiece--song or album, no box sets plz--that I should listen to, and I'll spend a day doing just that, in the order received, and probably write about it here. There's a cheap gimmick for you!

It's a weird time to have to do the eMusic pile-on because I'm really in the mood to listen to cheap, gimmicky music--singles, of course. New ones. I have a couple crucial deadlines in the offing and preparing myself to bear down on them is good discipline, but when I'm done I will start diving into as many items on my get-to list and in-box folders as still look interesting. I'm still not optimistic about Pop 2009's thing-ness, but I might as well start finding out.