Your best 'first listen' ever

This was posted over on the Black Messiah poll:

think i'm going for "betray my heart." it's my favorite groove on the record

i think this album was the best first listen experience i've ever had. i was two beers deep and started playing "ain't that easy" and completely lost my shit

― who is extremely unqualified to review this pop album (BradNelson), Wednesday, June 8, 2016 11:54 PM (Yesterday)

And I thought, that's a good idea for a thread. So here it is.

brilliant idea. Daft Punk's Discovery is up there, also Want One by Rufus Wainwright. Parklife in 94 was another.

Heh. Kid A. Heard it at just the right time in my life.

Zen Arcade too. Still love the record, but I never recaptured the transcendent experience of the first spin.

xpost!!! Kid A on whip-its stands out most prominently.

To elaborate a bit, I was going through an intense teenage struggle that I won't go into. Read a blurb about Kid A somewhere that made it sound really interesting. Picked it up in a mall early in the day. Listened to it late at night through headphones while lying on my bedroom floor and staring at a bright moon shining through my window. Won't ever forget it.

Zen Arcade. Another angst-ridden teenage moment of my life. Put the CD into my car stereo and didn't get out until it was over. Nothing quite articulated adolescent pain, rage, and confusion that perfectly to me ever again.

zen arcade for me too. 16 and drunk and miserable and homesick.

also: daydream nation, exile in guyville, lion & the cobra, s.f. sorrow.

i tend to remember exactly where i was and who i was with and what the room was like if something hits me hard immediately. like, hearing that sinead album for the first time. had slept over at liz's place. heard it in the morning. SO VIVID. jim was there and i had never met him before. liz also played diamanda galas and that was also memorable, but, man, hearing that first side of the sinead album....POW!

I think it's safe to say that Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) completely remade my musical brain. It sounded intensely wrong and almost scary but it hooked me.

I probably would've been scooping my cerebellum out of the gutter if Trout Mask Replica had been my first Beefheart.

Without going over old/obvious territory (Boo Radleys - Giant Steps at 16 basically rearranged my mind on first listen), the most recent example is probably Eno's 'The Ship'. I listened to the first 5 minutes as a stream and already had a window open in my browser to buy it in hard format.

xp haha old lunch, we both had our brains rearranged

Two that stick out: Daft Punk's Alive 2007 and the Neutral Milk Hotel album.

Both of which I never really listen to anymore though...

Gangsta Gangsta. Bought the 12" because I'd read in several places that these guys were gonna be huge and were making a lot of noise. Took it back to my cheap cheap cheap studio apartment and put it on the turntable and it just knocked me over.

Hearing Tago Mago for the first time was an instant "THIS IS MY MUSIC" moment.

The best lately was Erroll Garner's Concert by the Sea.

helium's 'the dirt of luck'

bought it, brought it home, listened to it straight through twice

Two that stick out: Daft Punk's Alive 2007 and the Neutral Milk Hotel album.

― skip, Thursday, June 9, 2016 7:47 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was kinda deflated when I finally heard the NMH album because NMH live (opening for Superchunk, and having only read a little half-page thing about the E6 bands in Raygun) is still one of the most astounding live performances I've ever seen. I guess that counts as a 'best first listen'.

Ween's Pure Guava did some pre-Beefheart brain twisting. 'Push Th' Little Daisies' did not prepare me for what was in store.

Maybe Doolittle? I remember tooling around suburban Maryland the day I bought it on cassette, driving too fast, half out of my head on the musical buzz, thinking, "there's no way they can keep this up." They did though, song after brilliant song. I didn't listen to anything else in the car for weeks. It's still one of my favorite albums, one among many, but I don't know that I've ever again been so happily excited and amazed by an album as I was on that first listen.

Also Graceland on one of my family's last car trips together.

There is one Then/Now thing that I don't hear mentioned a lot and that is: When I found a copy of Unknown Pleasures at the Harvard Coop in 1983 and brought it home after a long car ride back to Connecticut and went to my room and put it on...i didn't know what it was going to sound like! I had seen exactly ONE picture of Ian Curtis in Creem Magazine. That day I bought Unknown Pleasures/Closer/Power, Corruption & Lies/Blue Monday 12-inch. Other than one New Order song on the college station I listened to, I hadn't heard any of it.

Not that teens now can't have their minds blown by a youtube video or something that pops up on their spotify or whatever, but i think it's a different kinda thing. You have to look at ads now. That's one difference.

Two that stick out: Daft Punk's Alive 2007 and the Neutral Milk Hotel album.

― skip, Thursday, June 9, 2016 1:47 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

First heard NMH at a Samhain party for old pagans with canal boats (I was not one of these) when I was 19. I had just played saxophone for the first time in years on one of the boats and we were smoking hash around a fire and everything felt very liminal. Someone put on a record player and it was NMH and it seemed impossibly elating.

I feel like this is how they intended their listenership to discover them.

funkadelic - maggot brain for me

and nirvana - nevermind. changed my life

Cocteau Twins' Blue Bell Knoll and Jane Siberry's The Walking. BBK's magic persists, but I don't think I've listened to that Siberry album in 15 years.

mbv- loveless, right around the time i'd discovered weed

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

Cardiacs - A Little Man and a House was like that - I heard "In a City Lining" by mistake (someone sent it to me a year prior and I forgot about it until it came on next after that awesome "History of Rock n' Roll" song by Captain Lou Albano...whoops!), immediately tracked down the album and spent an hour walking around campus with it in my headphones, just in total awe like...holy shit, they really are as advertised

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

hah, the easy answer to this is Autechre - how the fuck can anyone like these guys??

Lilys ‎– A Brief History Of Amazing Letdowns

Swirlies ‎– They Spent Their Wild Youthful Days In The Glittering World Of The Salons

Nothing (music related) was more significant for me than discovering these two records at the same time.

'Louder Than Bombs' - a friend had the cassette, I'd never heard the Smiths before, every song was like IT ME

just a song not a full album, but T'zozo & Professor's Woza Durban, have vivid memories of driving on #2 in the blistering hot sun from Port E to Cape Town in my cousins car listening to it over and over as loud as we could get his stereo to go

Kerosene by Big Black

Princeton radio played Stereolab's "Golden Ball" from a 7" Elektra released ahead of Transient in late summer 1993. It was that version from the Jenny Ondioline EP. I was already deep into them at this point, but did not realize something was pending (pre-internet). I was driving and it came on the radio and I almost crashed my car, it was so overwhelming.

xp that comes pretty close to "best first listen" for me as well, anticipation was high after Racer-X and "Passing Complexion" is pretty killer, but then "Kerosene" came on.

I don't remember where I was or when beyond that it was just after he died, but I can remember listening to Mojo Pin by Jeff Buckley for the first time and thinking "oh wow, what a voice, what a song".

I remember my first listen to Caribou's Up In Flames on the day it was released, having read early reviews and thought "that sounds like it's precision-engineered to tickle my fancy" and it did, and I just kind of squirmed and laughed all the way through as more audacious shoegaze jazz drum tumbles happened.

But mostly I remember buying In Sides by Orbital in Teignmouth Woolworths on the day it was released in April 1996, based on the strength of early reviews again, having never listened to anything even remotely techno before (I guess Bjork and Screamadelica, but nothing long form, instrumental, etc etc), nicking off sixth form early to go home, putting it on expecting to do something else, and just sitting, staring at the stereo transfixed, from practically the first second, thinking "this is amazing" through every single second for 72 minutes. Totally rearranged my tastes.

yeezus was a really fun first listen

tbh a lot of the amazing first listen albums wear out faster for me though, yeezus certainly included

shabazz palaces lese majesty one of the best first listens for me

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

― nashwan, Thursday, June 9, 2016 8:57 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I really hated the first Royal Trux I heard. Now they're one of my all-time favorites.

Probably In the Aeroplane Over the Sea for me: it had just come out, so I heard it without having any context for it beyond finding the cover art arresting, which made my first playthrough much more intense.

astral weeks

did anyone ever do that thing where you pull your car over to the side of the road because you are so devastated by the ligeti or arvo part they are playing on the radio? i've never done that. though i have stayed in the car to hear the end of a song i'd never heard.

I've definitely wandered around to hear the ends of certain Magma records

i have done the thing where i sat down on the couch because the arvo part they were playing on the radio was kind of long.

did anyone ever do that thing where you pull your car over to the side of the road because you are so devastated by the ligeti or arvo part they are playing on the radio?

there's a thread about this

Talking Heads, Fear of Music

Pretenders - Pretenders. Every song was/is a masterpiece.

I pulled over the car the first time I heard Judee Sill's "Jesus Was a Crossmaker"

Most vivid first listen was Birthday Party's Mutiny EP. I got it cause I'd heard "Swampland" and thought it was pretty heavy, then "Mutiny In Heaven" came on, and the deathly scream on the hard stop gave me shivers I can still feel.

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

cupid and psyche!

otm lol

Why is everybody talking about albums? The first thing that came to my mind after reading the thread title was songs, not albums.

not best ever but recent best: new SWANS album. holy fuck

xp - brad nelson post that inspired the thread was about an album

tbh a lot of the amazing first listen albums wear out faster for me though,

this.

re pulling over .. nope, but i have sat in the car before going to the office/shop to wait for a song to finish.
i once did this on my own drive and bh was somewhat flummoxed as to why i had sat in the car for an extra 5 mins.
however, 'the cedar tree' by doves is a bloody long song.

i mentioned daydream nation and that album never again sounded like the first time i heard it. at a friend's house very loud and very stoned. it was epic. and definitely memorable!

Abbey Road - I sat on the floor in our living room playing my mom's worn out LP (on an even worn-er out turntable), and basically had a psychedelic experience. Nothing else has come close, really. Turned me into not just a Beatles fan, but someone who wanted to make sounds like I was hearing.

Best first listen

Thinking about this question, I think I've had a more than fair share of splendid first listens. They are all from my teenage though that's not that surprising is it? I can still get blown away (Kurdish and Iranian music was the last time, was completely unknown to me) but not to the ecstatic extent of yesteryears. And that's ok. Scott Walker, Mark Hollis solo album come to mind, so does Metalheadz I and so much more. But I'll pick five:

dEUS - Worst Case Scenario (holiday in Spain, blew my mind, opened the Beefheart/Zappa portal)
Velvet Underground - VU+Nico (Drunk and immersed at a family weekend, changed my life)
Klaus Schulze - Timewind (The most unexpected of the bunch, drinking whisky with my krautrocking uncle and this just... Opened the portal to drone, kraut etc)
MBV - Loveless (what to say? It's Loveless. Blew me away)
Elliott Smith - XO (from Sweet Adeline on I knew somehow he'd be in my life forever, and still is)

But the best first listen ever, was Daft Punk's Discovery.

Me and a m8 had bought the cd already but decided to wait a week because he'd be home alone the next weekend. 'Homework' was our life for four years and I can remember the anticipation was just... Ahhh, too much. We decided to make a whole seance of it, planned the whole Saturday building up to the climatic moment of pressing play around 9pm. In the afternoon we played Homework, the 12"s, remixes (Mothership Reconnection!!) and fantasized about what each new track could sound like merely going off the already published track list (and Internet too premature to be able to spoil it ). We wrote it down.
We smoked some weed, cooked a four course meal, opened our favorite beer and then come nine... Pressed play. We didn't exchange a single word for the first three tracks or so, but just sat there smiling, shrugging, in utter disbelief that they actually managed to pull it off: meet our insanely high expectations. Otherworldly.

Oh to be 19 again...

Nevermind when I was 15. I didn't think anything could ever beat it and that it would be my favourite album for the rest of my life

I'm going to have a serious think about this. When I was younger and just starting to build up a record collection of my own, music had a tendency to hit my "pleasure centre" a lot faster. What I've found is, the older I get and the more music I listen to, it becomes harder to find that type of high again - either because you can hear the references, or it becomes harder to be impressed, or you're trying to find something with an exciting freshness to it. I'm sure one of the big reasons that seasoned listeners end up turning to more extreme, avant-garde forms of music is not because they want to be "challenged" as such, more that it's reached the point where they've heard so much music that they're bored easy and want to hear something that breaks out of a more structured mould in order to keep things exciting for them.

About 30 years ago: "Lose Your Friends" and "Lose Your Job," two mixtapes of 1976-1982 punk that a friend made for me — opened a door to a new planet for me.

A few years later, Macro Dub Infection vol. 1 — ditto.

More recently, Pauline Oliveros' Crone Music — ditto ditto.

Nico's Desertshore, cutout cassette sometime in the early 80s. Car stereo, w33d, snowstorm, hypnosis...

Ohhhhhh, I just thought of one. I was a big Faith No More fan on the basis of The Real Thing but...holy shit, Angel Dust. Probably 14 or so at the time.

It was the summer I finished high school. A few of us were taking a camping trip in the wilds north of the city. They picked me up in their station wagon, and sleeping in the back seat was a girl. Chestnut curls, bare legs, vaguely Spanish features. I sat in the front and stole looks at her in the rearview mirror. We were on the highway when she woke up — my first love, we were together five years — and a song came on, warm and yearning. "Who is this?" I asked our driver. "Uh, Peter Gabriel," she said like I was crazy for not knowing.

I heard "Ghosts" by Japan in 1982, when I was fourteen, on the radio in the middle of the night lying in bed with no lights on. I had no frame of reference for it but it felt like something I had been looking for without knowing it...

I thought 'Loser' was just a dumb alt novelty song and paid it no attention. Then I was riding around with a friend playing Mellow Gold and was like, wait, this is that guy?!

Nico's Desertshore, cutout cassette sometime in the early 80s. Car stereo, w33d, snowstorm, hypnosis...

― Dan is a ‪#‎VegetablePuppet‬, he is NOT REAL. ‪#‎flatearth (Dan Peterson), Thursday, June 9, 2016 8:15 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oof. Best first listen I'd want.

i think i actually get more impressed by things the older i get. and i think it's because i've heard so much! i tend to appreciate things more for what they are and not use music so much as a narcotic. i'm really into listening.

oh man long ago x-post in response to turrican. started writing that ages ago.

Energy Essentials, 3-LP (much later on CD, I think), 99 cent radio promo from the Impulse! label: one of the very first jazz records I bought---had held back because I'd read all these ecstatic visions of Coltrane etc., and think, "What if I listen---and don't get it?" What would that say about me? But this was an immediate immersion and conversion: good variety of late Trane (not *just* the Upper Room, jazz-beyondo Pentecost of "Ascension"), and the likes of Cecil Taylor's "Bulbs," feat. Archie Shepp, for immediately engaging, come-fly-around-the-block, refracted catchiness: the ideal gateway.

I hate to say the Beatles, but I'm old enough to say it. The opening to Lovely Rita, age four or so.

Hands down Frank Ocean Channel Orange for me. Not because the album is great (though it is), but because hearing it for the first time at the exact same time as the rest of the Internet after that incredible late night performance, everybody freaking out about it and its story, was a really memorable shared experience.

Sheer Heart Attack by Queen was definitely one of them, for me.

Dreadful cliche but in an acid fug and hearing Freedom Run by Kyuss. I'm not sure I was ever the same.

More recent would probably be Ole Coltrane or the Individualism of Gil Evans.

Would have to say Pixies for both a live experience and album.
Saw them open for the Throwing Muses in a small club and was totally unprepared for their out-of-left-field brilliance. Shortly after I bought Come on Pilgrim and my mouth was on the floor for that as well.

I had been reading about bands in skateboard magazines but it was 1987 and I was 13 with no where to hear any of them until a new kid moved to town and had a copy of Black Flag's "the first four years" compilation. I remember listening to it for the first time on a crappy walkman on a dark, freezing school bus and it was so shocking and terrifying and exhilarating to me.

And that led incredible disappointment when I first heard the Smiths, as I had expected them to be like Black Flag because they had an album named Meat is Murder and they had to be like the Ramones but way more awesome and I had a real moment of cognitive dissonance followed by anger when I first heard them.

Waiting outside the school gates aged around 12, a guy walks past with a massive ghettoblaster on his shoulder (like Radio Raheem in Do the Right Thing), and it's playing the opening bars of Stevie Wonder's Sir Duke.

augustus pablo king tubbys meets rockers uptown! i worked in a record store in college and the much older 40-ish dude managing my shift threw it on and was like "this is one of the best dub albums ever" and i didn't even know what dub was at the time but we listened to it all day and i ended up taking the album home, this was prob 13 years ago and now reggae/dub is like a solid 35% of what i listen to nowadays

the 1975 lp

specifically 'settle down'

most memorable i guess, hearing the first couple tracks of Talker by us maple (first i'd ever heard them).. it was like it was tailored to my taste

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