Music Monthly: April '23
My monthly music dump of what I'm listening to.
Music Monthly: April ‘23
Just a short post about what I’ve been listening to lately not always because it’s something I like.
The Record - Boygenius
Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube Music
I’ve been looking forward to this a long time. Boygenius is the only supergroup I’ve ever been enthusiastic about. Somehow it works so well. Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus are all phenomenal songwriters (Baker’s Little Oblivions was probably my favourite album of 2021) and their styles and voices harmonise so well together.
The first Boygenius release, the self-titled EP from 2018, was as close to perfect as you can get. Great songs, great sound and short (an undervalued commodity at the moment). This might make you think that I’m trying to make the full-length release sound unruly… but I’m not. This is such an excellent album; heartbreaking, beautiful and easygoing.
Listen to: If you like nice harmonies (like me) listen to Cool About It, if you like references to things you already like (like me) listen to Leonard Cohen and if you’re a giant sap (like me) listen to Letter to an Old Poet.
Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins - Original Soundtrack
Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube Music
This was a less conscious choice, my nearly two year old child is obsessed with Let’s Go Fly A Kite after singing it with other kids at our local library. Naturally that means we listen to it a lot, which naturally means we listen to the whole soundtrack a lot.
And I’m not complaining.
Listen to: I don’t think you really need me to tell you.
The Psychomodo - Cockney Rebel
Spotify | YouTube Music
I had never really listened to Cockney Rebel, I wrote them off as a lesser glam band. The only thing I did know is that the cover of Tumbling Down near the end of Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine is amazing.
That song is great here too, as are a lot of them. In feel its almost a mix of glam rock and 60s British psychedelia. It’s got a little of that baroque-pop feel from The Zombie’s Odessey and Oracle. You know what I mean, there’s tuned percussion aplenty and I’m sure I heard a mellotron in there somewhere.
Listen to: the music-box turned carnival feel of Such a Dream, the lust for life on Psychomodo and the aforementioned Tumbling Down.
Since Time is Gravity - Natural Information Society
Spotify | Bandcamp | YouTube Music
I like listening to jazz a lot. It’s been a recent thing in the last three or four years but I’ve really embraced the genre and have been making my way through it’s canonical works. I have a tendency to look at things a little too academically, so I often come to things quite late. I’ve been enjoying bebop, free jazz and hard bop but the most well known pieces of those genres are from the fifties and sixties.
What I’m saying is there’s a distinct lack of modern jazz in my world. I’m self-consciously trying to rectify that and this is my first big step. Like I said, I’m no expert so genre-wise it might be considered as something like jazz fusion (maybe?), who knows.
I like this comment on the band’s bandcamp page from listener Phillip Graham:
This music sounds like a stately party barge floating down the Nile, in either the distant past or the distant future. Or both.
Pretty cool and that described vibe is definitely accurate. A mixture of Indian and African percussion (usually mixed quite low) with blaring horns over the top but also some beautiful trancey harmonium mixed in too. I’ll keep coming back to this.
Listen to: for a long drone that doesn’t ever tire try Is, for an interesting rhythm that introduces changing melodic ideas around it try Murmuration, Wax could be considered the record’s “pop” song.
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