Your best 'first listen' ever

Wim Mertens' score for The Belly of an Architect

Both my favorite first-listen album and song experiences were both by Springsteen, at different times of my life.

My cousin, who was a teenager at the time, played me BitUSA on her record player when I was either five or six years old. I still remember jumping up and down with excitement listening to a bunch of the songs on that album. BitUSA was my second album purchase soon after that listening experience (Thriller was the first, duh). What's funny is even though I listened to BitUSA obsessively for years I never really followed Bruce's career. To me he was just a guy who released an album I loved, and for all I knew, disappeared. I didn't start digging into his discography until my early twenties.

For the first-listen song experience, I remember being awed by "Streets of Philadelphia" in '93 or '94 (whenever it was played on the radio the brief time it charted). I would've been a teenager at the time. I distinctly remember being in my room, probably fucking around on the Sega Genesis or something, when the station I was listening to cued that song. I had to stop what I was doing just to focus on listening to it. Still probably my favorite Springsteen song, lyrically anyway.

The Clientele - Suburban Light

back in the day, The Cars - s/t

In my long history of buying things I've never heard based on reviews, probably the two biggest revelations were Brian Eno Music for Airports and Cocteau Twins Victorialand.

(And I didn't notice that Victorialand was 45 RPM so I played it at 33. Fortunately "Lazy Calm" is amazing at either speed.)

And the big formative experience cliche: When I was 12, my cousin put his huge 1974 headphones on my head and played me "Dark Side of the Moon."

Pinback - Summer, on a return flight from Japan

Like the flip of this idea also. Worst first listen as in your favourite LP now that you initially disliked.

― nashwan, Thursday, 9 June 2016 14:57 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Pere Ubu - Dub Housing. Found it in a cut-out bin with no cover - just the CD in a clear slipcase. Thought it was going to be reggae. Bamboozled when I put it in the CD player. Nearly threw it in the bin. But I kept coming back to it and it's now probably in my top ten favourite albums.

Probably Doolittle. Borrowed the tape off an acquaintance I had biology lessons with when I was 14, so 1990/91, and walked around town with in my walkman, blew me away. I can still remember standing in Midland Educational looking at books thinking this is the best thing ever.

In early high school I was at a record store and in the Miles Davis section I saw this odd-ass double CD in a fatboy case called Pangaea. I flip it over: two discs, two songs?? track one, 42 minutes long????

I'll never forget, I got home and needed to use the bathroom. My cd player/clock radio was still in their from my shower that morning so I just popped in disc 1, sat down on the toilet and proceeded to experience the most shocking and thrilling number 2 of my life

I loved Miles Already but I was heavy into like, Sketches and Blue Moods and stuff like that. I'd heard Bitches Brew but lets be real even thats tame in comparison. Pangaea changed everything for me. If that record is possible to capture live, fully improvised 40 something years ago, anything is possible

Still remember the first time I heard Songs in the Key of Life. Haven't been the same since.

The day after Christmas in 1991, I was trying to get out from under an extremely cold winter snowstorm that was shutting down I-70 throughout Colorado and Utah. It was so cold that morning that the doors on my truck froze solid and I had to heat up the latch with a hairdryer. A friend of mine had made me a bunch of tapes - one of which was Spacemen 3's Playing With Fire*. I liked what SP3 I had heard but hadn't heard a whole album.

I think "Suicide" came on just as I was crossing that part of I-70 in Utah where the landscape is straight out of the Coyote & Roadrunner cartoons (https://youtu.be/DTmeGk33mwE) - only in blizzard conditions. I've never heard anything that could take the familiar and make it so alien. So warped and out there and ephemerally hazy as a UFO encounter. Couldn't stop listening to it until I got to Las Vegas that night. I dunno - it just seemed like other proto-gazers out there weren't trying.

I later found out the PWF cassette was recorded on a faulty tape deck that subtly altered the speed here and there - increasing the overall effect. I still have the cassette - it's in the "going to digitize this some day" box.

For me it was The Final Cut. It was the first Floyd I ever heard (except for "Another Brick in the Wall") and the first track "The Post War Dream" on headphones was definitely one of those "this is music I've been waiting all my life to hear" moments. I know it's p derided now but I still love that album and it set me off on a voyage of Floyd discovery that I've never forgotten, even though I don't listen to them so much these days.

The Clientele - Suburban Light

― that's not my post, Thursday, June 9, 2016 10:12 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

When I first heard "I Am the Walrus" I was sure I'd never hear anything so amazing again in my life, and I don't think I have.

You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb was the first Spoon song I ever heard, I don't think I'd be exaggerating if I said I might have played it 50 times that week.

I'm not sure what my very best first listen experience was, so I'll just pick a recent one:

The opening triptych of To Pimp a Butterfly (Wesley Theory, For Free?, King Kunta) was totally mindblowing on first listen. The rest of the album was great too, but those first three songs were the real holy shit moment. I mean if he's gonna start an album like that, what the hell is the rest of the album going to sound like?

first listen to the self-titled velvet underground in high school made me feel "cool" for the first time

Waxworks by XTC changed everything for me from the second I put it on.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5jZXE3bNPg

^^ this, too, was life altering.

For a recent album experience, the War on Drugs' Lost in a Dream definitely counts. I'm 37 years old, I've been obsessively chasing the musical dragon for a good fifteen years at this point, and I can't believe my favorite album of all time was released in 2014.

lots of roots reggae and ska records on monday nights at a bar in los angeles.

There were probably first listens from my younger days that were more impactful, but the first thing that came to mind when I saw this thread was Bob Dylan's Modern Times. Partly because it was more recent I guess the memory is more vivid, but also partly because as someone who has experienced hearing great old Dylan albums for the first time many times it was my first experience hearing a new Dylan album and really digging it.

Isaac Hayes' Hot Buttered Soul. I was staying that summer with a friend who lives in Yakima, a small town over the mountains from Seattle. He lived in a tiny rundown house whose interior was dominated by the drumset that took up most of his living room, and he was a beast on the drums. I had it turned up on his nice stereo system, he comes home in the middle of "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymystic", hears it, immediately jumps behind his drumset and starts jamming along with it.

There's a number of albums that have utterly floored me on first listen, but probably the most memorable was Agaetis Byrjun by Sigur Ros. Just felt like every song seemed to one up the previous one in terms of beauty and grandeur and eventually left me spent by the end of it.

Enter the Wu-Tang at 14
Everybody Knows This is Nowhere at 19
Salem's King Night at 30 (I know)
Floating Points' Elaenia at 36