15th Anniversary CD Poll
 

It's been too long since we had a poll.

So, out of Mitsugetsu Shou (Live Album) or Ukina (Collabs album), which did you enjoy the most?

I gotta go with Mitsugetsu Shou. Sure, while Ukina had the new songs, Mitsugetsu Shou is one killer of a live album and had a superb flow to it. Ukina suffers from being a bit too all-over-the-place and I never really have the desire to listen to it in full.

Also re Mitsugetsu Shou: Major kudos to the inclusion of that perfect performance of Ariamaru Tomi from NHK Songs too. Beautiful stuff.

I just started putting these 2 on rotation in the car. This seems to be the one way I can get in extended music listening while completely awake.

This actually helps listening to both albums, which are both, I would argue, fairly scatter-shot across all tracks.

So far I've given Ukina a good run through. Will need to pop in MS before deciding.

Mitsugenshou. Honnou, Ariamaru Tomi, Tsumiki Asobi, Mittei Monogatari.

I'm not a fan of live albums, especially live COMPILATION albums, and I have to confess that I haven't really listened to Mitsugenshou all that much. I like Ukina because it finally lets me put some random tracks into one album instead of having just a couple songs from a bunch of articles dispersed throughout my music library.

^ If you don't like live albums, you haven't been listening to the right ones. Bjork, A Perfect Circle, Tool, Sunn O))), Boris, The Who, Midori, Yapoos/Togawa/Guernica, Oomori, Metallica, Iron Maiden all come to my mind instantly when I think of great live albums.

As for Ukina compiling stuff together: sure this is true, but it's still missed a fair few tracks too. Just this year, for example, it misses the (vastly superior) Death Jazz Version of Assassin's Assassin and the two (ultra-grower) other tracks from Tomita Lab's Joyous. (Not to mention that CIRCLES by SAPS is a great album too.)

Re: Mitsugetsu Shou compared to the other Ringo live album: This particular compilation is way better than Tokyo Collection, which somehow managed to miss pretty much every Jihen song people would want to hear, instead it tries representing the songwriting of the whole band. A noble idea, but we all really know who the star of the show is in Jihen....

:uki:

Ukina is fresh sashimi whereas Mitsugetsu Shou is sashimi made from fish stored in fridge years ago.

I listened to Mitsugetsu Shou without having seen the majority of the performances, so I'm not really qualified to judge it. With that being said, even most of the old songs off of Ukina were completely new to me. Although I love the songs performed off the former, I think I enjoyed the latter more because the songs were fresh. Also, I've seen other performances I thought were far better vocally and were of better quality (some of them of the same songs!).

I still haven't seen a lot of the recordings of the performances on the live album. Are there any specific ones I should check out to deepen my appreciation for the audio?