Cool Albums for May 28, 2025

Look at me, accidentally typing April instead of May. Where has the time gone? Before I know it, it'll be another month gone, and I will have stories to tell about seeing (and hopefully meeting) DEVO.

As I promised in my last post, I'm here sooner versus later to link to some cool albums. Admittedly, secretly working on creative zen affected how often I was listening to anything, so my list may be a bit lackluster, BUT goddamnit, I'm going to try my best here. As always, links will open in a new window. Click away!

Slushwave Social Club - SSCC Volume 5: Brief Glimpses of Quicksilver Dreams; or, Slush in a Rush - I gave this compilation a shoutout in the Hot Takes Super Retrospective episode, and I'm shocked I failed to mention it here. Slushwave can be an intimidating listen for some; each track varies in length from five minutes to 30, and it can be a lot to take in at one time. However, on this compilation, these artists were challenged to create tracks that were a maximum length of four minutes. It's a lovely introduction to artists with whom I hadn't been familiarized, and each track brings something different to the table to boot. There are some extremely gorgeous tracks on here that I enjoyed tremendously.
Ghost Enterprise - Vistas - I am so obsessed with how fantastic this album is, and obsessed with the fact that, for how genuinely sampled it sounds, it's not fucking sampled at all. So much of this brought back really wild flashbacks from my late 90s/early 2000s tweenhood/teen hood in ways that I really didn't anticipate. Listen to Teen Zone, and watch the accompanying Zoog Disney looped commercial, and tell me this doesn't work perfectly. I actually fully had a "Love Blooms in a Chat Room" moment with somebody I met through an Incubus AOL chat room in 2002! (Fun fact: we're still cordial to this day.) These songs sounded like things intentionally compressed for shitty dialup connections like mine to play without too many issues, and I already crave a sequel. Long live 96kbps!
Tommy Martini - Cosmic Dawn - There was an online radio station I would listen to at an old job called Smooth Grooves, which played the best of modern smooth jazz, and this album would fit in so well. It's beautiful, it's relaxing, is it sampled? I don't know that answer. I feel like answers are pointing to no here as well, but I feel awkward approaching this guy I've never met to be like "oh this is beautiful, is this sampled?" He may find that to be insulting! But yeah, I love this album. Give it a listen.
Enraile - Delete Yourself - This album is loud and honestly...sounds like the homie channeled a lot of anger into this. Some tracks get quite abstract and experimental in a way that I wouldn't quite expect from Enraile, but combined with his trademark use of 90s and 2000s R&B, it works really well. Prepare for a lot of distortion, and if you're not headbanging to at least one track, I'll be a. shocked b. sad. (p.s. Have a bonus album recommendation from an Enraile project with the artist Xcellents: Millennium Edition - コネ Software)
定常 w a n d e r e r - a f t e r h o u r s [WIP] - Who knew that a slushy house album would work so well? I'm surprised it's a work in progress, because to me, it feels quite finalized. I bet this would go off during a night drive after a fun time with friends. The only flaw, a very minor flaw: some of these tracks could be a liiiiiiittle bit shortened. Outside of that, the vibe is great. 
Cityman Productions - Enter the Metaverse, A Solarpunk Experience - A similar sound to the beautiful S​​​Ξ​​​CR​​​Ξ​​​+ ΞXPLOR​​​Λ​​​+​​​ION PROGR​​​Λ​​​M [Vol. 1] , a compilation I covered in this post. A gorgeous comp created to provide relief to Ukraine, all of these artists really brought their A-game. I regret how late I was to checking this one out. 

I guess this post wasn't too lackluster. I'm starving, and it's almost time to watch Twin Peaks in the Hot Takes Discord server, so I am going to be like Ben Horne and eat a brie and butter sandwich. Until next time! 

creative zen - touch

 

A loving tribute to mp3 players, which is exactly right up my alley. As many of you know (or maybe have noticed some in my previous blog posts), I have been in full blown mp3 player nostalgia mode for the last few months, reminiscing on how mp3 players have been such an essential part of my music listening history. The same mp3 player I referenced in my Video 2000 post was the same player I was using to fall in love with Vektroid's Telnet Erotika back in early 2011, my go-to album when I was doing everybody's dishes (well, I should revise this: it was either Telnet Erotika or some sort of kindasorta jangly shoegaze album playing), and that same mp3 player was used a year later during my daily walks around the park near my house, listening to things like Seahawks' Tramadol Beach, Outlands' Com Ocean, Whitewoods' Beach Walk, and some of the early pre-coined vaporwave albums. It eventually became flooded with future Fortune 500 releases, and that park was where I first thought of The Music of the Now Age, and I wondered "Will artists even actually send me tracks? I hope so."

But with this album being based in 2005, the year the Creative Zen Touch was brought into the world, let's really go back in time here to my first mp3 player which looked a lot like this (but navy). It was given to me by my bestie's cousin after he'd stolen it from a Big Lots. He had very large Tripp pants, and he had a history of seeing just how much he could successfully smuggle into those pants in one go. My friends and I watched him leave with 50 manga titles from a Books-A-Million once, seeing if he could actually pull it off (still insane that he did, as the bulky pockets of his pants made it stupidly obvious), and we were keeled over laughing in the corner of a cookbook aisle. 

One night, we met a new group of friends at Books-A-Million, and after the store closed, we chose to drive over to the park that was about five or so minutes away. It was a small car, and there were nine of us. The mp3 player-stealing cousin voluntarily chose the trunk, where he and another trunk friend loudly sang Gorillaz' Clint Eastwood to the rest of us up front who were crammed in and sitting in each others' laps, giggling like a bunch of hyenas. One of my friends fell in love with a girl from the group we'd met that night, and they later had a child or two. I always thought that was cute, looking back. 

I'm getting way way way into tangent mode, whoops. All of that to say: the mp3 player that my bestie's cousin grabbed for me has also been linked to many fond memories of my later high school years, finally getting through a very rough depression, developing friendships, and finally ungluing myself from my computer and going out for a change. Cherry Cola by Eagles of Death Metal is forever affiliated with swinging on a swing set behind a Salvation Army gym my class had gone to on a field trip. Alala by Cansei de Ser Sexy will always be linked to me flipping through music trivia books and biographies at Books-A-Million, hoping that music wasn't leaking out through my headphones too badly. Cowbell by Tapes 'n Tapes was never taken out of mp3 player rotation, as that was my go-to cheering up anthem. That will forever be tied to dancing in my bestie's kitchen, the song blaring on her mom's computer. 

Other songs on my mp3 player:

Beck - Scarecrow

Tom Vek - If You Want

Deftones - Knife Prty

The Zutons - Valerie

People in Planes - If You Talk Too Much (My Head Will Explode)

The Thermals - A Stare Like Yours

With only 128MB of storage space on it, I made it work. I think I had 16-18 tracks at most on that thing. It felt like a mixtape I could always have on me, something that didn't require some sort of accompanying player, something I could just immediately fire up and have playing when I needed it. Now, I look at it as a fond time capsule. A 20 year old time capsule. What the fuck.

Enjoy an ode to the impact of mp3 players on many of us in the mid-2000s, and how mp3 players always had an assortment of random songs preloaded upon booting it up for the first time, and think about how these ringtone-y songs have a way of sending someone back in time. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going into my Razr's ringtone settings to make cost of comfort my alarm. 

Download the album at the link below:

https://creative-zen.bandcamp.com/album/touch

Also, new post coming sooner versus later with some cool albums to check out. Talk again soon!