Week 7: On The Farm

Well, I'm back from my trip. Do I have any interesting listening habits to show for it? meh. But regardless, I picked up the new Dinosaur Jr. last week, and I'm thinking that we're gonna see a pretty substantial bump from them sometime soon. Not to mention that I managed to catch Sonic Youth @ Terminal 5, and the new songs sounded pretty rockin'. I'm probably gonna end up picking that up before too long as well.

So over the last two weeks, I'm managed to accrue aboutand minus all previous plays, that's a total of 1033 over the past two weeks.

So what was I listening to over those two weeks? Well, let's take a look:
Now, I know this is only the last 7 days, and I missed last weeks entry, but this is the best I can do, dammit! We cans ee David Cross got a lot of plays, as I realized that it's especially comforting to listen to comedy while undergoing air-travel. It's like traveling with a hilarious friend, and getting to laugh at little jokes all to yrself. "Pissing in God's face for five hours..." indeed. But otherwise, it's Dinosaur Jr.'s week. I managed to catch 'em live at Terminal 5 in NYC, and gotta say, they were far from a disappointment. Since I hadn't bought their new album (I believe in brand-loyalty, and simply haven't had the time to hit-up my favorite record shop, so I never bought it, 'cause I could never bring myself to buy it anywhere else--except: ) so I bought it at the show, and got the sweet deal of the double-LP, w/ free trucker hat & digital download, for a cool $20. Point is: I'm giving the new album the ol' college try, since it's been awhile since I bought something new, I'm not gonna let my monies go to waste. But either way, it's easy enough on the ears that I'm not really fightin' it, and will probably go back and listen to their late-80's, early-90's material afterwards, to put it all in context.

But despite all those plays, they've managed to have little to no effect upon the leader board, or even the top 35 artists.

Week 5: Capture the Flag/Fag/My Attention/Whatever...

Late update today, and all of this in spite of the fact that I started working on it yesterday. Still though, certainly a better week than last, what with my iPod functioning normally. With that, let us turn our eyes to the future: I will not be in town next week, and therefore unlikely capable of scrobbling any plays. Now, I could do a week 5.5 update before I leave, then do a massive week 7, but I'm lazy, so I'll probably just do it all when I get back. But if I'm going to do that, I'd better know how many plays I already have, and as of this week the total is: and minus the 32768 plays from last week, that's a total of about 509 plays. So let's see who garned those plays, shall we?




Really, a lot of it is about what is able to hold my attention over a specific span of time, others it's more about, say, what I'm doing while listening to music (note: I am at work a lot). This week, or weekend I should say, I played videogames, and that's why the Sun City Girls decided they'd show off their chops. They're a band that really just slays all others, and the only reason they're as low on the scale as they presently are (which is really not that low, is because I only started scrobbling circa September 2008. They're a band that rules their domain, and though I love visiting, I just haven't had the time lately. When I do find myself in the domain of the Sun City Girls, however, I find I often simply don't want to leave, and that's what happened this weekend.

...and actually, the very same phenomena explains the exceptional lead held by Sublime Frequencies above all others as well.


Looking at the artists list, we can see just who Bob Dylan pushed off the leader board this week:


And otherwise, as per the you-zh-uh, the top-songs remains relatively stable this week:

Week 4: ARGH

While this was supposed to have been an exciting week here at Listening as a Spectator Sport, unfortunately as I plugged in my iPod to scrobble this morning, for some reason it crashed, and so I lost all the plays that had accumulated since my last sync (sometime in the middle of last week), including everything we listened to out at the lake this weekend. So with that in mind, let's take a look at our total plays for the week: giving us a total of 371 plays since last week.
Otherwise, I'm just feeling so low and dejected about the lost plays from this weekend that I'm not going to give too much analysis today. So let's see which artists got the most plays this week: As we can see, generally speaking, it's been a pretty harsh week, with Jesus Lizard and Unsane topping the list, with some support from Swans and Melvins, who had fewer plays this week than I expected. This is likely the result of the influence of the Jesus Lizard, whose discography I began acquainting myself with this week.
If we move on to the top-songs list, we can see that it's remained relatively stable from last week:
So let's see what the leader-board looks like after all this: Looking, we can notice that Melvins, despite having fewer plays than I would've predicted, still had enough to overtake Xiu Xiu on the leader-board, while further down the list we can see Bob Marley & the Wailers overtook Shellac.
In terms of what's ahead for the coming week? I'm not making any predictions, things could go anywhere...

Week 3: Sweet Willy Rollbar

Still playing relatively exhausted. It's been a trying few weeks, but even during the worst of times there is always music. This week was very much a continuation of last week, as well as a sort-of elaboration, but that will likely become more evident in week 4.

Our total plays for this week come to: and minus last weeks totals, that gives us 669 plays for the week. I figure I should, without cheating, be able to average about a thousand plays a week when I'm on my 'A' game.

The story this week is gonna be best illustrated by looking at the top-artists of the past 7 days: As you can see, the big winner this week was the Kinks, whose 60's and early 70's output I figured I needed to acquaint myself with. If you want the early impressions, I like their first album, You Really Got Me, but the next couple are weaker. However, by the time the 60's become psychedelic the Kinks had picked up again. So far, my votes go to The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation society.
Besides the Kinks, as I anticipated, Melvins had another strong showing this week, pushing up their totals, and securing them a solid 8th place, biting ever-so-closely at the boot-heels of one of this lists more powerful artists: Xiu Xiu. But if you want my predictions, Melvins wont get as many plays this coming week, though they'll still end-up one of the most played artists.

In terms of Top Songs, no changes this week. These competitors are so entrenched that it'll be hard to dislodge any of them, especially considering my own aversion to listening to songs or albums on repeat. I usually like to give them a little time to sink in. Otherwise, two tracks that you may end up seeing climb this list are "Sweet Willy Rollbar" by Melvins, and "Home Is Where the Hatred Is" by Gil Scott-Heron, the latter of which has the distinction of being a song I actually can listen to repeatedly. Otherwise, here's this weeks Top Songs:

Otherwise, other changes amongst the Top Artists: Sonic Youth climbed ahead of Pavement this week, but still trails Madlib by 13 plays. Patton Oswalt jumped from 24th place to become tied for 18th with Hossein Alizadeh and Madjid Khaladj. Otherwise we can see that as a result of my recent Kinks binge, they've broken into the Top Artists list for the first time, at 32. All the while No Age remains the border-guard of the Top Artists list at 35th place with 167 plays as the benchmark to beat in order to break in. (We can also see, however, from last weeks list that No Age still shares this position with Neil Young & Crazy Horse)