For those of you who checked out my list of favorite albums of 2010, you may have noticed another list on there of considerable length of all the albums I had yet to grade. Since that December 31st posting, I have listened to and graded a lot of the albums on that list. Some of them I have enjoyed quite a bit, enough to place them in the top fifty of that massive aggregate.
An album released in 2010 that particularly peaked my interest post
-2010 was a collaboration between UK trip hop producers The Orb and Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour. Metallic Spheres was made up of two tracks, each a part of a metallic sphere whole. Each was made up of around twenty minutes of warped voices, reverbed guitars and indelible hooks that were perverted into dystopian dance rhythms. It was the optimal thing you could expect from a forty-minute album that consisted of only two tracks; oscillating odysseys that hardly got stale.
The excellence of Metallic Spheres has left a great impression on me since I first encountered it, so I cannot help but make it a reference when listening to the second album by Osaka artist Vampillia, Alchemic Heart. It too is a forty-minute album comprised of two tracks that each exceed the twenty-minute mark; the first is called “Sea” and the second is called “Land”. And like songs that need to fill up a lot of time short of playing a medley of Led Zeppelin songs ala Dream Theater’s A Change of Seasons, Alchemic Heart moves very, very slowly.
