This one's been sitting in my Kraken folder since last September. I had initially intended to dash off fifty words about this; "it was compiled 10 years ago by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, it has a bunch of weird shit on it, blah, blah, blah." But something told me, "hold back for a laundry day. Listen to this on random. Throw the tracks in with a bunch of your regular tunes."
So I did. And gratefully so.
Other than the curators, I grabbed this initially because it had tracks from Adrian Younge (who I've heard and loved), Betty Davis (ditto), and Karen Dalton (who I'd heard of, but never heard). And there were no surprises there; everything I'd heard about Karen Dalton was, if anything, understated, and I rushed out to cop her two initial releases.
It was the unfamiliar that knocked me for six, especially when it was slotted in between a Get Up Kids track and some classic Adam & the Ants. The likes of Moondog and Giorgos Xylouris were revelatory; "Else Torp singing Arvo Part" is a sentence that is almost unfair in its simplicity, for how powerful a track it is. Even songs from Thurston Moore and Bill Callahan are almost gobsmacking in their strength. It's enough to make me reevaluate how I feel about those artists.
(Hint: I wasn't a fan.)
So, yeah, this has been on my phone for about five months now, on account of how it inspires me to listen broadly and experience sound differently.
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