Jan. 9, 2025
“Tiger’s Blood” is a glorious bundle of songs that writhe with brains and heart, with love and friendship, and many other complements and opposites. The music is mostly alternative AOR with a distinct country twang. The lyrics were pretty impenetrable to me, at least until I looked them up online (and they’re also on the back of the poster that came with the LP), but they’re mostly songs of hope and happiness.
Tags: Twenty Four, Country, Indie, Rock, Album, Waxahatchee
Jan. 8, 2025
Acopia are a band from Melbourne Australia with that time honoured line up of one girl and two guys. This eponymous album is their second and it’s full of slinky electronic ballads that echo classic 90s trip hop. It’s got that same downtempo downbeat vibe, the sorts of songs that revel in sadness but also the joy of a killer bass line.
This album was actually released in November 2023 but I first heard it in January 2024 after reading a glowing review of it.
Tags: Twenty Four, Album, Electronic, Pop, Australia
Jan. 7, 2025
One album that’s lurking in the periphery of my understated classics series is “Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You” by Big Thief. “Bright Future” is the latest solo album by Big Thief singer-songwriter Adrianne Lenker and it is just as good. Intimate and intricate, it draws the listener in as Adrianne sings live with a very small band. At times you can hear breaths drawn and the sound feels like a small space that you are cocooned in: this could be sound engineering (spatial audio would have us believe anything is possible) but it’s most likely equipment set up intelligently in a cosy studio.
Tags: Twenty Four, Album, Indie, Rock, Country, Big Thief, Adrianne Lenker
Jan. 6, 2025
It’s interesting that an album sung entirely in Italian ended up being one of my favourites of the year, but perhaps not surprising given well written and arranged these songs are. They’re just the right side of electro-pop but also with an air of sophistication.
I can’t speak Italian but I do speak some romance languages, so I can sort of guess what the titles might mean. “La Notte” is “The Night”, “Il Bucchi Neri” is “The Black Holes” (I’d thought it was the black mouths but I guess I was close!
Tags: Twenty Four, Album, Italy, Il Quadro Di Troisi, Electronic
Jan. 5, 2025
What do you think of when you think of the colour blue? The sea? Perhaps the sky? Maybe it makes you think of blue stones like sapphires, or flowers such as forget-me-nots? Maybe the colour blue is the glow of a phone screen on someone’s face (maybe yours) in the dark? Blue gathers at the edges of the harsh white LED light that has come to dominate our night time existence.
Tags: Twenty Four, Music, Total Blue, Electronic, Jazz, Ambient
Jan. 4, 2025
I don’t know very much about MGMT these days. I haven’t read any interviews about their albums. The video to the single “Nothing to Declare” was brought to my attention by the YouTube channel Justin Hawkins Rides Again. In it he points out how melodically interesting the song is. To be honest I was more than a little bit in love with the video.
After that I added the album to my library and heard a few more singles in the run up to the release of the album, including “Bubblegum Dog” and “Mother Nature”.
Tags: Twenty Four, MGMT, Rock, Indie
Jan. 3, 2025
Nonetheless is the fifteenth album by the Pet Shop Boys. As seems to be a common theme with this top 10 so far, it’s an album that initially underwhelmed me. Well, perhaps “underwhelmed” is a little unfair, it was more that it didn’t seem to have much to it to distinguish it from their previous albums, and there have been some palpable duds in the previous fourteen.
Nonetheless, this album is definitely a grower.
Tags: Twenty Four, Pet Shop Boys, Pop, Dance
Jan. 2, 2025
The first time I listened to this album, I was still off work sick with Covid, but well enough to go out for a walk on what was too hot a day to stay inside the house. I remember it well, recovering from illness does tend to make these things more vivid, but more because I thought it was brilliant, but all out of order. I was, of course, completely wrong.
Tags: Twenty Four, Cassandra Jenkins, Female Vocalist, Indie, Rock
Jan. 1, 2025
Yard Act are a post-punk band from Leeds. “Where’s My Utopia?” is their second album. I first encountered Yard Act in a review of this album, which sent me to look at the excellent video to their non-album single “The Trenchcoat Museum”. I enjoyed the metatextual references both in the video and the song, so I eagerly added “Where’s My Utopia?” to my library.
However, the album took a while to win me over.
Tags: Twenty Four, Albums, Indie, Postmodern, Yard Act
Oct. 26, 2024
A nice feature I added to this blog in its recent update was a tags page. With the help of this very useful discourse thread and some additional CSS tweaks, the resulting page is something that I am very happy with. It lists all of the tags that apply to any post, along with the number of posts with that tag, in alphabetical order. It’s mostly intended as a guide for you the reader, to help you see whether your preoccupations match my own.
Tags: Blogging, Twenty Four, Orphans, Series, Meta
Aug. 6, 2024
A hardback book called “The Satsuma Complex” is all that remains of a mysterious young lady that young lawyer Gary is chatting up in the pub one night. It’s a book that everyone reckons is “a bit sh*t”. But Gary’s moping about after the Satsuma lady doing a runner while he was in the loo will have to be put on hold when his friend turns up dead.
I really enjoyed this book.
Tags: Books, Twenty Four, Bob Mortimer, Detective Story, Comedy
Aug. 5, 2024
Welcome to the new look for my blog. I’ve had my eye on a more minimal look for a while now. Whether this new look is successful or not depends on how often I write new posts. To that end, this theme also supports a separate (or almost separate) stream of photos. Once I’ve got back in to the habit of putting photos up, that should be a nice additional stream of content.
Tags: Blogging, Twenty Four, Meta, Writing