Today, we are trying something new. It's partially out of necessity, but I'm pretty psyched about it. At Ear 2 the Ground, we usually focus on the Morning Shuffle which allows us to bring you a good cross-section of our eclectic musical tastes. We will continue to do that. Recently, however, I have been reminded of an e-mail conversation I had with a few friends who are more knowledgeable about music than I am (but they don't write music blogs - so there). But anyway, this was a few years ago, just before all of us were on Facebook, so we mainly had these discussions over e-mail (we are spread across the country). We were talking about the rise of the MP3 Player/iPod or whatever. On the plus side, it sure makes it convenient to have at least a large chunk of my music collection at my fingertips, but I wondered if somehow, the concept of a record album might be lost. In the end, I concluded that art is enduring and adapts to whatever changes in medium come along. But, I still believe in the power of the album as a cohesive form of expression. So, we do the shuffle, but I always like to point you, dear reader, to the source album, in the hopes (unspoken usually) that if you hear something you like you will check out the album as a whole.
It is on rare occasions when we do a full-fledged record review, and of late, due to some unforeseen circumstances, I have been unable to doing many posts outside of our daily shuffle. So, when I was recently asked to write about a new record, I was excited, but the current state of my life and technology and time made it difficult to do what I so wanted to... That's when I came up with this idea. With my extended listening time in the morning, I usually end up with between 7-10 songs in the morning shuffle. Coincidentally, that is the approximate length of many albums. So, I pulled up the record I wanted to review, turned off the shuffle function (so I could hear the record in the order intended) and voila. We have the first ever Morning (Non-Shuffle) Album review, and it's a great one... keep reading after the jump:
