Welcome to Episode 68 of This Is Not Happening, an Album of the Month podcast. In Part 1, we do a deep drive review of our Album of the Month. This month Guy brings a Robyn's latest release 'Sexisitential'. In Part 2, we play Spin It or Bin It, we pick a theme and all pick songs that represent that theme. This month, the theme is 'Sad Bangers'. —— Part 1 | Album of the Month | Robyn | Sexistential ——Robyn is a unique, iconic figure in contemporary music. She's been making and releasing music since 1995, her career spans 4 decades already and she shows no signs of slowing down. Her pop career started when she was 15, she's about to celebrate her 47th birthday, this is insane staying power!Sexistential is her 9th studio album if you count the Body Talk series as full albums? It's only 29 mins long, it doesn't mess about and no track or the album in full overstays it's welcome. There is lots to get into in the discussion, has she still got it? Is she doing new things? Is this still relevant and if so who for? How artists change and what we expect from them as they age?Have a listen, tell us what you think.Listen to the original album here.Watch some of her videos here , particularly the singles from this album.Buy this album or some merch here. And listen to her talk about the album here. —————- Part 2 | Spin It or Bin It | Sad Bangers —————- Robyn's biggest track is 'Dancing On My Own' is the archetype of a genre that Guy made up 'Sad Bangers'. This is our theme for Spin It or Bin It this month. It's got to be sad, and it's got to bang. Simple (in theory).The task is pick a track that fits the theme, the objective, get more 'spins' than your friends. We each pick four tracks for a 16 track play list . We then each pick select 1 track and ask the simple question 'Spin It Or Bin It'?David chose Destroy Everything You Touch by Ladytron.Joey chose 'Teardrops' by Womack and Womack.Guy chose 'Lovesick' by Friendly Fires.Nolan chose 'Blue Monday' by New Order.What would you have chosen? What's missing from our playlist?We've been writing the blog for years come and have a look – https://thisisnothappening.net/
Episode 9 of This Is Not Happening lands on another massively hyped album from the last year: Arlo Parks: Collapsed In Sunbeams. From being crowned BBC’s ‘Sound of 2020’ and labelled ‘the voice of a generation’, the pressure on a debut album hasn’t been this heavy in a long time. We dissect it to see it lived up to the expectation, with Nolan at the helm.
In the second part of the show, we come back to picking our favourite new music since the turn of the year, with a really intriguing set of four great tracks We chose:
Episode #10 will be digging into The Weather Station’s latest album, Ignorance. Another female singer songwriter, but a departure from the world of Arlo Parks, for sure. Coming to you in late April.
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.
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