I Opened Pandoras Box And Liked What I Found

Back in what i assume was 2007 (i can not remember exactly) i acquired the album Beyond by Dinosaur Jr. The reason i am not sure of when it was is because it seems quite a while ago but the album was released in April 2007 from what my sources have told me so i have assumed it must have been there. Now there is nothing strange about me buying an album. In fact i have over 100 CD's which is quite a lot and a pain to store but i would not have it any other way. I am not a fan of downloading songs onto my computer legally or illegally. I like to have something tangible that i can touch and see. Something you do not get with MP3 downloads. Anyway i am getting off topic. The reason i am mentioning this is 1) i was listening to this album on my MP3 player on my way home from work and i realised just how much i love this album and 2) i came about this band and album in a different way to usual.

Over the course of 2006 and 2007 my friend introduced me to the internet radio station called Pandora. It was a free internet radio station based in America which was also available in the UK until sometime in 2007 when they enforced their serve users only in U.S a bit more strictly for what reason i cannot remember. At the time i was a bit gutted about this as i used to like listening to it. Pandora was created by the Music Genome project and when you signed up to the site it would ask you to enter the name of a band, solo artist or song you liked and then it would select songs that it considered to have the same sound or style of the song or artist you picked. And then it would allow feedback on the songs it played for you by giving you and thumbs up or thumbs down icon. It would then use this feedback to narrow it down your likes and dislikes so it could play music you would enjoy that you may never have come across before or otherwise would have never come across. This suited me because though i very much enjoy the music i have bought and listened to over the years there is nothing like hearing a good song for the first time i find.

Now for the majority of the time i was aware of the site i did just use it for this thinking that it would be around for a while i never really thought about getting any albums or exploring any of the bands i heard on their further musically. It was a nice alternative to putting on my music collection on the PC and to be quite honest although i liked a lot of what they played at me a lot of them were independent artists that never really stood out anymore than the others. However after i found out that they were going to be taking away the service from the UK through a very apologetic email i started to use it more as i knew it would not be around for much longer and i wanted to make the most of it. During this time certain songs i had heard before would be repeated because i had marked i had liked them and it would play them again whilst also searching to find new songs it had not shown me that i may like and i discovered that i liked some more than others. Now me being me meant that i ended up looking at HMV's website to see if i could find the album that these songs were on for sale. I was successful in my search and i bought two that i can remember to various degrees of success. The albums i bought were 'Beyond' by Dinosaur Jr which i mentioned earlier and 'Read Music/Speak Spanish' by the Desaparacidos. A band of which i am still not entirely sure how to pronounce the name of.

Now on first hearing them both i did like them but i was not wowed by them and so they got limited listening time and both eventually ended up back in or on the CD rack i had for housing my CD's. I would look at them both sitting there neither of them inspiring me to put them in my CD player and give another whirl. It had seemed to me as if the Pandora experiment had failed and i felt a little disheartened by it and as a consequence a little bit discouraged from impulse buying again because that is why i bought them really. However i consider myself a fair man even to my CD's and so on one or two occasions that i can think of if i could not think of a CD i wanted to listen to i decided to give both albums another chance to win me over. This had different outcomes for both CD's.

'Read Music/Speak Spanish' sadly could not do anything more to sway my opinion of it at the time and i am still not convinced by it today. It is not a bad album and obviously has at least one song on it i like otherwise i would not have considered it as one of the bands i wanted to explore further from Pandora. However as an entire album i do not like all of it as musically not all of it is to my taste. I can listen to it but it is not one i would choose personally. This i guess is the gamble you take when you buy any album but i believe the gamble is even greater when you have only heard one or two songs by the band ever.

In contrast 'Beyond' by Dinosaur Jr changed my opinion of it in a positive way. When i listened to it again i found that it was not as 'bad', for want of a better word as i never thought it was bad exactly, as i remembered. In fact i enjoyed it and decided that though still far from being a favourite in my collection it was definitely one album that i had misjudged and that i would play it more with less hesitation. However it was still one of the forgotten albums in my collection really and it was not until when i moved out of my parents home in September 2008 that the big breakthrough occurred.

Obviously when moving out you have to collect all your possessions together and put them in cardboard boxes that you have taken from your place of work so that you do not leave anything behind. So part of this involved me putting my CD's into a box and as a result i came across 'Beyond' again. Remembering that i now did in fact like this album rather than how i felt before i decided to listen to it again around that time and it was better than it was before and i decided that now i really very much liked this album and that it was worthy of MP3 player status. I only have limited space on my MP3 player so it has to be something i really like listening to otherwise there is no point really is there. Also as i listen to it on my travels to various different places that i go its always nice to listen to something you really enjoy because traveling can be rather boring at times.

Its one of those albums i have discovered that just gets better and better every time i listen to it. I just love the guitar work in the songs and i have also discovered i can relate to the lyrics more now. I do not know if this is because i am at a different stage in life or because i am older or what really but all i know now is this album has grown on me and i love listening to it. It restored my faith in Pandora even though i will not be able to use it. It was and is a great concept for both musical listeners and musicians because they did not discriminate against any musical artist based on how successful they were and so it could bring to your knowledge bands you would not have heard otherwise and it brings that band more fans which in turn could aid them in commercial success if that was indeed their aim. And based on my love of this album i have been listening to some of their other material via the wonders of YouTube and have decided that i like most of their stuff and may invest in their most recent album The Farm after Christmas when my money is less tied up in other things.

Now below i am going to post a few of my favourite songs from the album so that you can get a feel of the sound of it. Obviously it will not appeal to all and considering their lack of mainstream success it may not appeal to many but you never know.















There i hope you liked what you heard if not then that's life isn't it. As for me i better get to bed so goodnight thanks for reading.