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Ends in Two: Favorite songs and albums of 2022 (Part V)

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By May I was back into the groove of full-time day job work again. Five days a week and hovering right around forty hours, it was definitely not as stressful as the Former Day Job, and I just had to get used to the more physical demands of standing for most of my shift. And getting home at a reasonable hour with time to spare was just what I needed. It wouldn’t be long before I started using some of my past experience to slide into a few extra responsibilities.

Musicwise, I’d started flagging a bit as I wasn’t always able to connect with my daily schedule of listening to KEXP, but I made up for it by keeping an eye on the weekly new releases and sampling new bands.

Belle and Sebastian, A Bit of Previous, released 6 May. I’ve witnessed this band’s evolution since the late 90s and they’ve gone from the bedroom-pop twee (they were the band first given that term, I believe) to quirky modern rock to windy Smiths-style British alternapop. Their latest finds them at home sounding confident and strong.

Warpaint, Radiate Like This, released 6 May. So happy that this band is back after such a long hiatus!! Their sound is still a bit weird and slightly spooky, but also just as infectious as it’s always been. Another band worth checking out their entire catalog.

Dubstar, Two, released 6 May. I’ve loved this band ever since the US version of Goodbye came out in 1997 (the one with their megahit “Stars”), and I’m quite happy that not only did they get back together in 2018, they’re still going strong! The new record is one of my favorites of the year, and I love that they included a cover of my all-time favorite REM song on it!

The Smile, A Light for Attracting Attention, released 13 May. Sounding a lot like the quieter moments of OK Computer and the less-manic moments of Amnesiac, Thom and Jonny’s full album finds them writing some of their best introspective and adventurous music.

Florence + the Machine, Dance Fever, released 13 May. I’m still not sure what to make of this album as it’s definitely more leftfield than her usual (and that’s saying a lot, considering) but it’s a curious and entertaining listen.

Various Artists, For the Birds: The Birdsong Project Vol I, released 20 May. The first of five multi-disc volumes for an extremely curious and expansive project from National Audubon Society featuring spoken-word poetry and music about our avian friends. Interspersed with writers are musicians such as Beck, Nick Cave, UNKLE, Karen O, Beach House, and more.

Liam Gallagher, C’MON YOU KNOW, released 27 May. The younger brother’s turn in the spotlight doesn’t quite have the bombast as his earlier solo works (most likely due to pandemic reasons keeping recording at a minimum) but it actually works in his favor here; you’re not focused on the grandiosity and instead on the guitar groove and the tight songwriting. Our Boy has come a long way since his former band’s days.

Wilco, Cruel Country, released 27 May. Long labeled as purveyors of alt-country — much to their chagrin — they turn the tables this time out and completely embrace it with nearly all live takes of full-on twang alternafolk, and the end result is an amazing collection of high lonesome melodies and lovely tunes.

jennylee, Heart Tax, released 27 May. Not only do we get a new Warpaint album this month, we get a solo album from its bassist! This one’s much darker and more sedate than her band’s release, meandering and moody and contemplative. An album to listen to late at night.

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Tomorrow we hit the halfway point of the year with tunes from June!

Ends in Two: Favorite songs and albums of 2022 (Part IV)

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By April I was working at my new job — not only working full time after two years, but back in retail after at least seventeen. Immediately I realized that while it might have been physically exhausting, mentally it was a walk in the park. Compared to the daily stresses of the Former Day Job, I knew I could stick with this one for a while and not have to ever return to that bullshit ever again. It also helped that my commute is a full eight blocks instead of thirty miles! It’s not the work-from-home I enjoyed so much in the past, but it’s a fair trade given how much I’ve come to enjoy it. And I get to listen to new music on my off hours!

EMF, GO GO SAPIENS, released 1 April. Now this was a band that no one expected to hear from again, given their last original album had been back in 1995. A welcome return to an underrated band unfairly judged on a one-hit wonder.

The Clockworks, The Clockworks EP, released 1 April. An EP from one of my favorite finds from last year? Yes, please!! I am so looking forward to more from this band as they sneak out new singles. Highly recommended!

Orville Peck, Bronco, released 8 April. Is he country? Is he alternative? is he alt-country? Whatever he may be, his style is a fascinating listen and he really does know how to write a great crooning love song.

Jack White, Fear of the Dawn, released 8 April. The first of two full records from the ex-White Stripes singer, he only seems to get better with each release.

Oceanator, Nothing’s Ever Fine, released 8 April. Elise Okusami’s quirky and catchy guitar-based tunes are all sorts of fun to listen to and well worth checking out.

Kae Tempest, The Line Is a Curve, released 8 April. They began releasing their fascinating beat style brand of pop and poetry, often gritty and frustrating, back in 2011 but their latest is a gem.

Wet Leg, Wet Leg, released 8 April. Speaking of spoken word, this duo hit the charts last year with the catchy and goofy “Chaise Longue” and followed it up with even more bonkers and irresistible alt-pop.

SAULT, AIR, released 15 April. The first of six (!!) albums to be released this year by this secretive yet incredibly prolific collective, they turn their attention away from their oddball R&B towards…classical? This one’s like a score for an unmade film and it threw quite a few fans, yet it only proves that they are exceptional musicians.

Hatchie, Giving the World Away, released 22 April. Their sophomore album is just as bouncy and fun as 2019’s Keepsake, which was one of my favorites of that year.

Fontaines DC, Skinty Fia, released 22 April. This band continues to be in its own little universe of strange yet captivating songs. Whether they’re spoken, sung or both, they’re never boring.

Bloc Party, Alpha Games, released 29 April. Always a fascinating band that can be twitchy one track and calm the next, they’ve always released great records that are excellent from start to finish.

Röyksopp, Profound Mysteries, released 29 April. This Norwegian duo always surprises me, as their releases can range from full-on chillwave electronica to laid back synth contemplation. This — the first of a three-volume set — blew me away with their great single “Impossible” with the always lovely Alison Goldfrapp on vocals. Definitely on my top ten of the year.

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Coming next week: May through July!

Ends in Two: Favorite songs and albums of 2022 (Part III)

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Now that I’ve gotten my head around the many albums that came out this year (and, I admit, having forgotten that some of these dropped as I’d been too distracted by adjusting to the New Day Job and other things), I can confirm that yes, there are indeed quite a few great records that I’m glad I got to check out!

Here’s a sample of some of March’s great releases!

Letting Up Despite Great Faults, IV, released 4 March. This band explores the lighter side of dreampop with what feels like a nod to The Church with its chiming guitars and reverb-drenched melodies. Their first album in quite some time has been a welcome return.

Steve Kilbey, Of Skins and Heart (The Acoustic Sessions Vol 1), released 4 March. Speaking of the Church, its front man dropped an acoustic reworking of the band’s debut album from 1981, proving these songs have definitely lasted the test of time.

Stereophonics, Oochya! released 4 March. Originally planned as a compilation of hits and rarities, singer Kelly Jones found himself inspired by some of those unreleased songs, retooled them and wrote new tracks to fill out the rest of the album instead. A band that never quite gets its due here in the States but continues to impress.

Nilüfer Yanya, Painless, released 4 March. Yanya’s second album is a study of less-is-more, with several of its songs so sparse they’re almost delicate, yet never losing any of their power. “Stabilise” is definitely on my top ten favorite songs of the year. Highly recommended.

Bob Moses, The Silence in Between, released 4 March. Yet another band on my ‘I will download anything from them’ list, their latest comes on darker and harder than previous releases yet never obscures the lighter touch of their melodies.

(G)I-DLE, I NEVER DIE, released 14 March. This K-Pop band gets punkier and poppier with this release, going full-on P!nk with lyrics and moves that are sassy, brassy and fun.

Stabbing Westward, Chasing Ghosts, released 18 March. A welcome full-album return to this band, coming back hard with their classic wall of sound style.

PLOSIVS, PLOSIVS, released 18 March. Quite possibly my favorite band name of the year — it perfectly fits their fast, gut-punching post-punk sound. “Broken Eyes” got the same reaction out of me that Interpol’s “PDA” did back in the day (…what the hell is this, and were can I find it??) and it’s high up there on my favorite albums of the year list.

Bauhaus, “Drink the New Wine” single, released 23 March. Just when you thought this band was going to implode once more, the four guys revisited the exquisite corpse style of writing (last heard with the “1-2-3-4” b-side) during the Covid lockdown by recording their own segment separately over a slow beat. It’s a weird yet surprisingly cohesive experiment.

Placebo, Never Let Me Go, released 25 March. This band has definitely mellowed with age, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, considering Brian Molko writes such great songs that are both quirky and extremely heartfelt.

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Stay tuned tomorrow for April tunage!

Ends in Two: Favorite songs and albums of 2022 (Part II)

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Given that we’re already in the last month of the year with only so many days left to blog about the year’s tunage, I will be doing my best to post here three times a week to ensure I hit all twelve months! I haven’t posted that much in ages, so hopefully I won’t be pushing it too hard!

And now for an extended look at February’s great releases…

cruush, “bckwards 36” single, released 2 February. This is a KEXP find, the kind that’s perfectly in my wheelhouse: muddy, dreamlike shoegaze with lovely wandering melodies and vocals (from Manchester at that). They kind of remind me a lot of the Boston band Mistle Thrush, who had a very similar sound. I don’t know much about them other than that they have a handful of singles on Bandcamp that I really need to get!

Love, Burns, It Should Have Been Tomorrow, released 4 February. This band really does sound like early Lloyd Cole & the Commotions if they’d chosen to go the psych rock route. It’s a fascinating listen.

Korn, Requiem, released 4 February. I’d mentioned on a friend’s Discord recently that I was surprised by how melodic this album is, and that it’s really good because of that. Sure, the drop-tuning and the vocal growling is still there as well as the doom-laden lyrics, but with age they’ve become a stronger and more cohesive band.

The Reds, Pinks & Purples, Summer at Land’s End, released 4 February. One of my favorite super-local bands — Land’s End is a cliffside hiking area of Lincoln Park that overlooks the Pacific Ocean and Golden Gate Bridge, just west of my apartment — released yet another banger of an album that I keep coming back to. He sounds even more like Felt here, not quite lo-fi but certainly sticking deep in that lane and I love it.

Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio, Cold As Weiss, released 11 February. Groovy and infectious bluesy jazz that’s a super fun listen any day. These guys played on the front porch of KEXP’s morning DJ John Richards around the time this came out and it was a brilliant set.

Eddie Vedder, Earthling, released 11 February. Vedder’s newest solo record is a counterpoint to Pearl Jam’s last record Gigaton from last year, its music more contemplative and restive than his band’s sound. His powerful voice still soars just like always, creating a lovely and uplifting album in the process.

Andy Bell, Flicker, released 11 February. The Ride vocalist and lead guitarist (and former Oasis member as well) came out with a sprawling yet wonderful eighteen-track album full of his trademark brand of shoegaze — melodies that always seem to be on their way somewhere yet never quite arriving, giving the sense of weightless movement — and it’s an excellent listen from start to finish.

Spoon, Lucifer On the Sofa, released 11 February. Spoon albums are always a trip as you’re never quite sure where they’re going to lead you, with Britt Daniels’ off-kilter and twitchy songwriting style. Yet “The Hardest Cut” is one of those tracks that you just want to crank up because it’s just so great!

Urge Overkill, Oui, released 11 February. This was a year of unexpected returns of long-missed bands who’d been mostly doing live shows instead of recording, and UO’s last album had been released eleven years earlier. It’s a welcome return for a loved band from the late 80s-early 90s!

Alt-J, The Dream, released 11 February 2022. An album written and recorded during the height of Covid, it’s the band’s lightest yet most lonesome record yet. Tender in places and pained in others, it’s a tough listen but it’s beautifully crafted.

White Lies, As I Try Not to Fall Apart, released 18 February. I’ve always liked this band’s brand of not-quite-goth, not-quite-synthpop blend of melodies that are equally danceable and contemplative. This is a gem of a record and I really should be listening to it a lot more!

Beach House, Once Twice Melody, released 18 February. Originally released as four EPs over the course of late 2021 into early 2022, this band once again nails it with their own brand of dreampop that’s not just evocative of Cocteau Twins and classic 4AD but transcends that style and makes it their own. Dreamlike and sprawling, it’s a lovely listen from start to finish. One of my top ten albums of the year.

Gang of Youths, angel in realtime., released 25 February. This London-by-way-of-Sydney band has a sort of Springsteen-meets-Future-Islands high energy about it that makes their music powerful without being overly intense. It’s a great album worth checking out.

Deserta, Every Moment, Everything You Need, released 25 February. Their follow-up to Black Aura My Sun (one of my favorites from 2020) is just as dense and sprawling in its echoey and aching dreampop, and well worth the wait. “Lost in the Weight” is an absolutely lovely track.

Johnny Marr, Fever Dreams Pts 1-4, released 25 February. One of many musicians that released an album in bitesize EP parts before gathering them together, Marr continues to write excellent alternative pop that’s equally enjoyable and adventurous.

Tears for Fears, The Tipping Point, released 25 February. The duo’s first album together since 2004, it feels like time has caught up with Smith and Orzabal, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, considering their music has always been about being caught up in situations.

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Stay tuned tomorrow and Thursday for more 2022 music!

Ends in Two: Favorite songs and albums of 2022 (Part I)

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As promised, I’m about to go through my music library to check out what came out this past year and shake the dustbunnies out of my brain to remind myself how many great songs and albums came out in 2022. Like the last couple of pandemic years, the music scene has kind of been all over the place — not necessarily in a bad way, but it’s definitely shaken things up to the point where the unexpected is the norm. Let’s take a listen…

The Smile, “You Will Never Work in Television Again” single, released 5 January. Radiohead members Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood joined up with their drummer friend Tom Skinner from Sons of Kemet as a creative outlet during the pandemic and surprised everyone with a decidedly punkish sound that might be Radiohead at its most frantic. They’d eventually release a full album later in the year.

The Weeknd, Dawn FM, released 7 January. His latest is kind of…weird? Yet really fun and funky? And features in-between smooth-jazz-DJ voice-overs by…Jim Carrey? I’m still not entirely sure what he was trying to say with this record, but it’s a great listen nonetheless. “Sacrifice” in particular is my favorite off the album.

Cat Power, Covers, released 14 January. Chan Marshall has been known to record unique and fascinating covers of other people’s music, and this latest batch is full of gems. Her take on Frank Ocean’s “Bad Religion” got quite a bit of airplay on KEXP at the beginning of the year and it’s a wonderful take on an already quirky track.

Miles Kane, Change the Show, released 21 January. Kane, also known as part of the supergroup The Last Shadow Puppets, takes the classic British soul swing sound and tweaks it with humor and maybe a bit of strangeness and the result is earwormy fun.

Kids On a Crime Spree, Fall in Love Not in Line, released 21 January. I’ve been intrigued by Slumberland Records these days for several reasons: much of their roster is super-local (one or two coming from my own neighborhood!), and much of that same roster often records in a semi lo-fi way, providing a very loose ‘bedroom recording’ feel that reminds me of…well, my own band The Flying Bohemians, actually! Extra props for this particular Oakland band for naming themselves after a newspaper story headline about problem youths in Foster City on the peninsula…which became the inspiration for the movie Over the Edge.

Yard Act, The Overload, released 21 January. This goofy punk band from Leeds provided probably my first favorite track of the year with the title song from their debut album. I kind of see them as what The Fall would sound like if they played twice as fast and Mark E Smith hadn’t been so damn grumpy all the time, but they have a really fun and hilarious charm all their own. The whole album’s well worth checking out.

The Smile, “The Smoke” single, released 27 January. The band followed up with another new single leaning ever so slightly more towards Radiohead but remaining unique to their own style. This one definitely showcases Greenwood’s penchant for increasingly complex riffs and musical phrases and Yorke’s unnatural ability to easily shoehorn vocals within them.

Paul Draper, Cult Leader Tactics, released 28 January. The second solo album from the ex-lead singer of Mansun continues his foray into tension-filled alternative rock, this time featuring friend and Porcupine Tree singer Steven Wilson on the lead single “Omega Man”. Props to Draper for filming this video in the exclusion zone in Chernobyl to really drive the theme of isolation home.

The Beatles, Get Back: The Rooftop Performance, released 28 January. Tying in with the utterly amazing Peter Jackson miniseries, this release finally provides fans with the full rooftop show that ended up being the band’s final live show (of sorts). We got to see it on the (very!) big screen on IMAX and it was so much fun!

Our Lady Peace, Spiritual Machines II, released 28 January. A sequel to an underrated and fascinating record about Ray Kurzweil’s book about artificial intelligence, The Age of Spiritual Machines, this one revisits the predictions he’d made in the book to see what has come to pass and what has not.

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Next Up: February tunage!

Ending in Two

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Yeah, I know…I’ve gone on record multiple times that years ending in two are awesome years in music. And 2022 saw a lot of great releases! But I think it’s me this time out that didn’t do my due diligence and connect as deeply with it all as I should have. It’s not that it didn’t interest me, as a lot of it did. It’s that I didn’t allow myself to resonate with it.

I’ve been using variations of the word ‘resonance’ a lot lately, in two different ways. Musically, it means “the quality in a sound of being deep, full, and reverberating.” Emotionally, it means “the ability to evoke or suggest images, memories, and emotions.” Both are important to me: things that hit me in the heart not just emotionally but creatively.

And I haven’t been letting myself do either of them over the past couple of years. Maybe it’s partly the pandemic’s fault for holding back or blocking so many musicians out there. Maybe it’s partly my own fault for not making a strong enough attempt to make that connection in the first place. Maybe it’s also partly my own fault for focusing on the acquiring (yay for being a discography completist!) and less on the music itself. Maybe it’s that I listen to KEXP so frequently that I don’t give myself enough time to relisten to what I already have in my collection. Maybe it’s that my Day Job doesn’t allow me the ability to listen to my collection while working. Maybe it’s just too many real world distractions. It could be a lot of things.

I think what I’ll be doing in the next couple of weeks is do a monthly overview of 2022 to reconnect myself with this year’s releases and posting them here. There were a lot of great songs and albums out there that I loved but for some reason never completely connected to. And I’d like to see what I might have forgotten. Maybe I’ll reconnect with them this time around.

Let’s start with what has resonated with me: “Golden Air” by Sun’s Signature — the first new music from Elizabeth Fraser in many years. I absolutely adore the EP it’s from and I think that’s a good place to start!

Stay tuned for more!

Mixtape: Untitled I

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What to name a mixtape you truly enjoy, but can’t come up with a decent one? By this time I had Walk in Silence, Listen in Silence, The Last Home Year, Cimmerian Candlelight, and so on…names for themed series. But what about a chaotic mix that was essentially my favorite indie tunes at that point in time?

And so the Untitled series was born. Cheeky, but it worked.

This is a mix of songs I’d heard on Amherst College’s WAMH, WMDK out of Peterborough, recent 120 Minutes episodes, with a sprinkle of deep cuts, records borrowed from Chris, and to top it off, promo singles he and I had “borrowed” from the local radio station that they were obviously never going to play. The original mix features versions taped from the radio or off the TV speaker as well as actual source material.

Like Listen in Silence II, it was a mix primarily made as a catch-all for songs I liked but didn’t necessarily have in my collection. This would explain the strong beginning and the somewhat meandering end…but yet it works and still stands up so many years later. Also like LiS II, it was a mix to be listened to while mowing the cemeteries for my summer DPW job. Since my favorite college radio station was off the air for the season, this was my mix to fill that gap.

[Missing from the Spotify mix due to unavailability: The Feelies’ “Away” (after “Makes No Sense at All”) and Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians’ “Swirling” (after “Charlotte Anne”).]

This Week’s Earworm: Cheekface, “We Need a Bigger Dumpster”

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Thanks to KEXP, this little bit of silliness has been stuck in my head for the last several days. Cheekface comes from Los Angeles but definitely has that same slacker vibe that Pavement had, especially in the “Cut Your Hair” 90s, only much goofier. [Come to think of it, I think it also fits in with some of the late 80s humorous college rock as well, such as The Strawberry Zots, Beat Happening and King Missile. It’s just retro-sounding enough that I definitely would have included it on the mixtapes I made back then. It also helps that the covers to all their releases thus far are hand-drawn in that wonderful did-it-during-study-period style.] It’s not often that a song both perfectly embodies the decidedly Gen-X “we’re fucked but what can we really do anyway” vibe of Covid these last few years and contains a shout-out reminiscent of the Gunshow “this is fine” comic/meme.

I’m yet to listen to the rest of the album, but from what I’ve heard so far, I’m really enjoying. And come to find out, they also recently did a great They Might Be Giants cover!

a simple song

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One of my favorite Sparks songs is “My Baby’s Taking Me Home”, in which said title is the near-entirety of its lyrics, barring a short spoken word passage near the end. The Mael brothers comment on it in The Sparks Brothers documentary, where the dynamics of the song are purely in its construction rather than its lyrics. Because of this, they find it one of their all-time favorite songs to play live.

Back in the 80s and early 90s I wrote a handful of Flying Bohemians songs that were similar in construction, and they were always my favorite to play because of that. One song, “She Sang to Me”, had three lines that were repeated in different ways while Chris and I played its three chords in various ways — fingerpicking, muted, augmented, and so on — until it sounded like a wondrous release of sound.

I don’t often hear that many songs like this, but when I do, quite often they’re my favorites of the band’s entire discography.

Revisiting

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I’ve been thinking about revisiting some discographies lately, mainly the ones of bands I used to listen to obsessively back in my youth. One of the inspirations for this was the reissue of REM’s Chronic Town EP a few weeks ago, their first release on the IRS label.

I’ve always been an early-era fan of the band up to and including 1988’s Green, and it’s been ages since I’ve listened to those first albums other than hearing the occasional single on the radio (usually “The One I Love” or “It’s the End of the World As We Know It”, but occasionally I’ll hear “Superman” as well). Me and my high school friends were big fans of the band and taped each other’s copies of their albums into our own collections. But I haven’t listened to Lifes Rich Pageant in ages, and I used to play that one a ton in my college years.

So how is this different from any other time I obsess over 80s alternative rock? Well, instead of slinking back into the memory banks to relive those times or attempting to work on the Walk in Silence book, this is just…for fun, just like before.

I think part of it is tied into what I was talking about in the previous post, in which I find myself so constantly wrapped up in New Releases every week that few songs are actually sticking in my head. Which leads to the question: how is it that these REM songs (and Smiths songs, and Love and Rockets songs, and so on) stick like Gorilla Glue where the new songs don’t?

I think it’s partly because I’m not allowing those new songs to anchor themselves in the first place. It’s like I’ve forgotten how to do that somehow. The focus has gone from the music to the procurement of it. Which of course feeds into my obsessive tendencies, but doesn’t really move me emotionally, does it?

I’ve been trying to figure out how to change that these last few months. How do I let these songs into my psyche when I’ve forgotten how to do that? What do they have to anchor to? Moments in time, memories in the making? So many of those songs are fleeting, great to listen to but never quite moving me emotionally. Produced too clean, given airplay to a station that smothers us with its constant repetition. Caught in a race with millions of other songs, all trying to enter my subconscious at the same time.

It’s time to revisit how I made them stick in the first place. Allowing the song to percolate and simmer for a while in my mind, to allow it to latch onto a moment in my life. Keeping myself from getting constantly distracted by yet another song that sneaks up behind it. Allow the song to become a part of my own personal and private world rather than chasing after several songs at once as they go by.