Daily Eclectoid

Back again. Not so much a Daily Eclectoid as a When I Feel Like It Eclectoid. That's okay. I logged every album I listened this week. Kind of. Each day, I wrote down every album I listened to. If I listened to half an LP one day and finished the following day, I didn't log it. If I listened to something on separate days, I logged it twice. That didn't happen this week, but it will. I'd like to log Mondays to Sundays, but I started last Sunday, so you get a bit of everything. I'm making this up as we go. Here's Sunday 12.07 to Sunday 12.14: Sunday, December 7, 2025 In Nigeria (1985) - Yusef Lateef Ella & Louis Christmas (1960) - Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong Butterfly 3000 (2021) - King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard Give Love At Christmas (1980) - The Temptations Poppy Seeds: An International Benefit for Mutual Aid in Gaza (2025) - Various  Monday, December 8, 2025 Club Nostalgia (Special Edition) (2024) - Minuit Cafe Groove Memories (Japanese...

Happy Labor Day. Many of you labored on Labor Day. I hope this wasn’t the case, but if it was, I hope you had a good soundtrack. It’s not quite the end of summer, but it might as well be. Hence a playlist that transitions from hyperpop to neo soul. Sure, it ends with some forgotten funk, but something reclaimed from the dustbins of the early 80s is bound to contain some wistfulness that’s settled into the sound. We start with a six song block of Kero Kero Bonito, spanning the entirety of their output. The first tracks are as poppy as possible and the final two tracks give us a glitched social media freakout (“Only Acting”) and visions of wildfires fueled by human carelessness (“When the Fires Come”). That’s certainly a summer to fall arc. KKB hasn’t released a major project since 2021, so hopefully they’re in their winter stage and not permanently closed. Lemuria’s “Christine Perfect” feels like the perfect fall throwback sound. Something Letters to Cleo never released. Let’s throw “He...

No posts since October 2024 and then four since August 24? One of these posts is a random playlist and another is review of a Conan the Barbarian eBook? What’s going on around here? What’s the point of this blog? Practice is the point. I love writing, and I never write. I love creation, and I never create. So this is an exercise in commitment. Not that I have commitment issues. Rather, what I regularly commit to rarely fulfills me. I commit to my job, but if I didn’t have to work it, I wouldn’t work it. Two hours a day on the commute circuit? Two hours a day of poisoning the atmosphere and wearing down my body? No thank you. I commit to cleaning the house. To building habits and routines. To feeling productive. But that’s all a racket. True commitment is creating. It’s loving. So here I am, in a hotel room outside of Princeton, New Jersey typing these words and learning more about myself than I knew five minutes ago. I need to commit less often to the arbitrary. I need to commit less ...

    Now That's What I Call Little Hag  (2024) - Little Hag  Thirteen tracks about being horny, dissatisfied, and resentful. The variety of instrumentation keeps the attention just as much as the lyrics. Different flavors of EDM flares are present throughout tracks. Plain Jane rock 'n' roll powers songs like "Oops!" and "1000 Birds." "Hell Yes," an all time favorite, manages acoustic, power chords, and experimental electronic flourishes. The cover art sums it all up--there's a little bit of everything, and it's all representative of Little Hag. Oh, and the opener, "The Machine" is about singer Avery Mandeville's vibrator and also manages to capture a bit of current cultural milieu. Head over to r/myboyfriendisai for insight. Or don't, if you value your peace of mind. It gets a bit tired in the second half, but perhaps you're not supposed sit down with a modern rock album. Perhaps you pick a few tracks to obsess over...

    It's Sorted  (2024) - Cheekface   Call me a Cheek Freak. Call me an instant convert. This is the album that did activated me.   Clocking in just under a half-hour, this has to be the newest release of any artist I can recite line for line. (Exception: Their 2025 album,  Middle Spoon .)   My children can recite the lyrics. I'll throw a random "Okay, cheesecake" at them and they'll hit me back with a "I saw you at the pharmacy." My seven-year-old listened to nothing but Taylor Swift until I spun this one, and then she ditched Swiftiedom entirely and spends her time begging me to take her to see Cheekface live.   What's the appeal? Everything, really. Every song is catchy. Every lyric is absurd, yet still they find a way to throw the occasional biting commentary at the listener: American chaos, carnage, and death, Nature really is returning, And we really are the virus, dude. This from a song that also includes: "We used to brush our teeth, but...

Ellen Carter, host of the Morning Brew Jazz Notes Edition, kicked my day off with David Sanborn's "Snakes" (1992), highlighting Spaceman Patterson's rhythm guitar. Patterson jammed with Miles, and he's playing at the upcoming DC Jazz Festival. (These are the things you learn on a Monday morning spent with 89.9 WPFW.) This track is new to me, and it's the perfect sound for a recently risen sun on a late summer morning. For this playlist, I let the feel of "Snakes" knock down similar musical dominos. Not stylistic dominos, but dominos designed to elicit a similar feeling. That of a late summer Monday. The start of a good week. The scent of wishful thinking. Take note of the Parliament "Flashlight" interlude on Maceo Parker's swinging version of Cannonball Adderley's "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy." Make sure to queue up the correct version of "Ain't Got No - I Got Life." You want the second version on the "'Nuff...