This Week: Laura Marling, Hungry for the Riff Raff, The Cranberries, Stromae, Manu Chao, Rubio, Will Butler (and Arcade Fire kind of), The Weeknd, Loverboy, The CardigansToday marks almost exactly the quarter-pole of the calendar year as we head into April on Tuesday, and in that time I've handily polished off around 40% of the albums needed to hit my target. It was looking touch-and-go in terms of volume of albums listened to over the last seven days, because the week before the start of the new financial year is like a full moon to the lycanthropic senior executives I report directly to, so they all collectively lost their mind and put a huge workload with a short deadline onto my plate. I am going to self-check my privilege here because I work a spreadsheet job instead of doing something important and demanding like medical work or service industry or teaching, but I worked a crazy amount of hours this week, including the majority of my Sunday when I should have been out enjoying the sunshine*.
However, a couple of things saved me; Catherine had evening plans on Friday which gave me an opportunity to listen to some stuff when usually I'd be sat in front of the TV with her; then on Saturday we had a four hour round trip to visit Catherine's Aunt who is recovering from a heart whoospidaisy (she seems fine, fingers crossed) which meant significant opportunities for more listening. Finally, the one upside for me working in my office all morning on Sunday was the ability to have music on secure in the knowledge I wouldn't be interrupted by a Teams call or a pointless meeting and I could just power on through.
All told, I managed to knock out thirteen albums in the last three days, which just about keeps my on pace for my thirty per week I've been managing to maintain. So, let's soldier on together and I'll try not to ramble too much.
After a few weeks of pulling recommendations from the pile of albums sent to me by my friends, I jumped back to my "best of" list on Friday night to hit some more of the critically acclaimed albums from the 2020's which had passed me by. Laura Marling's Songs For Our Daughter was first, and I was excited to listen to it because I'd already heard I Speak Because I Can when my friend Matt had played it for me in January and I'd enjoyed it. It's going to sound slightly redundant, but it turns out that when you use "Best albums of" lists to pick what you listen to, the quality is pretty high, and this is the case with both Songs For Our Daughter and Patterns In Repeat, which didn't appear on my list but it seemed natural to continue on to her most recent album after listening to Songs.. I also hate my habitual reductive comparisons, but Songs... in particular sounds so much like Joni Mitchell to me as I was listening to it that I couldn't push the comparison away. The fact it stacks up favourably with one of my all time favourite artists is a monumental accomplishment, and when I say "She sounds like Blue era Joni Mitchell" you have to understand that is intended as the highest of praise.
The Past Is Still Alive is another unsurprisingly good album from a list of good albums; less immediate in its appeal to me just because it didn't have an easy point of comparison, Hungry For The Riff Raff (great name, no notes) finds a unique middle ground between genres; PJ Harvey by way of Reba McEntire, perhaps, a set of introspective country songs, but not yeehaw country, sad and lonesome and mournful country. The further through it I got, the more I started to pay attention, and it exists as another example of an album I'm hungry to go back to more and spend some time with.
As I've said before, I'm deliberately not specifically planning what I listen to ahead of time much, but that doesn't mean that my listening choices aren't occasionally dictated by a story I want to tell, and that's the case with The Cranberries, who are a band that demonstrably had several hit songs, reasonable success in the mid nineties, and sadly lost their lead singer in 2018 to a tragic accident. Both Everyone's Doing It, Why Can't We? and No Need To Argue are great and feature tunes anyone born on or around 1980 will know very well. I hadn't listened to either of them in full in decades, but it was time well spent. If you don't know The Cranberries, go listen to Linger, or Dreams, or their most popular song by far, Zombie - a song I have a specific memory of.
My younger sister got a lot of the innate musical talent that runs in my family; she took to playing the guitar seemingly without need to practice or struggle to do so, she sang very nicely and had the bulletproof delusional confidence it requires to want to do that in front of people. She was I guess 16 or 17 when she ended up in a band through people she knew from school (I had been sent off to the lower class comprehensive school; by the time it came for her to go to secondary school, my parents had relocated to be closer to the nicer, fancier school with the music programme). With a determination that spoke to the lead singer delusion I mentioned above, their ambition went from "rehearsing together at school" to "playing a gig in front of people" fairly quickly. In the town where we lived, there was an upstairs bar with a small stage, and her and her band somehow negotiated a performance there. I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the bar, or the name of her band (though I remember it being incredibly stupid and pretentious). They had a setlist, 6 or so songs, mostly original, but their closing number was a cover of Zombie which in fairness she could belt out with convincing rock bravado.
On the night of the gig, controversy was afoot in our household as my sister was determined to dye her hair red for the performance (brick red, pillarbox red, for reference). She had been specifically and repeatedly prohibited from doing so by my parents. So when I arrived at the gig to see her band setting up, I was bemused to say the least to see her with the brick red hair she had been so forcefully told not to inflict on herself. The time comes, and her band take the stage, and work their way through their setlist, with her at the front, flouncing around and establishing as much stage presence as was possible on a stage with the surface area of a large dining table. By the time they hit Zombie to close the set, she'd been doing work under the close-range spotlights, and throwing herself around with enough abandon to start to work up a sweat. She reaches the first chorus, and tosses her hair. A shotgun blast of red droplets erupt from her swinging tresses, spattering the stage, the drumkit behind her, and the dancefloor in front, which is mercifully free of dancers. The floodgates are open now, but she is committed. She careens through the rest of the song as the sweat washes the red food colouring she used to dye her hair out and onto every surrounding surface in thousands of spattered droplets, turning the entire area into a scene from Dexter. The song finishes, and the fifteen or so people in the bar stare in silence as the bar owner ushers them out in short order. They are barred for life, and never perform in public again.
I knew we had a lot of driving to do on Saturday, and in a feat of complete generosity I told Catherine this was her opportunity to pick any albums she wanted to play for me, and I would have no choice but to listen to them as I drove to Worcester and back. Four hours of driving you would think would produce more than four albums, but she did instead have a 90 minute phone call with her friend while I drove back in silence on the way back, so she let her opportunity to inflict Celia Cruz or some Spanish-Language Shakira on me slip through her fingers.
What we did get wasn't completely unexpected. Catherine has been trying to get me excited about Stromae for a while now. The issue, as we discussed on the drive down, is that I don't speak French (Catherine certainly does) and Stromae performs in the musical style which most hinges on lyrical content, none of which I could comprehend. Catherine insists he's a very clever lyricist who does interesting things with language, but her attempts to illustrate that mid-song were like watching a stand up comedian perform in French and then have someone next to you go "See, that was funny because he said 'table' instead of 'tablet'". It's lost on me. I'm pretty sure I've been subjected to at least a couple of Stromae albums and I can't tell you if Multitude is something I've heard before or it was brand new to me. It's all kind of blurs together for me, a series of interesting sounding beats over a big question mark of my own understanding.
Manu Chao, on the other hand, was a far easier pill to swallow. For one, I speak a little Spanish, and my comprehension is pretty good, even if my linguistic skill, vocabulary, grammar and confidence in the language is not. Also, I've heard Clandestino more than a few times, and he sings and raps in a combination of Spanish, English and French throughout. I like this album, though I'm not sure how often I would listen to it without Catherine being present. Interestingly, to my untrained ear there's a significant degree of connective tissue between what's on here and early Gorillaz stuff. Go listen to Bongo Bong off this album and Clint Eastwood off Gorillaz and tell me I am wrong.
Finally, Rubio, who Catherine discovered because she created the theme song for a Mexican drama she watched called
Senorita '89. If you've ever wondered what Chvrches would sound like if they were Chilean and just one person, wonder no more, because Rubio has you covered. I might have sounded dismissive there, but these are great albums, and if you've not heard them and you've an interest in cool synthwave pop I'd encourage you to dive headfirst into her catalogue. If you don't believe me, let
Rolling Stone try and convince you.
The last album Catherine put on before we got back was Will Butler's Generations; Will is a member of Arcade Fire, brother to more-than-alleged sex pest Win Butler, and while I'm not wild about the album, which has huge solo-project, 'I pitched these songs to my band but they didn't think they were worth developing' energy which means it sounds a lot like half-finished Arcade Fire B-Sides to me, it's a useful springboard to let me talk about Arcade Fire a little.
When I started this project and I was thinking about bands with deep discogs which I have enduring memories and opinions about, I thought about Arcade Fire, a band for whom I own all six of their studio albums. They've been the performers at some of my favourite gigs in my life, and their run of albums from Funeral to Neon Bible to The Suburbs might be amongst my favourite of all time. I won't be covering any of them for this blog.
I thought about it, I really did. I bought
WE when it came out, had tickets to see them live for a third time. Two days before the gig, the
sexual misconduct allegations came out. Their support act immediately pulled out. With no time to get refunds, with our trip already planned, with so little time to react, we went to the show; instead of a support act, a wedding DJ played embarrassing mixes, dancing like Jean-Ralphio from Parks & Rec to an arena who could not care less that he was here. Arcade Fire came out, started with
Rebellion (Lies); still on the defensive from the media, hoping to claw back some reputation. Since that show in 2018, I don't think I have listened to any of their albums, some of my favourites of all time. There's a level of hypocrisy I'm aware of here too - there are artists I still listen to (especially in rap/hip-hop and nu metal) who have provably done far worse; I haven't chosen not to listen to them. But they weren't my
favourites. The degree of disappointment I feel for the way these albums have been tainted is hard for me to overcome. So, with a seemingly limitless supply of other music out there, these six Arcade Fire albums will sit, unlistened, for another year.
And finally we come to this morning. I was in my feelings about working on a weekend, so I used that for a couple of thematic pulls. I'm not overwhelmingly familiar with The Weeknd, with the exception of that one
SNL Daniel Craig clip, and his godawful pandemic-era Superbowl halftime show, one of the most boring I can remember. I'm not a huge fan of modern R&B and listening to
Beauty Behind The Madness just convinced me that it's just not for me. I'm pretty sure the intended audience is not white Brits in their mid-forties, so it's possible The Weeknd will do just fine without me in his fan club. Call me uncool if you must, but mid tempo slow jams about how well he does sex good to women just was not it. I did get a lot of good Excel work done while listening to it though. Also I kinda like
I Can't Feel My Face, that song is alright.
Loverboy were a hair metal band which I don't think really crossed over to the UK, so my introduction to them was specifically the 30 Rock joke that Pete was the guitarist in Loverboy back in the 80's (which it seems is not popular enough to have been clipped for Youtube). From that I heard a 40 second clip of Working For The Weekend and that was all the leverage my brain needed to summon that up years later while I was working on the weekend and instruct me to listen to it. I can confirm that yes, this is 80's Hair Metal. I don't have much else to say about, it was very predictable, and also less than 30 minutes, and I got the rest of the work I needed doing done during it, so Get Lucky gets a passing grade from me with the caveat that I will likely never listen to it ever again.
Finally, why The Cardigans? Well, when I asked Catherine what she was doing as I passed through the living room on the way to cook lunch, she told me she was shopping for tops to wear for work and that's all it took.
Has there ever been a band more misrepresented by their most mainstream single than The Cardigans? I'm talking of course about Lovefool, which I think everyone on Earth heard as part of the Romeo + Juliet Baz Luhrmann film soundtrack, which makes them sound like a kind of twee Swedish version of Sixpence None The Richer; where nearly every one of their other songs off their earlier albums (of which Gran Turino is the best simply by virtue of not having Lovefool on its track listing, but also My Favourite Game and Erase/Rewind on there) has a far more Garbage-lite, soft-alternative-rock vibe which stands completely at odds with their one big hit. Lovefool is fine for what it is, and I am sure the royalties still spend splendidly, but it's not really what The Cardigans sound like, despite many people being absolutely sure that it is.
And with that, we wave goodbye to March, look forward to hitting album number 400 some time next week, and I have to start thinking about what I am going to listen to again. Onward to April.
* I would absolutely not have been outside enjoying the sunshine, let's not kid ourselves.
