Tower and Town, August 2018 (view the full edition)'Listen To This' Moments“Listen to this. It’ll change your life.” I’m being handed a CD by my Dad. A brightly coloured wash with stark black font running down the left-hand side like a playbill: “Stage Fright” by The Band. I’m in my early teens in a branch of an entertainment retailers that no longer exists. The Band, I marvel. I spend the next few months poring over liner notes and photos. Big Pink, beards, Bob Dylan. And then there’s the music. Three powerhouse vocalists, multi-instrumental prowess and songs that sound like they spring straight from the well of the great North American canon. I’m obsessed. If you’re lucky, this kind of experience will happen to you multiple times throughout your formative years. Raiding Mum’s record collection: Who’s Next, Dark Side of the Moon, Graceland. Borrowing friends’ albums: Tallahassee, Brighten the Corners, Millions Now Living Will Never Die. Before taking the plunge on your own, following your muse into weird and wonderful and, yes, maybe even uncool territory: Heavy Weather, A Love Supreme, Karma, The Nightfly, Toto IV, Abandoned Luncheonette, Hard Candy, Hot Rats, Glassworks. And just when you think you’ve got a handle on things, the potential for new aural epiphanies exponentially increases each Friday. I’ve worked at Sound Knowledge, Marlborough’s longstanding independent record shop, for the best part of seven years and, while there’s plenty of the admin that comes with the running of a small business, it doesn’t change the fact that I get to listen to and enthuse about a constant stream of brilliant new music. Behind the counter of a record shop it pays to have Catholic tastes. Wait, forget the caveat. It pays to have Catholic tastes - because there’s so much brilliant stuff out there from places you’d never even think to look: Brazilian new wave disco, Nigerian funk and boogie, private press yacht rock from failed Californian musicians who never hit the big time except for two sides of vinyl – but among the slap bass and sax solos, they got to touch the stars. I couldn’t begin to draw up a list of favourites; one man’s trash is another man’s treasure after all (as anyone who picks an album off our shelves and asks “Would I like this?” will surely attest). But I can trace my voyage of musical discovery, a great spider diagram of album credits, of city-wide scenes, of my Dad handing me a CD. Because those “listen to this” moments never stop if you don’t want them to. So here are five Great Songs from 2017/2018 by Artists You’ve Never Heard Of: Samuel Robinson |