The two hundred and thirty-fourth album: #234 Faces - A Nod is As Good As a Wink... to a Blind Horse
It's not hard to draw a parallel between this album and the blues rock of the Rolling Stones. There's the same drawl, the same instruments, the same country-ish guitars. The album follows tha pattern, without any major surprises - not going into the really hard numbers the Stones tended to put one or two of in an album - but it flows along with some experimentation. It's still pretty straight up country and blues rock, a formula that works here.
The eighty-ninth classical recording: #718 Alexander Zemlinsky - String Quartet no. 3
I'm still not sure I've fully got the vocabulary down to talk about these recordings, which means that for these string quartets it gets harder to say much here. They can be fairly abstract - creating nice music without feeling like they have any story to them.
For me, there's always some longing in a melody using only string instruments, with this piece having a lot of those moments. There are the bursts of energy, but it really lives in the quieter parts. The main change to this is in the final part, described as 'burlesque' in one of the lists I have for this, with a far more upbeat sound. It feels a bit of an odd choice to put that at the end - usually the energetic piece comes earlier - but to be honest, it was the pick me up here that I did need today.