BRENTON NEWCOMB
Special to The Leader
The new Music Listening Club (MLC) might have something for you, despite your listening tastes or preferences.
The club is for everyone with a thirst for hearing music that they generally wouldn’t listen to or just new music that they would listen to.
In MLC, participants will be asked to listen to a chosen album each week, on their own time, and then be asked to discuss their opinion on it each week freely and bring up anything else they might know about it.
The club is a great resource for getting out of your comfort zone music-taste-wise, and you are bound to discover interesting music that you generally wouldn’t have heard before.
Inspirations for the club were generated from Club President Lucas Rinaldi who would do a similar “club” with his friends at home over the summer.
Each week, they would listen to an album on their own time, and he found this extremely valuable to broadening his taste.
Rinaldi said, “You listen to it, and then you can research it and see why they made it a certain way. Or, what was their inspiration, or who was involved?”
This mindset or thirst for learning about music carried on to the new MLC.
The club is run by music industry majors: Lucas Rinaldi, president; Aaron Fern, secretary; Liam Sloan, vice president; and Max Gucinski, treasurer. Each of the members are very passionate about music and felt that it was necessary to create a club aimed at expanding people’s listening repertoire.
Rinaldi said of music fans, “It kinda sucks when two people are really passionate about music and they can’t always have a conversation because they don’t listen to the same music.”
With the new MLC club, attendees are “forced” to listen to the same album each week, despite whether it’s their favorite genre or not. In one aspect, this encourages conversation, and in another, it encourages people to listen to music they wouldn’t normally.
“It’s interesting to actually take the time to sit down with a piece of music that you wouldn’t normally listen to,” said Rinaldi.
Rinaldi also mentioned that when starting this new club, the only similar club on campus was the musicology club, which deals with a lot of music history (mostly classical). It’s a lot less pop culture than MLC.
Recently, at the first meeting, the albums chosen were Kanye West’s new album “Jesus Is King” and “Lightning at the Door” by All Them Witches. Both are very different, yet recent albums that are satisfying to most music fans.
The system for choosing albums to listen to each week involves a voting process in order to pick something that most attendees would enjoy listening to.
“Everyone comes in, and everyone has the option of submitting an idea for an album … We throw them all in a hat and we pick three at random,” said Rinaldi. “That way everybody has a chance to submit an album.”
After three albums are selected, there is a poll to pick what album will be listened to.
Rinaldi would especially like to drive home the idea that the club is not “genre-exclusive,” and any album request will receive fair treatment in getting chosen.
The voting is essential in making sure that, in general, people won’t have to listen to “an album you really don’t want to listen to, but have to.” However, the idea remains that the club will be a great opportunity to expose students to interesting and new music that they generally wouldn’t listen to.
The club meets weekly on Thursdays at 7 p.m. in Fenton 105.