0.10.0 - Spin spin, spin the black circle (Week 10 Wrapup)

This week:  Midlake, Self Esteem, Lady Gaga, Imogen Heap, RAYE, Wet Leg, illuminati hotties, Annie Lennox

I've had this paranoid feeling for the past couple of weeks that less people read the weekly catchup posts because I don't post the image of what other bands I listened to in the header art.  Why this bothers me, or why I am changing the format a bit to make it more obvious what other bands were included in an attempt to modify the behaviours of the handful of people reading this is obviously completely unhinged.  I would be more successful just DMing the people I know who read this and tell them not to skip over the weekly summaries.  However, I've done it now and I'm probably not going back - whether I can be bothered to go back and update all the other weekly summaries remains to be seen.

A few things happened this week;  I've written on a few occasions about my running discomfort with letting giant tech companies be the only conduit through which I can listen to albums I love, so I took the final steps to correct this over the last couple of weeks - specifically, I bought a record player, dusted off the hi-fi components of Catherine's we had been storing in our back bedroom and tested them for usability (her Phillips CD player is the only thing that survived the years of neglect;  the speakers are OK but very crackly because of huge dust buildup, her old EQ/Amp only works with the volume set specifically to a single micrometer-thin segment of the volume dial and if you touch it at all, it distorts all to hell) and then had a Richer Sounds shopping spree for some cables and a turntable and a new EQ and some new speakers.

It was a strangely nostaligic experience putting it all together.  It's a skill I hadn't exercised for probably 30 years, but I had a proper hi-fi system including a record player back in my teenage years, and I had set that up myself - I spent a happy morning cutting and stripping insulation off some speaker cable, wiring the whole things through the IKEA cabinet that exists as our catch-all multimedia centre and testing it worked.  Well, testing that the CD player worked, because at the time, I had nothing to actually play on my new turntable.

With a little guidance, I found an independent vinyl shop in Sheffield, and took a walk down this weekend, where I spent a very reasonable amount of money, and after some slight teething issues (I'd put the drive belt too high on the spindle that controls the table speed, so it was spinning at like 37/38 RPM instead of 33 - everything sounded very weird until I figured out what I had done) spent a pleasant couple of hours remembering a time where albums came on sides, there was no pause, no track select, no rewind, just a start-to-finish-(with-intermission) musical experience.  I'm looking forward to more of the same, but I've committed to not going crazy and bankrupting myself buying a hundred albums at £30 a throw;  slow and steady builds the collection.

Having covered my Faith No More and colour-album retrospective this week already, what else did I end up listening to?

Normally I put the albums in the 3x3 in the order I listened to them.  In this case, I fiddled with it for 20 minutes because there was a lot of mostly white/black&white art to contend with and it's most aesthetically pleasing to me this way.

Another week, another topic that worked well retrospectively so I kind of leaned into it.  It was International Women's Day on Saturday, and conveniently, I'd spent much of the week outside of the stuff I already covered listening to excellent women in music, so continuing that trend was no great hardship.  It started when I discovered, through subject of previous article flatluigi that Imogen Heap had got into the top 100 in the US for the first time this week because (obviously) some TikTok craze had latched on to her song Headlock, exposing a bevvy of whatever the current generation of music listeners are called to her song.  I feel bad for Imogen Heap (though I am sure she doesn't need my sympathy) because prior to this, her previously-largest exposure was her song Hide And Seek being used in a climactic moment in The OC, and then parodied on Saturday Night Live.  

Like some kind of annoying hipster, I bought and listened to Speak For Yourself when it came out.  There were many paths to getting noticed by me in the late 90s, but one of the most surefire (and true to this day) is to put on a great performance on iconic UK music show Later...with Jools Holland.  I saw Imogen Heap on there, and I'm pretty sure I bought her debut [[editors note - yes, additional research has revealed that Speak For Yourself was in fact not her debut;  I have preserved the inaccuracy mainly because I can't be bothered to rewrite this paragraph]] album that weekend.  It's really an under-rated classic that has been done a massive disservice by how it's been mined in pop culture;  it would be like everyone only knowing 21 by Adele because some exec decided to use Rumour Has It in the season finale of the Teen Wolf TV show.  It's diminished by the association, where it can quite clearly stand on its own if anyone had given it a chance.  In case it's not clear, I have significant feelings for this album, and Ellipse as well.  I'd spent so much time listening to Speak For Yourself that I bought the follow up sight unseen when I saw it in a record shop a couple of years later.  I also made it half-way through listening to Sparks this week, but never ended up finishing it, so that's back on the list for another time.  If I have to try and sell these albums to you, I'd say that Imogen Heap makes deeply ethereal and sometimes sinister pop music carried almost entirely through the power of her voice and the variety of synth and vocoder effects she uses to manipulate it.  Instrumentation is stripped back and minimal, and leaving all the space for her vocal delivery to wire itself into a minor-key emotional centre of your brain.  Another precursor to the boygenuis clique, it's fitting that she's now getting some recognition, just two decades too late.  Listen to The Moment I Said It for a truly frightening portrayal of a conversation I recognised from the other side (though without the implied domestic violence);  Goodnight and Go for a song that wouldn't be out of place on a Gracie Abrams or Sabrina Carpenter album right now, and Bad Body Double for the song I thought should have been a hit if anyone was paying attention to her in 2009.

Friday also saw the release of the new Lady Gaga album.  My Bluesky timeline has a certain musical bent since I took the time to fill it with a number of the Swiftie exiles when starter packs for those were going round.  I'd much rather see a community of fans sharing gifs of Taylor and asking each other about how their day went than much of the goddawful rubbish that got served to me in The Other Place.  However, it does also provide me with a kind of breaking news service for all things big in the pop world, and by lunchtime on Friday, the consensus was the new Gaga album was hot.  This felt like a sign from the universe, so I threw on MAYHEM despite not having listened to a full Gaga album since The Fame Monster from 2009.  I like her stuff, don't get me wrong, she's singularly talented and has incredible presentation, but let's say her output is not aimed at me (and I think that's great) so as a result I have not followed her album output as closely as others.  I'm pleased to report that the internet was not wrong, and MAYHEM (on first listen) felt like it came out of the gates incredibly strong and just kept that energy throughout the entire album.  I've no context for what her music outside of the albums which catapulted her onto the scene felt like in quality, but on first blush, MAYHEM could stand side by side with The Fame and The Fame Monster in terms of overall quality.

Not pictured, the giant suction hose attached directly to my bank balance.

So, with the record player assembled and wired up, I needed something to play on it, and my friend Matt had recommended Spinning Discs, which had recently relocated dangerously to within walking distance of both my house, and an excellent brunch venue.  Much like my hi-fi assembly had taken me back to setting up my first stereo system as a teen, going into an honest to goodness independent record shop gave me intense flashbacks to my youth, stood petulantly in a corner while my Dad endlessly browsed thousands of albums and I dreamed of being back at home playing Sonic 2 on my Sega Megadrive.  While I could have spent a significant amount of both time and money that afternoon, I set myself a strict budget and went in with an agenda;  I wasn't trying to buy duplicates or replacements for albums I love but already own on CD - the initial goal of this exercise is to have physical copies of albums I have only ever really appreciated digitally - either through shady or legit MP3 downloads, or later streaming.  

I came out with two successful hits (and one rogue choice by Catherine from the second hand section);  a copy of Antics by Interpol which I'm elated to own physically at last, and a vinyl copy of Prioritise Pleasure by Sheffield local Self Esteem.  

In 2021, I read one of the many end-of-year lists from peoples who's opinion I respected, this time belonging to Alan, someone I had met through playing the Netrunner card game, and who despite his moving on to other things, we remainedTwitter mutuals;  Alan is also the person who gave me my BlueSky invite way back when, and  I also ran into him at the Carly Rae Jepsen gig I talked about a few posts ago.  All in all, Alan is a good egg and his music recommendations are always worth exploring, even if they don't always land with me.  I listened to Prioritise Pleasure on and off for two months early in 2022;  I was convinced not only was it a great album, but that Catherine would love it.  Despite multiple attempts, I could never get her to commit to listening to it (I think the album art made her skeptical).  At the same time, I was going slightly insane as I hadn't been to a live music event at that point for nearly two years.  With lockdown restrictions lifting, I was scouring websites looking for shows to go to, and by pure fluke, landed two tickets for the final night of the tour for this album, playing at a local, intimate venue.  

Without having listened to the album, and still nervous about being around crowds of people, it took all my persuasive powers to convince Catherine to come to this show with me.  By the time the gig arrived, the album and the tour had sold out everywhere, thanks to a huge amount of positive press;  so much so that the tour would end, then restart again some months later as demand continued to increase.  Convinced that she should go, that it would be OK, that we'd keep our distance and the crowd numbers would be manageable, we saw Self Esteem for the first time.  

Sometimes you see someone live and you just know they've got something special.  This gig, the final night of a tour that had exploded, in her home town, was magical.  She has a bombast and confidence that walks the line between brutal honesty and stage performance  She stops to read poetry in one moment, apologises to her parents in the audience for graphically talking about her sex life in song in another;  her desire to do performative pop while talking about things that are real to her (and many women, if Catherine and the majority of the audience are to be believed) elevates it above merely reaching for chart success.  There are choreographed dances and costume changes and fun, endless fun.  We came out of that show with Catherine, the doubtful sceptic, completely converted.  Self Esteem now holds the unique distinction of being the only artist, despite the hundreds of gigs I've been to, that I have seen more than once on the same tour.  After seeing her a second time at Manchester's Albert Hall, one of the greatest small concert venues in the country and my personal favourite, we drove back across the rolling mountainous hills that separate Manchester from Sheffield, and by the time we made it home, we had booked tickets to see her again 3 days later, in Sheffield.

Having listened to Prioritise Pleasure on the record player, completing her discography-to-date by listening to her less successful (but I think only due to lack of exposure at the time) precursor Compliments Please seemed obvious.  I actually now like this record more than the second; though there's possibly a novelty/overexposure thing going on (we listened to Prioritise Pleasure a lot after that first gig).  Girl Crush and Peach You Had To Pick are great, but both of these albums feel hard to single out to just individual songs;  they exist as a whole, and should be appreciated as such.  If you've never heard of her (looking at you, US readers), go listen to Fucking Wizardry and see if that floats your boat.

So I said we'd bought a rogue second hand album, and this was it - an album that Catherine has fond teenage memories of (and a bargain at £8!).  However, we didn't end up listening to it this weekend, because we spent a lot of time in the kitchen, unpacking our fridge and freezer while we waited for the replacement to arrive.  In lieu of listening to this, I put Diva by Annie Lennox on the old bluetooth speaker while we sorted through undiscovered relics of jams and chutneys.

I don't have much of a conenction to the album - obviously Annie Lennox has an amazing voice, this album has Walking On Broken Glass and Why which I know - but like the Eurythmics record, Catherine had listened to this album a whole lot when she was younger, and she spent a happy hour or so singing along and reminiscing about how she hadn't heard it in ages while I scraped expired food into our trash.  Sorry Ms Lennox.

Wet Leg and Kiss Yr Frenemies both come from my expansive attempts to find worthwhile music-based podcasts which I went through a couple of years ago.  There are lots of podcasts about music, it seems (and very few long form anecdotal text based blogs with a dozen readers), and most of them are bad.  I have no problem with the democratisation of media, and I love it when I find people who aren't media experts but who've learned enough craft, and have enough style and charisma to carry them to success.  But even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and I came across a mention of the illuminati hotties (the all lower case styling is intentional and makes my skin crawl) on a podcast and was curious enough to look up their stuff based on the description.  I'm a big fan of The Breeders and Verruca Salt, and illuminati hotties (and a year or so later Wet Leg which I heard about on a different music podcast I stopped listening to*), nicely slot into the blank space I have in my life for music in that style.  I very annoyingly missed out on tickets to see Wet Leg as their gig was the same night as we were supposed to see a Florence & The Machine show, then Florence rescheduled her show because of an injury, but by then, all the Wet Leg tickets were gone.  

Without much debate I think I prefer the illuminati hotties record (the one I listened to here was actually their 2018 debut, but their album Let Me Do One More is the first one I listened to based on the podcast recommendation). IH have a mischievous streak about their music that I really enjoy - they are undoubtedly having fun making music and don't mind their relative obscurity.  Also, they have some of the best song titles going, including MMMOOOAAAAAYAYA, Joni: LA's No. 1 Health Goth and my favourite, will i get cancelled if i write a song called, "if you were a man you'd be so cancelled".  Their albums are fun and slightly deranged in a kind of Aubrey Plaza way, if that makes any sense.

By contrast Wet Leg arrived with an interesting assortment of fun, punky songs with a kind of affected disassociation poured over them, and somehow in what felt like the length of time it took for me to listen to their album, they were everywhere.  Their songs were used on TV sporting occasions, for interstitial music for BBC festival coverage of Glastonbury, every time you turned on a radio station somehow it would inexplicably be playing Chaise Longue.  But the band felt uncomfortable with this massive buzzy status;  they seemed slightly shell shocked in interviews, and reluctant to lean into their new found fame (not that I blame them, it would freak me out too).  And since that summer of 2022 when they were everywhere, now they are nowhere again.  I think, with no other context, Wet Leg is still a great album, but it feels like the entire span of the bands career got expended all in the course of a single summer.  Peculiar.

Last in my International Women's Day nine-piece was a recommendation from a list of the best new British female artists.  I'd already listened to The Last Dinner Party and Olivia Deen and Lola Young who were the top three on that list;  number four was RAYE, and I'm so pleased I'd already listened to the other three.  From the moment I started My 21st Century Blues I knew I was hearing something special.  I broke my golden rule and listened to it start to finish, and when I was done, I just put it on again.  I haven't done that at all this year yet, listened to an album twice in the same day, let alone back to back.  I played it for Catherine in the car as well, and she felt what I did.  I'd heard of RAYE in passing, but had no idea this was going to be a combination of whip-smart R&B, soul, and some UK garage blended together into a fusion which takes you on an incredible journey.  I love this record.  Listen to The Thrill Is Gone. for a flavour, but really, the whole album is exceptional.

Well, I guess the run of me trying to be concise in these wrapups is over since I just spent eighteen paragraphs on nine albums and I still have three more albums to cover which come with their own weighty question I won't get to discuss elsewhere, so let's just lean into it shall we?

My ex-brother in law (estranged sister's husband) loved Midlake;  He was a musician (frustrated, on the verge of making it, never did, couldn't figure out how to hold down a real job) and he loved to talk about music, which meant we had some common ground at least.  He is also the person who wouldn't stop recommending Joanna Newsom to me, but his advocacy for Midlake was far more effective.  The Trials Of Von Occupanther is a conceptually weird album, a kind of relic from an alternate timeline where American frontierspeople of the 1800s, as well as manifesting their destiny and building log cabins and doing terrible things to indigenous people, also got together and recorded incredibly well produced jazz tinged indie folk records to modern musical production standards.  It's incredibly musically rich, and reminds me particularly of The Band and Neil Young, the narratives of rural life spun into glorious reality by songwriter and lead vocalist Tim Smith.

While The Courage Of Others leaves behind the past, the forlorn and introspective tone carries through both musically and lyrically;  somehow, the arrangements have become more baroque, more intricate, the lyrics mournful and hopeful.  Both albums for me embody such a particular mental and emotional state, a kind of melancholy that when the mood is upon me, these albums become like companion pieces to my own mental state;  keep me connected to the world and others around me, feel like an healthy expression of my own feelings of being unsure and lost and forlorn.  

But if you were a member of Midlake, and your name was not Tim Smith, you were perhaps feeling those feelings for a different reason.  By all accounts, Mr Smith existed as the auteur of everything Midlake was on these two albums;  while the band are credited together, Smith was calling the shots;  musicians generally like to be creative, collaborative - what do you when the vision of the guy who created your most successful music also reduces you to nothing but glorified session musicians, playing the notes and keeping the rhythm dictated to you?

The answer, in Midlake's case, was to separate at the shoulders;  Tim Smith went one way, the rest of Midlake another.  An entire albums worth of recording, the follow up to The Courage Of Others was discarded, and Midlake started again.  I listened to their third album, Antiphon in 2013, this Midlake in name but not in substance, and it was not the things I wanted it to be.  And it made me feel guilty - this is a band of talented musicians, who's performance I had held so dear.  I wanted them to succeed, to produce something that made me want to keep listening, but the truth was I needed the vision, the auteur, that was what I loved.  I listened to Van Occupanther this week because I had one of those very melancholy moments and it seemed appropriate;  I also noticed that after their 2006/2010/2013 album trio, there was a new Midlake album released in 2022.  For this reason, to assuage my guilt, to give them one last chance and listened to For The Sake Of Bethel Woods hoping against hope that something had changed, that time and insight had found a way for Midlake to bring back to me something that I thought they could provide.

It was a nice dream to have, and there's nothing wrong with the new album;  it bounced and meandered pleasantly, and it didn't make me feel anything.  So I hold onto those two Tim Smith Midlake albums and I try not to think about how unhappy those albums must have been to be a part of in the moment.

* They were were actually mentioned by someone writing an email in to the show, so I guess the email writer should get the credit