The most frequent question i field about my ever-expanding mp3 collection is how i manage to listen to it all. The simple answer is, i don't. I have many, many things tucked away in there that i have never heard. Some of these unheard pleasures (or pains) are there because i'm a perfectionist ... for example, i have the entire David Bowie backcatalog because i appreciate his influential role in the evolution of modern music, not because i care to listen to it. I'm actually not a big Bowie fan to begin with. Ditto Bob Dylan. Others are there because Allmusic uttered the proper code words to get me interested ... angular is a good one, shoegazing will also pique my curiosity.

This response begs a second question, which is if i don't listen to a lot of things in my library, why do i keep them? A fair question, and one for which i should have a good answer since keeping my library intact has required the purchases of larger and larger hard drives. One potential answer is so that i can boast about all the music i have, and to be honest, i can't completely deny that interpretation. However, i like to think the driving reason is that by having a lot of unlistened music hanging about, i provide myself the opportunity to make fantastic musical discoveries while listening to iTunes on random. Today's case in point was Envelopes. A Swedish/French collective categorized as indie pop/rock (reason enough for me to pick it up), i downloaded their album Demon (which Allmusic tells me is Swedish for "demos", and does not denote an evil spirit). As with many other things, it got tagged, labeled with cover artwork, filed in my iTunes library, and promptly forgotten. But the miracle of iTunes shuffling put me onto its opening track "It Is the Law" today, and the revelational experience i so hunger for ensued. A plucked folk riff is followed by a crash of drums, a thumping bassline, and sustained Cure-esque synths. It's like everything the Legends tried to do on Public Radio, only it works. The album fluctuates between the pop and rock ends of the indie spectrum, but with consistent results.