The Soundboard: Going through boxes Edition

Last week I mentioned to The Wife that the recently updated edition of 1000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die, by Tom Moon, was on the shelves and to keep an eye out for it for me. Sure enough, while she was wandering the WalMart, there it was.

That was easily one of the worst ideas I’ve had this summer. Not because it’s a crap list, but because as soon as I realized it was in the house I spent the next three hours pouring through it.

It ends up being 1108 recordings, with the inclusion of a “108 Recordings to Know About” list. 1108 recordings is a lot more than you’d think. The guy has a heaping helping of “Classical” and “World Music” genre tracks, so if you wean it down to recordings you’ll listen to more than a handful of times in your life time, you can probably make the list work with about half the book.

Now, after said pouring, it turns out that I own 21.8% of the 1108 list. Which would be sad except that there is probably another 10% or so that I blame my own sheer incompetence for not also owning and which I will be remedying in short order.

However, the man does leave a goodly number of exceptions off the list that I have no way to remedy other than to post them here. The most glaring exception is the lack of the Substance album by New Order.

Sure, he’s got Unknown Pleasures (by Joy Division) on the list, but c’mon. If you wanted your teeth kicked in musically in 1987, that was the double album to purchase.

So, to pick up his slack

And

More on the book in next week’s Soundboard.