I was a little surprised to see an album by Parliament listed in the new releases section of Spotify. I can’t claim to be any sort of expert on the band, and could never really keep track of all the various combinations of Parliament, Funkadelic, Parliament-Funkadelic, and P-Funk, but I do like a bit of bit of funk.

I had a look on Wikipedia to see if the album Medicaid Fraud Dogg is new stuff or just some re-hash of old stuff and it is actually  a new album – the first in 38 years!

I was more than a bit amused to see right at the top of the Wikipedia page it says “Not to be confused with Funkadelic or Parliament-Funkadelic”. That is a big ask. In the second paragraph of the band history it says how George Clinton formed Funkadelic as a group of 5 musicians with 5 singers from his old band, The Parliaments,  as guests and then re-launched The Parliaments as just Parliament with the same 10 people, concluding with “Clinton was now the leader of two different acts, Parliament and Funkadelic, which featured the same members but were marketed as creating two different types of funk.”

But don’t get confused! As for the album itself, it is 107 minutes spread across 23 tracks and I think you could edit it down to a brilliant 45-minute album.

Today’s suggestions for me on Spotify included an album by Lieutenant Pigeon called “Mouldy Old Dough and other hits“. I do hope the title is tongue-in-cheek or it is re-defining the definitions of “hits” and “other” as well as the concept of plurals.

I was interested enough to look them up on Wikipedia and found that they did actually have one other hit after Mouldy Old Dough – Desperate Dan, which reached number 17 in the charts. I wasn’t interested enough to actually listen to either on Spotify though, not when there are Tom Tom Club remixes and a new Manic Street Preachers album to play instead.

Not that I stayed completely in my comfort zone. I also came across a new album collaboration between Sly & Robbie and some Norwegian jazz musicians called Nordub. Who knew that dub reggae and jazz trumpet would work so well together?

I spent a large part of today listening to The Usual Suspects by Jah Wobble & The Invaders of the Heart on Spotify. If you like dub basslines with krautrock and world music influences then I can’t recommend this highly enough. Apart from those juicy basslines, there is also some brilliant-sounding drumming on it. The album came out last year and somehow I missed it, but I’m making up for that now.

I am still finding Spotify great for discovering stuff that I would otherwise not have heard, a lot of which becomes a firm favourite – like Public Service Broadcasting, Information Society, Jane Weaver and Sleaford Mods. I have lost count of the times I have come across something that is years old but totally passed me by at the time – like Cymande.

And let’s be honest, if I was relying on buying CDs, listening to the radio, and getting recommendations from the music press I really doubt I would have ever heard Les Ogres de Barback or all those German punk bands.

But for all those obscure delicacies, I see that the top five artists I have listened to in the last month includes Motorhead and Bananarama. MAybe I just like living in the past.