I’m only asking for 28 minutes of your time. 15 songs, at least half of them barely make it over 2 minutes each. Frankie Cosmos (Great Kline) is a 21 year old singer song writer and this is her 2nd full length release. I was aware of the first, slightly more aware of the EP that followed but have really taken to ‘Next Thing’. This was released around Easter but and its been a big part of my life since. It feels like I’ve had it for much longer than 4 months.
What you will hear is 15 guitar driven pretty pop songs and beautifully crafted if delightfully simple lyrics. If you can spare the time, to sit and listen with the lyrics at hand it is a great experience. Ms. Cosmos extracts heart lifting significance from the mundane and almost never fails to make me smile. I am sucker for singer songwriters, I love the focus that one person pouring their heart out provides. This is a great example.
I hope you enjoy. As I say, its only 28 minutes. You could listen to it 2.5 times for every ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ or ‘Malibu’ so you have no excuse not to get involved if you don’t like it first time.
Look out for Floated In, Embody, On the Lips, Sinister.
Pitchfork reviews and article if you’re interested?
I don’t think I’ve ever chosen an album of the month before about which I’m still so undecided. But here we are. Erol Alkan and Richard Norris’s musical side project, Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve, has finally produced a full album, and it’s the very definition of the phrase, a mixed bag.
Let’s start with the good. It’s a real musical journey. There are almost no two songs on here that sound the same, and you really can’t fault the guys for their ambition. It’s a post iPod album that displays the duo’s rich musical tastes – and there is almost no genre untouched on here. The most obvious one is psychedelia – from the rockier almost goth psych of Iron Age to the Jane Weaver-led cutesy psych of Creation to the instrumental freak out of Finally First to the frankly tedious spoken word druggy closer, Third Mynd.
But other songs, particularly with guest vocals, live in a totally different universe. Door to Tomorrow, with Gorky’s Euros Childs on vocals, is a wisful slice of indie that could easily be a Gorky’s song. Diagram Girl (is that the Mystery Jets guy on vocals? Not sure), in all honesty, sounds more like OMD than anything else I can think of. Nothing wrong with a bit of OMD, of course. And Black Crow, when you strip it back of the psych trappings, is a very traditional song that you could easily imagine being sung by Adele. Tomorrow Forever might well have appeared on a This Mortal Coil album!
They’re clearly coming at this from an anything-goes balaeric vibe. But it’s also as an uneven experience. On a project like this, the songs have to stand up in their own right, and I’m not sure that some of them do. On paper, this should be RIGHT up my street. I’m a huge fan of 60s psych and I love the likes of guest vocalists Jane Weaver and Hannah Peel. But there are too many times on the record that you find your attention wandering or wonder if self-indulgence has taken over. The first half is great – Iron, Age, Creation, Door to Tomorrow and Diagram Girl are 4 fantastic tracks in a row. Then it goes seriously downhill. Black Crow is seriously meh, Tomorrow Forever is far far too long, The Soft Bounce is indulgent noodly bollocks, Finally First is psych by numbers and Third Mynd is a naff druggy pysch cliche. Every time I listen to it, I’m slightly cross by the end.
It’s funny that we so often want our music to show ambition and diversity, but it’s rare to see bands pulling off the trick of making that kind of ambition work in a full album. It does flow well as a record and it is an enjoyable listen. But when you consider the standout work of recent AOTM like Christine and the Queens and Anderson Paak, this isn’t even in the same league.
Reviews have been pretty glowing of this album, though I notice no one’s quite brought themselves to give 5 stars, but maybe I’m being a bit harsh on what is a pretty fun musical diversion. But I can’t see it living long on my playlist.
June has been a struggle for an album. David has used his one allowed objection of the year, some albums were only available via a digital format, and some albums didn’t feel right. With those factors I had to revisit the drawing board and pick a wild card. Brothers, may I introduce ‘Coma’ and their brilliant ‘This Side of Paradise’.
I have previously shared the Robag Wruhme remix of ‘Lora’ which found a solid place in my sets last year on the 1’s and 2’s and also became a fan favourite in our house. Naturally I went looking for more and fell in love with Coma and this album. Coma hail from Cologne and release on the amazing Kompakt Records.
There are many things that I love about this album, the first is the way it flows. It’s starts things off with ‘Borderline’ which nicely settles you in for the 8 track journey with a slow melodic build to what I can only describe as the perfect pace for a pre disco shuffle. The familiar ‘Lora’ follows which sets a good standard moving forward.
This album has found a strong place in my life around the house, at work and in the car. It’s lets you get lost in it if you let it. ‘The Wind’ is catchy but haunting. It also introduced me to the vocalist Dillion who is worth checking out as well.
Showing a slight build to the pace throughout, the likes of ‘Pigeon Power’ and ‘Verse Chorus’ remind me a little of something Mylo would make. Whilst ‘Poor Knight’ makes me want to go raving and always seems much more fast paced then in reality in actually is.
‘The Sea’ is another stand out and I highly recommend you check out the Baio remix. Another track that has found a firm home in my sets. Lastly ‘Happiness’ ties things up through grimly building before bringing itself back down and finishing out the album.
It confuses me what category to put this music in. Is it ‘chill out’, ‘deep house’, ‘electronica’? The 4/4 beats make it dance driven, but it seems to have a place within a club but also very far away from one. It’s easy to leave this album on repeat and I heavily suggest this approach as it sinks in nicely.
Hayley and Luke seem to like it as much as me. Hopefully Coma also finds a place in your lives. Enjoy brothers!
You wait for a bus and then a few come along at once. In agreeing to have PJ Harvey’s new album as May’s album of the month – I have long found her a singular and unflinching artist that’s made music that doesn’t seem to nod to any other artists – and then Radiohead release A Moon Shaped Pool forty-eight hours later. Music’s gain is confusion for this blog. For, as much as I love PJ, and have enjoyed The Hope Six Demolition Project‘s own character, it can’t but help have taken a back seat since I heard Burn The Witch.
But this is about the album of the month, and it’s still more than worth all our attention and review. Harvey burst onto the scene with The PJ Harvey Trio’s Dry in 1992, an angry, unafraid and powerful artist that put her own life and experience at the centre of her music. Despite her never giving much care to the mainstream’s accolades or attention, she flirted with it in the mid-00s, even garnering BRIT, Grammy and Mercury nominations (the former two, she never won), but is the only artist to have won the latter twice, with Stories From the City, Stories From The Sea, and then her previous LP, Let England Shake.
So, what does an am artist that’s been making music for 30 years have still to say? While Let England Shake drew parallels between previous world wars and the messy modern conflicts we have been dragged into, The Hope Six Demolition Project deals with a much larger focus, in reality it still addressed themes and topics that are as virulent and important as any she’s taken on over the years: poverty, deprivation, loss, race, class, and humanity. It crosses the pond to look at America (as she’s done before) and is a nakedly political record, perhaps addressing the issues in a way that a US artist couldn’t. And being Polly Harvey, it was no ordinary recording, with sessions taking place live in Somerset House as the public watched.
What is the album like? You get many of Harvey’s strongest suits – raw rock, piercing vocals and lyrics, confrontational themes and the ever presence of John Parish’s gruffness – and an unflinching gaze onto America’s most troubling issues. This has resulted in somewhat of a backlash over the pond, with residents of the Washington DC area referenced in the album and commentators both criticising her subject and her opinion. But provocation is what Harvey does, and across the eleven tracks you get an album and a message that’s clear. In The Community Of Hope’s critical words and The Ministry Of Defence’s jangling guitars and chorused vocals, fans will feel at home. It’s not just a single pace or style, with Chain Of Keys’ rumbling snares and heavy sax, while River Anacostia’s haunting wail overpowers everything else. There’s definite echoes of Stories from the City… on show, so it’ll be interesting to see if it can follow up that and its predecessor’s success and resonance. Single The Wheel (above) is the most accessible and catching record, but like many of PJ’s albums, it needs addressing as a sonic whole. That’s where the power lies.
As she gets older, perhaps the one criticism of Harvey’s canon is that as she addresses weighty and important issues in her music is that she gradually retreats herself from the centre of it. Perhaps she’s earned that right. Are these views her own? Is it simply a theme of the album? We will likely never know, but it doesn’t dim the power of her music, and most likely never will. We bandy ‘national treasure’ around too much, but while she’d never agree with it herself, I’m sure PJ Harvey deserves it more than many.
For me, first and foremost this is a ‘soul’ album. There is extensive genre hopping on Mr. .Paak’s second album, but the overall impact as a body of work to me feels like soul.
As with my last AOTM (Miguel), Anderson .Paak is a mult-instrumentalist-singer-songwriter with some added rapper-ness for good measure. This is lot less ‘love-sexy’ (R&B?) than Miguel and I think perhaps an easier listen for Brother Guy? I saw a number of very good reviews for this album but I fully engaged with it when I was in London for a very long day’s work on trains and walking across town. I got to listen to the album probably 4-5 times throughout the day and it put a big fat smile on my face.
This guys singing voice is gorgeous, his singing based tracks feel organically soulful and emotionally driven. There’s a sense of humour running through the album that really resonates with me. It would take me far too long to reference all of the lyrics that hit home for me because the song-writing is so good and so mature. The album feels very socially conscious without ever feeling preachy. He’s obviously had an emotionally troubled life which he uses for inspiration in a very measured manner, never played for effect or thrust in the listeners face (ears?). Never greater than on the last track, ‘The Dreamer’ tell me you don’t love that track and it’s message?
There’s obvious Kendrick Lamar influences weaved through these tracks. You will hear it when you listen to it initially. I understand that the albums were recorded almost at the same time though so it would be interesting to understand how the artists arrived at relatively similar places independently. They both worked with Dre extensively on Compton and come from the same music back-yard. As you continue to listen the Kendrick Lamar references soften (or they did for me but perhaps cause I have not listen to Pimp A Butterfly that much) and it blossoms as something quite different.
So this is a confusing one. Christine isn’t her real name: it’s Héloïse. And she’s not straight, but she’s not gay, or she might be, or something in between. This record was a massive hit in her native France, but that was two years ago, and then it came out in the USA, but that was a slightly different version of the album – and now it’s out in the UK, but that’s a different version from both of the previous one. She’s re-recorded some of the songs in English, but not others, and there are two new songs and two less of the old ones.
As I say, you may already be confused. And just to add to your confusion, I have a copy of the original French version (the song ‘Tilted’, for example, is ‘Christine’ in French, and the Perfume Genius song is just a bonus track). I wanted the French version as I’m currently working with Canal Plus so I’m trying to listen to as much as I can! Anyway, I will TRY to review the English language version.
All this confusion aside, it all becomes a lot more simple when you listen to Christine AKA Heloise’s debut, in whatever language or form it comes. This isn’t the first female front bit of Euro electro pop I’ve put forward for the blog (indeed, my last offering was the wonderful Susanne Sundför), but when there’s so much good stuff out there, it seems a shame not to share it. This is an extraordinary debut, full of muscular songwriting, beautifully and tautly arranged. It doesn’t feel like a drum programme or a string quartet or a single sung note is out of place. But neither is it overly tasteful or bland. Christine is clearly a woman who’s struggled/struggling with her demons, and a cloud of longing and sadness hangs over many of the best songs (Paradis Perdus, Narcissus is Back). It’s so hard to write pop music of this quality and built with such solid foundations. Hype can be a terrible thing, but Chaleur Humaine is well worth its Pitchfork 8.0 and its Guardian 5 stars.
The only caveat for me is that, having bought the French version (a RIGHT ball ache – via Ebay from Germany!), I do think the original is actually better. Not becuase more of it is in French, but because two of the best songs (Chaleur Humaine and Ugly-Pretty) have been excised in favour of the two songs featuring guest artists. It’s an understandable move, especially considering Perfume Genius having a fanbase in the UK and USA, but actually, they’re the weakest songs. So if you get the chance to check out those two tracks, do add them to your listening experience.
French artists so rarely make a breakthrough into English speaking audiences. I know this only too well from research into the French 60s artists I’m doing at the moment. Gainsbourg barely bothered the UK or USA charts in his lifetime; Francoise Hardy has had one English language hit in her whole 50 year career. Who knows if Héloïse Letissier will succeed where they failed – but on the basis of this, she certainly deserves to.
When the new floating points album was suggested for February there was an expected 50/50 split on knowing who or what Floating Points is or were. Floating Points is a guy from east London via Manchester that is known by friends and family as Sam Shepherd. For those more inclined to a 4/4 beat he’s been around for a while and often is thrown in the same barrel of genre as Caribou and four tet. Partially for his friendship to them both but also for their ability to throw out many of the established boundaries of dance music and push on their own agenda of all things music.
I’ve read a few reviews on this album, and although the reviewers have rated it, not one has pinpointed what they liked. There are the more accessible tracks such as “Silhouettes” but the album is much more than that.
Elaenia isn’t a dance record in my opinion. It sits more in the realm of experiential jazz or chill out (not in a late 90’s compilation way). This is an important point, don’t approach this as a dance record as I did and I struggled at first. In-fact on first listen I wasn’t a fan an had to take a while off to clear my assumptions and re-visit.
This album has changing moods to it with each song, though still maintains an over all flow that appeared for me after a few listens. I read a review that said this album was an extension of his ep’s. I think it’s a prequel. Gone are the loops replaced by live cords and strange sounds that sit nicely together.
The album lives to the name of it’s creator as it floats about with key rhythmic points that stick with you, ‘Thin Air’ and ‘Marmish’ are great examples of this. I can imagine Kendrick Lamar rhyming over both for some reason. In-fact most of the album.
It look me a few listens but I really like this album. Like many reviews I’ve read there is no distinct reason for it. Maybe because it’s short and it’s just the right length at 7 songs to let it take you away, day dream a bit, and then get back to the real world unscathed.
Well, I was going to say “who saw that coming?” but we’ve been here before. As it’s been said, when you no longer tour and live as a relative recluse, you can control whatever the public sees of you. So it’s no surprise that after The Next Day, which skewered his early years whilst nodding in reverence to them, that David Bowie spent 2015 making a follow-up, confounding us all again with the title track in November. I have to confess I took a little time to finally listen to this, as I wanted to watch the video rather than just the audio. And it stopped me in my tracks. In fact I ended up stood on Cheapside in my lunch break with my mouth open.
As a statement of intent it’s pretty powerful. While I loved The Next Day, for all the parallels to his classic albums, lyrically it was very much in the moment, skewering his character, ageing, his legacy, and proving he still has the edge that made his music so alluring when I first listened in my teenage years. But while the words on Blackstar do find some common ground with The Next Day, that’s mostly where the comparison ends. There’s been a lot (and I mean a LOT) of frothing of about how avant-garde it is, as if he’s turned into John Cage, genetically spliced with Roni Size and Miles Davis, but I’d take much of that with a pinch of salt. For anyone that’s familiar with Radiohead’s more experimental (recent) work, or the likes of Flying Lotus, or Bjork or any other more outre albums of the last two decades (let alone all sorts of electronic music), it’s not that far-fetched, but I guess the praise is in someone of Bowie’s stature and reputation still feeling so fresh, raw, and willing to experiment. After all, I can’t think of many (any?) artists approaching 70 that would do this, or do it with so much success or style. Especially when they’ve had forays into more experimental work with such varying results. I can see how die-hard classic era Bowie fans (especially those who are the same age as the Thin White Duke) may struggle with it, but really forget the hype, and just listen: this is outstanding work, a potential classic in the making, even after a few listens.
The title track’s first half echoes so much of Radiohead to me, and this isn’t a statement of either artistic laziness or pastiche, (just think Thom Yorke singing instead, and it’d be one of their best works itself) but high praise. Coupled with a deeply disturbing video that burns itself onto your consciousness, with Bowie as some sort of excommunicated (punished?) preacher stating prophetic, abstract lines as adolescents convulse and shake in the background, it’s affecting from the start. Who knows what it’s about? There’s been discussion (denied by Bowie’s team) that it’s referencing ISIS, but really it’s the ambiguity that’s the point here. The dead ‘Spaceman’ (Starman? a nice touch either way), the huge candle, the eclipsed (black) star; there’s huge, broad stylistic strokes at play and then, just as you wonder where it can go from here, it slows and shifts into what feels at first like familiar Bowie, its sax and swagger, all offset by the harsh, discordant, repeating chorus. I’m massive fan of long opening tracks on albums (Station to Station, or Elton John’s Funeral For A Friend), after all, isn’t that what albums are for? As an opener you’d think it’s hard to live up to, but it’s a case of setting the scene.
There’s almost breakbeat-ish, brash rock in Tis A Pity She’s A Whore, then a self-effacing Lazarus, which was written for a stage version of The Man Who Fell To Earth. Sue, which is Bowie to d’n’b (in a good way, thankfully) and echoes things like Squarepusher. Similarly, Girl Loves Me goes heavy on percussion and electronics, but they never take over the song itself. Dollar Days and I Can’t Give Everything Away again talk of death and loss and age and the past. Even a few listens and I’m hooked, and you can only applaud the constant reinvention of a man that could’ve ‘retired’ in 2003 and had a legacy as good as anyone in music.
Bowie continues to confound, and this may be the best thing he’s done since his Golden Years.
Good evening. Welcome to Beach House – Thank your lucky stars.
9 years ago I was checking out what was happening in Manchester that coming weekend. ‘Beach House’ were playing at Day and Night that Saturday. I googled them, came up with a you tube or two and ordered the album as I liked what I heard and wanted to know more before going to the gig with Stacey. I loved the album …. but we never went to the gig. Can’t recall why.
That 1st album was a very honest, raw affair. It was early enough in the whole ‘dream-pop’ (yuk) ‘low-fi’ (puke) thing that many of the tropes of the genre had not warn thin. The 2nd album didn’t move it on and I didn’t love it. Then they released ‘Teen Dream’ that everyone except for David loved. Teen Dream was a big step forward and played with lots of the same ideas but paired them with some really strong, catchy pop songs. Literally everyone who has heard it at our house has gone out and bought it.
2 years later they released ‘Bloom’ which annoyed the shit out of me. They released the same album again but with a different cover. There was nothing new. It was embarrassing how formula driven it was. Love affair over.
In August of this year they released ‘Depression Cherry’ I was excited as Beach House have such a big place in my heart … but was disappointed again as there was once again nothing new and the formula had been trotted out yet again. So it was with disgust and huge frustration that they released another album 2 months later! WTF! Quality control anyone?
However, when I listened to this one I heard what I had wanted to hear for the last 2 albums. Some new ideas, playing with some new instruments, possibly a bit darker return to their debut that I loved so much. A couple of tracks blew my socks off (‘All your yeahs’ and Elegy to the void’). It felt more honest and real than anything that they’d released since their debut. In some ways it feels like a debut. I’ve had this on hard rotation. My wife adores it and reminds her of our early days which always helps. I am conscious that this may be more of a ‘heart’ choice than a ‘head’ choice as Album of the Month but what the hell. Live dangerously.
There are periods in musical history when a certain country or part of the world suddenly has a flourishing of incredible output. British rock in the 60s, French electronica of the late 90s/early 2000s, Brazilian tropicalia of the late 60s, German krautrock of the 70s, the late 80s/early 90s golden age of hip-hop.
To add to that, I honestly think we might have to start thinking of Scandi pop of the noughties and teens (WTF are we calling this decade? Can someone please decide – we’re half way through!). The extraordinary explosion in electronic pop from the icy inlets of Northern Europe is really quite something. From Robyn to Royksopp to Annie to Fever Ray, not to mention Swedish Karl Martin Sandberg and his Norwegian cohorts who have written more pop music for American artists than anyone else in the last decade – the breadth, the quality and the standard of their output puts everyone else to shame.
What I love most about it is that there IS a unifying feel and sound, even if the bubblegum of Annie and the icy krautrock arthouse of Fever Ray couldn’t be further apart. There’s a love of melody – and – for me, this is the clincher – there’s a melancholy at the heart of it all that tugs at your hearstrings. Hell, think back to ABBA. They did just that. Perhaps that’s in the DNA of every Scandi performer somewhere!
Also notable is how female fronted this wave is. And somewhere in the midst of all this, here is Susanne Sundfor, sitting RIGHT in the sweet spot of everything I’ve described. The fact that this stunning album – there’s no other word for it – is not a million seller around the world is testament to the embarrassment of riches coming from her part of the world. But do note that in her native Norway, she is a MASSIVE star and this album sold by the truckload.
So, yes, I’m a fan of this kind of stuff, that sounds so effortless but has been toiled over so expertly. But how can this not beguile? From the chugging motorik of Accelerate to the aching pop of Kamikaze, to the grand balladeering of Silence, Sundfor has a wide palette to draw upon, and she doesn’t put a foot wrong. This is undoubtedly one of my albums of the year, and I’m so looking forward to delving into her back catalogue
Finally, one moment that makes my heart skip every time – when the fierce OTT pop madness of Accelerate slips into the chugging, bubbling beginning of Fade Away and you know you’re heading into an entirely different tune. And yes, there IS a touch of ABBA in Fade Away. Why not? You can always learn from the masters.
For me, first and foremost this is a ‘soul’ album. There is extensive genre hopping on Mr. .Paak’s second album, but the overall impact as a body of work to me feels like soul.
thisisnothappening.net 