Album of the week – N° 1

In this weekly series, we’ll cover someone’s favorite Album of the Week. 

Exploring new music and discovering new bands is always fun. Without music we couldn’t even listen to all of great gear. Music is what unites us and as such I am reviving a very old series, in which we each week talk about one specific album. In short: “The Album of the Week”!

Nowadays there are great tools on the market to discover new bands or albums. Last.FM and ROON Radio are great examples of that. But not everyone is using ROON or any other software that analyses your music library/listening taste, and so it isn’t always easy to find new cool stuff to listen to. This is where the Headfonia writer team and you, the HFN readers, come in.

We feel and hope that this “Album of the week” series can be a way to recommend new music to our fellow headphone enthusiasts and so we’ll be posting a new recommendation each week on Saturday. If you want to see your favorite album being featured here, head over to our contact page, or hit us up on Twitter or Instagram. (hashtag #albumoftheweek or #AOTW). If we like it then you will be featured in this series.

It could be a great album, a great recording, an impressive binaural experience, a YouTube play list and so much more.

I look forward to all the new music, so let’s get this new series started!

As Chief Editor I’ll be taking the first spot, and my album of the week is “Blood Sugar Sex Magik” from the Red Hot Chili Peppers!

September 24, 1991, is a legendary date in album history: Nirvana’s Nevermind, A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory, Pixies’ Trompe Le Monde, and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik all landed in American record stores on that fateful day. And – I kid you not – those are three of my favorite albums right there!

I was just about to turn 14 later that year, but I still remember buying those albums on CD in the local music store (they still existed back then). I still own these CDs and I still play them on my vintage Kenwood cd-player at least a few times a month. These weren’t my first cd’s though, that honour goes to The Scorpion’s “Crazy World” album which was released back in 1990. And yes, I still love that album today. Before 1990, all my music was on vinyl and I still have all of those as well.

Anyway, back to the Peppers. I have had the pleasure of seeing the RHCP live (unfortunately they sucked) and of course I have listened to their other albums, but none of them – at least to me – is as impressive as this one. Each and every song on this album is great and the albums just oozes energy, power and excitement. Even when I click play today, 32 years later, I am singing along and playing air guitar from the first to the last note.

My favorite song on the album is the album’s title song. The lyrics of this song were written by Anthony Kiedis and portray sex in a variety of lively and explicit yet metaphorically driven and spiritual ways. According to Kiedis’ autobiography Scar Tissue, several of the lyrics were written about him and his girlfriend of the time. This song is one of the heaviest on the album. A characteristic fat drum beat drives the intro and verses and a similarly powerful beat features in the chorus, with multiple bass drum accents and a heavy-hitting feel. A very dark wah-wah ridden guitar riff and bass chords (one of the few examples in RHCP music) complement the verse beat and crescendo into an extremely heavy, almost wall of sound melody in the chorus. Kiedis’ low lyrics and contrasting lively chorus complement the dynamics as well.*

Lots of iconic albums were released back in the 90s when I was a teenager, so expect to see more of this “old stuff” in this series from me. I will also be posting on binaural music and ASMR in this series.

For those not familiar yet with this album, I hope you’ll like it as much as I do. For those who know it well, I hope it will bring a smile on your face again.

Enjoy, and see you next week!