Odd chord choices, lo-fi recording, abstract noise washes. These are the ingredients to the kind of music most of my art school friends were listening to in the mid-late 90s. I liked some of it, but much of it just sounded boring to me. I inherited this record when one of these art school friends moved to New York a couple years ago. The Sonora Pine is from 1996, and it sounds like it, but that’s not to say it doesn’t sound great. I doubt I would have liked it then, but my tastes have developed a little in the past 14 years. There is enough of a hook to these songs that you actually can find yourself swaying to them or tapping your foot. That’s the sort of connection I wasn’t able to make back then. Thanks, Angela, for leaving this record with me. Glad I finally got a chance to listen to it. Perfect music for lounging on the couch when you are stuck in the house on a snow day in the middle of the afternoon, which is lucky, because that’s exactly what today has been like.

ALSO: I’m not sure I’ve been clear, but my plan for The Month Of New Music is that I’m listening to 31 records from my vinyl collection that I haven’t heard yet. I listen to vinyl very differently than I do mp3s — which is my other main source of music. (I turn my CDs into mp3s when I want to listen to them) I don’t often listen to whole albums off the computer or iPod, but you really have no choice but to with vinyl. So, while I might gush over an album when I listen to it on one medium, I might totally ignore it in another. I also don’t often buy music I’ve never heard before on vinyl, unless it’s flea-market price. So, considering these factors, me listening to a month of new vinyl is a very interesting experiment, at least personally. It’s a hard thing to explain. I hope I’ve done at least a mediocre job of doing so.