Five Albums At A Time

Introduction - The Rhino Five Album Sets

I have shared these before, and there are a lot of variations, bigger and smaller, but Rhino Records have a huge catalogue of five album sets by various acts. The format is on CD in a replica card cover of the original twelve inch vinyl albums. The think is that generally these cost around ten to fifteen British pounds so each album costs you today what it would originally have cost when it was originally released.

Music While I Work At The Touch Of A Button

I was born in 1957 so I grew up with singles and Extended Players (usually for track singles) before graduating to albums. An album is obviously a collection of songs usually that have some common thread, concept or link, the very least being the artist performing the songs.

When I started working from home I listened to BBC Radio 6 a lot and listened to music I had ripped from CDs or downloaded when I purchased them from Amazon (often it’s cheaper to buy the CD and get the free MP3 download than actually buy the MP3s) or the excellent Bandcamp on streaming software via my PC or Kindle Fire.

The Kindle Fire is really awkward now as a music player unless I stream from Youtube, and Amazon Music is terrible as it keeps directing me to what it wants me to hear rather than what I tell it to play.

A Realisation

My DAB Radio has a CD player and my CD racks and CD player are right next to my work station. While digital and streaming services tell us everything is immediately available “at the touch of a button”, that is a barefaced lie. It is several touches of sometimes various buttons. My music player on my Google Pixel 3XL phone is a little faster and more convenient, but I found taking a CD and playing it extremely convenient and so that became my preferred method of listening to music.

Obviously most of my CDs are just single discs and they are very convenient so suddenly this got me revisiting a lot of my music, including the four hundred or so I have for sale on my Discogs store here.

Back To The Rhino Boxes

As I type this I am listening to “Lorca” by Tim Buckley, the last disc in the five disc box that I have been listening to this morning. The discs are all thirty to fort minutes and I have been working since seven this morning so it's coming up to ten now and I have enjoyed five wonderful Tim Buckley albums. This one is quite expensive on Amazons so look further afield.

Three more of the sets that I listen too often are Little Feat, Alice Cooper and Dr John and they do really make the time pass in a most wonderful fashion and really do help deal with the actual pressure of work.

While a lot of this is rediscovery or first time listens, it really does make working at home and excellent experience.

Because of the price of these boxes you can really discover a part of an artist's musical history for very little outlay.

People call me a dinosaur because I will not use Spotify and actually want my musical media in my hand, but don’t people love dinosaurs?

Conclusion

After Tim Buckley I am going to have the Alice Cooper box which contains my favourite Cooper album “Killer” and my two favourite Cooper songs “The Ballad of Dwight Fry” and “Halo of Flies”. If you want to do this you ideally need a CD player and CDs but you could probably fix it up to stream as well.