0.20.0 - He sings a song that reminds him of the bad times (Week 20 Wrapup)

This Week: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Chvrches, Wet Leg

I spent the evening with our friends last night watching the Eurovision finals and while I am not going to talk about the show because I know at least one person who hasn't watched it and intends to do so, I mention it in the context of me having a very low grade hangover not helped by staying up till 1.30am last night and then having to get up at 7.30am this morning to go play a Tennis match.  This is my way of saying that this is going to be a mercifully short wrapup this week, in part because I have been listening ahead to albums by a band I am going to cover next week and I am only half way through, so I won't be writing about those, and because I already covered a lot of my listening last week in my previous two articles.

Apart from that, no major news to report.  Catherine is getting ready to go away to the Scottish island I would like us to relocate to permanently as part of my plan to ride out the global and national ascendency of fascism by living on a tiny island with a single major town and a population of 22,000 people.  I feel pretty generalised guilt about the level of cowardice this displays but as I said last week, I'd be a pretty bad freedom fighter.  Also it's a beautiful, empty place which when we visited last year was the most relaxed I had been in like a decade.  Anyway, with Catherine away next week that opens up strong opportunities to get a lot of listening done before I head off to UK Games Expo in two weeks time to both revel in, and be overwhelmed by, the growing board game community and hang out with my friends in a rented property and play games through the weekend.

So, outside of the albums I've already covered, there are only 3 records I need to sweep up in this article, and all of them for a very stupid reason.

On the occasions I am summoned into my works office building for a face to face meeting which could definitely have been a teams meeting and possibly could just have been 3 emails, it's about 90 minutes drive each way.  If there is a traffic incident on the many miles of densely populated road between my front door and the industrial park our office sits in, that adds at least 50 minutes to my travel time.  On top of that, my mobile phone reception in and around the office itself is very bad, and the data signal I get there is not strong enough to run the search function in Spotify, let alone stream any music.

So on Wednesday, on leaving the office, two things were immediately apparent.  One, my SatNav told me there had indeed been some kind of incident and my door to door eta was at least 120 minutes; and two, I was definitely in an internet blackspot which prevented me from downloading any albums to listen to.  I thought about going back into the office to connect to the wifi and just jam some albums on there which I wanted to listen to, but that opens up the possibility of one of my colleagues stopping me to ask me questions, and that's time I can ill afford already facing into the teeth of a long commute home.  Fortunately, I have a selection of albums pre-saved on my phone.  Back in the old days of my previous job,. where they took great pleasure in making me get on a plane every 2 months, these were my aeroplane songs;  now, they are just a collection of useful fallbacks.  

What I had not considered, in my collection of aeroplane albums, was that I might in the future restrict myself to only listening to different albums by different artists and so I found my selections slightly limited because I'd either covered them already, or didn't want to cover them yet.  Fortunately, I was able to find three albums which I could reasonably listen to on the drive home without violating any of my rules;  I queued them up, set off, and got home just as The Bones Of What You Believe reached its final track - excellent planning if I do say so myself.

So, I did Yeah Yeah Yeahs last week and couldn't believe I hadn't already listened to Cool It Down, so this was an opportunity to correct that.  This album became a weird hyperfixation for me when I heard it, kind-of slightly post COVID lockdown, but still not sure of rules of movement and what is and isn't acceptable or safe.  The fact that its uncompromisingly dystopian in the way it reflects society and climate crisis post-pandemic really struck a nerve, and it became almost like a security blanket, an 8-song expression of how I pretty much felt (and still feel to some degree) about where things are at.  I should probably go back and backfill listening to the other three Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, but I'm worried that they will somehow lower the very high average they've attained with this and Fever To Tell.  

As with Chappell Roan, sometimes my music radar gets me into something moments before it becomes ubiquitous and gives me a combination endorphin rush of saying "Oh, yeah, I was listening to them three months ago" and a kind of selfish disappointment that you've just been forcibly shunted back into the mainstream and you have to explain that no, you knew about them before they were everywhere.  In 2023, you couldn't turn on a BBC tv show without a track from Wet Leg being used as a bed somewhere inside it.  I swear if they could have found an angle they would have had Piece of Shit playing under Aled Jones talking about Canterbury Cathedral on Songs of Praise.  Nearly a year earlier, I'd heard them being discussed along with The Illuminati Hotties on a music podcast about the resurgence of "girls with guitar" bands, and I took the time to check them out;  Like Illuminati Hotties, I found Wet Leg to be a throwback to the era of Elastica, Republica, and Vercua Salt and so they immediately had my attention.  Wet Leg (the album, their debut, with a follow up due this year) became a firm favourite of both Catherine and I and we spent a lot of time listening to it in the car while driving long distances.  There's a new album on the horizon and a tour, and while Catherine's away, I am going with friends Stuart and Jenny to see them live...somewhere.  Stuart has the tickets, I'm sure he knows where the gig is.

Despite the near-saturation level of public acceptance for Wet Leg (somewhere within 250 meters of you at all times, some media device is playing Chaise Lounge no matter where you are in the UK), that doesn't make this any less of an excellent art/rock/punk/indie record.  If somehow you have missed this, I'd correct that, if only for the satisfaction of going "Oh, is that the song I've heard 35 times already this year?".

I was late to the party on Chvrches though.  The Bones Of What You Believe came out in 2013, and it wasn't until Catherine and I watched the excellent TV dark comedy Fleabag which featured the use of The Mother We Share on the soundtrack in 2016 that it got stuck in my head from just one or two incidences of hearing it that I had to go listen to the album.  What's amazing is that this album (and the Chvrches sound in general) is so close to an album I'm going to cover next week, one of my favourite forgotten gems of the 90's, that I should have received a Back To The Future-esque Marvin Berry phone call from someone saying "Hey, you know that one album from 1996 you loved and the band never released anything which sounded like that ever again then broke up?  Well, there's a new band that kinda sounds like that you should hear."  That never happened, obviously, and so I was aware of Chvrches only as the band who had to put a v in their name because you couldn't google "Churches" and expect to get information on their band.  

I've corrected my oversight now, and have in the course of the last decade repeatedly listened to the entirely of the Chvrches discography, which is a kind dark indie electropop voiced by Lauren Mayberry who's voice has a kind of piercing clarity which contrasts with and complements the ominous electronic sounds over which she sings.  I actually think their most recent album Screen Violence is also their best, but this album is the perfect jumping off point if you, like me, have somehow missed out of them.  I would probably have done all four albums together at some point in the future, but the aeroplane album restrictions meant I had to listen to something and this represented the path of least resistance.  I'll probably sprinkle Screen Violence, Every Open Eye and Love Is Dead into my listening in the next few months just to feel like I've given Chvrches their time in the sun.

That was pretty effortless, right?  A quick three albums, blog written in less than an hour, everyone goes home happy.