So today my random album script picked out “Bright Lights” by Ellie Goulding, an album I wasn’t sure I’ve ever listened to. I looked in my music library and there it was! As a result this is not so much an album revisit as an album _visit. Anyway, this album was released in 2010 and did quite well. In fact, “Bright Lights” is a reissue of an album that was originally released as “Lights” (February 2010).

This is one of my more played Fabric mix CDs so I decided to go for it when my random prompter plumped for this earlier today. One constraint of these posts was to write it in roughly the amount of time it takes to listen to it. You’d think that for a mix CD that would be ok. After all, this mix is a full CD and 74 minutes long.

I’ve managed to extract my music library, including all the albums I’ve added to streaming, as a CSV file and write a routine in R to select an album at random. The plan is to write about that album for the blog in roughly the time that it takes to listen to that album all the way through. I already did this yesterday for Goldfrapp’s Black Cherry. But I have to level with you.

This is the first in an unplanned series of album revisits, I will write a post explaining the process soon. “Black Cherry” is the second album by Goldfrapp, released in 2003. I bought the lead single Train while I lived in York and also the single of the title track because by then I’d discovered M83 and they’d done a remix of it. “Black Cherry” finds the band faced with following their successful and chilled out debut album “Felt Mountain”, which back in 2000 had sounded notably weird.

Went with my friend Nick to see The Orb at Concord 2 last night. The last time I’d seen the Orb was back in 2004, at the start of their relatively dry spell. That night, they’d been a bit lacklustre despite playing (some of) the hits and a relatively decent album in “Bicycles and Tricycles”. I left feeling that I’d seen the past rather than the future, something that I wouldn’t glimpse again in their records until 2015.

Lifeforms is the 1994 album from the Future Sound of London. A double album (just), it also features the talents of Robert Fripp, Ozric Tentacles, Talvin Singh, Toni Halliday, and Liz Frazer. It reached number 6 on the UK album chart and went silver. I have wanted to write about the Lifeforms album for a long time. In 2012, I even tried learning how to tell the tracks apart from one another.

At the new year, thoughts and spare time for writing point me toward writing some new posts for my understated classics series. Expect some new ones soon. I also reflected on my previous choices and thought a bit about how my music tastes have changed recently. Some of this has to do with streaming and the frustrations I wrote about in my last post. Some of it is just down to getting older: I have less time to listen to new music, and much of the ’new’ stuff I listen to is me investigating the stuff I missed first time around.

How hard is it to just listen to music these days? Spotify has crammed in all sorts of crap in to the app lately. Lyric videos, those weird interactive art things that are turned on by default, podcasts (so many podcasts), Netflix tie-ins, and audiobooks. It wants to be the app that opens when you plug in your headphones (not that we’ll be doing that for much longer the way things are going).

Today I listened to ‘Cloudbusting’ by Kate Bush for the first time in a while. What a gloriously strange song it is. Best of all, it’s one of those songs that obscures what it is really about. It’s not a song about a change in the weather, but about Wilhelm Reich, the orgone accumulator, fluorescent yo-yos, and a son (rather than a sun) coming out. ‘Cloudbusting’ is from ‘Hounds of Love’, Kate’s ‘comeback’ album following the commercial failure of ‘The Dreaming’, an album I wrote about in my understated classics series.

I don’t know about you, but lately I’ve been in need of some music that: Blots out the outside world Helps me to concentrate on my work Makes me feel a bit less anxious about the state of the world Well, allow me to submit the compilation Trance Nation for your consideration as an understated classic. But Matt I’ve heard trance music, I hear you say, and it’s one of the least understated forms of music possible.

I’ve listened to music in slightly different ways to normal in the last nine months, but it’s still been a decent year for music. When I checked out my Spotify Unwrapped and my Last.fm reports, I had listened to more 2020 music than I thought. December Album of the month had to be “We Will Always Love You” by the Avalanches. One of only three albums that I bought physical copies of this year, it combines my favourite musical genres and has a novel take on the spacey-sounding album: like something beamed into space about how great humans are.

Over the course of a week on holiday, I started reading many interesting articles. In lockdown there isn’t much to do but read articles, but I still find myself not that good at finishing them. My phone has lots of tabs open and has become a Rolodex of shame. This post is to confess my sins. I’m trying to re-familiarise myself with Python. As with all modern software development, Python now seems atomised and hyper-complicated.

Doves are a band from Manchester who traded dance music for rock yet never left their former genre behind. Starting out as Sub Sub, they scored a worldwide hit in 1993 with “Ain’t No Love (Ain’t No Use)”: a timeless dance tune that immediately owns whatever room it plays in. However, subsequent releases by Sub Sub did not catch on and people started to think of the band as a one-hit wonder.

I haven’t written one of my monthly album digests for over a year. The reasons mostly boil down to a lack of time and motivation but other factors include the changing way in which I listen to music. I bought more albums on vinyl and only a small proportion of those were recently released music. Meanwhile, the attractions of Spotify’s release radar proved too great to resist: it is a very convenient way to consume new music.

10. Grails “Chalice Hymnal” Some albums are good because a band continues making the music that you love. Some albums are good because a band takes their ideas a step or two further than before. Chalice Hymnal is that rare album that does both of these things. The references to past albums include the track Deeper Politics and Deep Snow II, and, as per albums past, these tracks evolve slowly out of languid guitar hooks and smoky atmospherics.

10. Rolling Blackouts CF “Julie’s Place” Sometimes you just want a simple pop song about going out somewhere. I enjoyed the Rolling Blackouts’ EP “The French Press”. It contains many catchy tunes as I noted in my review. “Julie’s Place” is the best, speaking of a need to be somewhere or a promise that you will go there. Given that I often listen to music between places, it’s nice to have a song or two like that on my playlist.

Bjork Utopia “Utopia” is Björk’s ninth album. It’s a happier album compared to the emotional wreckage of “Vulnicura”. But while “Vulnicura” was a compelling if uncomfortable listen, “Utopia” is more comfortable and, unfortunately, not that compelling. This is old ground retrodden with few glimmers of past glories. The brevity, succinctness and sharpness are all gone. Even on the best songs (the first three), there is very little strength in the lyrics.

00110100 01010100 “0181” This is a reissue of a Four Tet rarity from 2013 that has recently surfaced on Spotify under an alias1. “0181” collects a series of short experimental pieces from throughout his career, though I’m not enough of a nerd to know whether they are in any particular order. Last month’s ‘proper’ Four Tet album “New Energy” has a lot more bounce to it, but “0181” nevertheless has some interesting moments that raises it above mere curiosity.

In a perfect confluence of last month’s album digest, here’s an excellent Four Tet remix of Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s “I Will Make Room For You” from her album “The Kid”. I’ve put it into a playlist with “Lush” from Four Tet’s “New Energy” album and the original version of “I Will Make Room For You.” Enjoy!

Mary Epworth “Elytral” This album came to my attention because its lead single “Me Swimming” appeared on my Discover Weekly playlist. I’d never heard of Mary before but this album was one of those nice discoveries that one sometimes makes when one tries to broaden what one listens to. The aforementioned “Me Swimming” is probably the best track, a beautiful slice of summery experimental pop layered over a beat that you can imagine as the kicks of a swimmer compared to the swirling lyric that imitates the pull of the strokes through the water.

Perhaps in today’s modern age of streaming and such, The Coral would be a bigger band and may have survived their eventual burnout. Their work ethic was evident from the start, as rumours swirled in the NME about a fantastic new band from Liverpool who were going to blow everybody’s socks off. I went to see them live in Bristol after they’d released three EPs and they were incredible. Their sound, a bit like the movie “Holy Mountain” set to pop music, imagined a Merseybeat channelled from an alternative universe in which Lennon and McCartney took their acid in the Mojave desert rather than in the English suburbs.

Note: Recent months have been very busy, so this album digest combines a review of the new album by The National with a couple of reviews left over from earlier in the year. I’ve written a few more album reviews in the past months but I’m so far behind (February and March have already been published on a considerable lag) that I’m just going to pepper forthcoming digests with additional reviews of older albums.

I came late to Orbital’s work. I knew of them through a few remixes and because as a mad Orb fan, they could not have avoided my notice could they? Apart from that, one of my college friends tried to get me into “In Sides” just after its release in 1996. The same friend got me into “Second Toughest In The Infants” by Underworld. I cannot now understand the reason, but “In Sides” just left me cold.

Blanck Mass World Eater This album is pretty extreme. It’s not for everyone and even for the people who can handle it, it’s not for all the time. This album is a soul crushing experience at points but there are also points of light. Perhaps this makes “World Eater” more reflective of life as a whole than any other of this month’s albums. On balance it’s probably less crushing than the last Blanck Mass album “Dumb Flesh”, which I reviewed back in June 2015.

Grails Chalice Hymnal Some albums are good because a band continues making the music that you love. Some albums are good because a band takes their ideas a step or two further than before. Chalice Hymnalis that rare album that does both of these things. The references to past albums include the track Deeper Politics and Deep Snow II, and, as per albums past, these tracks evolve slowly out of languid guitar hooks and smoky atmospherics.

Mike Oldfield Return to Ommadawn With Return to Ommadawn, Mike Oldfield revisits his third album Ommadawn. He has past form for this, having revisited his masterwork Tubular Bells twice (the third revisit and fourth instalment Tubular Bells 4 is due next year). I wrote about Tubular Bells II for my understated classics series. Of course Mike has in fact made many more than three Tubular Bells albums1, and this is not a first “return” to Ommadawn.

The next instalment in my understated classics series is "Stray" by Aztec Camera. Released in 1990, it features two hit singles and the cover is my favourite colour: green. My angle for writing about “Stray” was that it was an album that I "caught" from my parents. I soon realised that I wrote about some of those already, for example “The Circle and the Square" by Red Box. Besides, I’m not sure that my parents liked this album that much.

This month’s album digest features albums by Wilco, M.I.A., Local Natives, and a collaboration between Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and Suzanne Ciani. Wilco Schmilco Schmilco is the tenth studio album by Wilco, which regular readers will know are one of my favourite bands. There’s no need to repeat that anecdote about why this blog has the name that it does. Meanwhile, this album follows on from last year’s Star Wars and is probably the third Wilco album to have a jokey meta- kind of title.

Because I couldn’t find any albums coming out this month that I wanted to review for the album digest, I decided to let Spotify pick the albums to listen to. I listened to my algorithmically chosen Discover Weekly playlist one week and selected albums based on the songs that I liked the most. The album also had to be released in 2016. The selections are ones that got away. I’ve done this before.

We went to see Prom 47, an afternoon prom at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The bill included a brand new work by Piers Hellawell, along with a Cello concerto by Haydn and a symphony by Tchaikovsky. These were all performed by the Ulster Orchestra. The conductor was Rafael Payare. The tickets were an affordable £17 each which isn’t bad at all given that we were sat in the second row of the circle.

Album Digest July 2016 consists of a bumper five albums, mainly because I couldn’t work out which one to drop. I think they’re all pretty good though it’s great to hear new music from The Avalanches after all this time. Bat For Lashes “The Bride” For her fourth album as Bat For Lashes, Natasha Khan applies her considerable songwriting skills to a concept album. She sings from the perspective of a bride whose husband dies on his way to their wedding.

I give the impression of planning these posts but to be honest I came across an article about Maxwell a few weeks ago and fondly remembered my cassette copy of this album. The joy of Spotify is that it’s easy to dig up old favourites. The recent warm weather makes for a good opportunity to enjoy the sultry embrace of “Embrya” once more. “Gestation: Mythos” burbles along for two and a half minutes, overlaying spoken word samples, string phrases and weird underwater noises, before the bass line of “Everwanting: To Want You To Want” brings things to life.

Album Digest June 2016 is a poppy batch of albums. We have the return of my long-time favourites Roxette and the heroes of my South American tour Tegan & Sara. There’s some dance music in the form of Flume’s album “Skin”: an Australian presence ahead of the new Avalanches album next month. Finally there is the first of two new albums by Islands - both were released back in May but one gets reviewed this month and the other next month.

Album Digest May 2016 features the work of four bands or artists that I have reviewed in previous album digests. I also own (or will own) all of these albums on vinyl, so it’s handy that I’ve recently bought myself a record player! Radiohead “A Moon Shaped Pool” Radiohead released “A Moon Shaped Pool” online about three weeks ago and a physical version hits the shops later in June. As with all of their recent albums, it is (mostly) a slow burner that rewards multiple listens.

This month’s album digest is a mixture of comparisons. First we compare the fortunes of old hands Underworld to even older hands the Pet Shop Boys. After that I’ve found two dance albums, one that I liked and one that I didn’t. I find it quite hard to write about dance music and so the comparison is quite useful. Sometimes it helps to work out why you like one thing and not another.

The Orb return with a new EP on the Kompakt label called “Alpine”. “Alpine” is split in to three tracks “Morning”, “Evening” and “Dawn”. The third of these was included on the 2016 edition of Kompakt’s annual “Pop Ambient” compilation, a gently drifting track with plenty of bells and yodels. A diversion from the sounds of Moonbuilding 2703 AD (and its presumably ongoing remixed companion EPs), but it sat nicely with the other tracks.

I thought I’d add three of my favourite David Bowie albums to my review of Blackstar to a form an album digest tribute. Also among my favourites but not included here is “Outside”, which will be included in the understated classics (currently it’s number 66) at some point. I thought about bumping “Outside” up the running order but I’d like to be objective about it when its turn comes. Station To Station “It’s not the side effects of the cocaine / I’m thinking it must be love” sings Bowie on the title track of his tenth studio album “Station To Station”, released in 1976.

Given that I gave up on writing album digests for a bit this year, I thought I would at least do a proper top ten list of my favourite albums. There are quite a few albums that I did not have room for and I might try to revisit those later. In the mean time, let’s crack on. (To save time, I have in some instances pasted my original review from the appropriate album digest.

Last week Underworld reissued their excellent second album “Second Toughest In The Infants” in various formats including a four disc super deluxe edition. I wrote about this album in my understated classics series and I want to share some thoughts on the reissue. I love this album so I was excited to hear the remaster and the additional material. I can’t comment on the physical version of the release as I can’t afford it at the moment.

As it is Halloween, I’m writing about a spooky understated classic. Liars’ second album “They Were Wrong, So We Drowned” is a concept album about witches. It was the first of their albums that I owned having heard their name mentioned among those in the New York Post-punk revival scene at the start of the 00s. I imagine that to most ears a first listen to “They Were Wrong, So We Drowned” sounds dreadful.

It’s difficult to write honestly about your feelings. It’s difficult to write about your feelings consistently, for a living on a regular basis. It’s difficult to write about your feelings when the world constantly intrudes with inanity, insanity and hatred. It’s difficult to write under those conditions without seeming frayed, without coming loose at the edges. “Get To Heaven”, the third album by Everything Everything, was forged under these stresses and pressures.

This little masterpiece was released in 1991. I got my copy on cassette for Christmas that year, but by May in 1992 they’d already “retired” and split up. The KLF were a band in the right place at the right time with the right idea. Taking advantage of synthesizers and the idea of fusing rock and pop music with the emerging sound of house music, they laid the ground for many of the most successful electronic acts that followed them.

My previous post about Apple Music was more a response to how it was presented at the WWDC Keynote rather than to the idea of Apple Music itself. I should have known better than to use that clickbait title. I knew I wasn’t writing about the product, more the flatness of its introduction (despite the names on show). After a few days of living with it I thought I’d write about it and Spotify, so that it’s not just my snarky comments about the keynote that are on record here.

To reboot this series, Album Digest June 2015 features five fantastic albums from Hot Chip, Jamie xx, Blanck Mass, Holly Herndon, and The Orb. I could pick loads more as I’ve listened to a lot of albums since February but I decided to focus on the more electronic material. This means that I have no excuses for not continuing next month with a rockier theme. Hot Chip “Why Make Sense?” Hot Chip seem to be settling in to a pattern with their album releases, alternating between messy experimental affairs and then a state of the art correction.

The thirtieth understated classic is by a band named after a fish. There isn’t a great deal for me to say about “Our Aim Is To Satisfy”1 apart from the usual insistence that it is quite good. There’s no overarching theme to write about, and no deep personal story attached. It was bound to happen eventually. “Our Aim Is To Satisfy” is one of those albums spawned in the late nineties and early naughties at the height of the Electronica boom: dance music that you didn’t necessarily have to dance to.

Ministry of Sound boss Lohan Presencer does the cry baby act in today’s Guardian, complaining that Spotify’s freemium model doesn’t allow him to bathe in a Scrooge McDuck style swimming pool of golden coins any more. The cat is out of the bag for streaming music now, and no matter how much music companies cry foul they can’t stop Spotify and their ilk, and there wouldn’t be pots of gold waiting for them even if they could.

Aphex Twin “Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments Pt2 EP” Aphex Twin follows SYRO (reviewed in Album Digest September 2014 here) with this 27 minute EP of music that, if we take the title literally, features computers playing acoustic musical instruments. It’s a very different sound to SYRO and sounds acoustic for the most part. It’s an important experiment about the role of the musician, one that is already blurred in the creation of electronic music.

I listened to Let It Come Down by Spiritualized for the first time during a difficult time in my life. I think this will always affect my feelings towards it. For me it’s a great big comfort blanket of a record. Coming after one of the all-time best break-up albums (in an artistic sense) in “Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space” perhaps it’s not that much of a surprise.

Album Digest January 2015 rounds up a few albums from the tail end of 2014 that I didn’t get much time to write about. The only one of these six to be released this month is the excellent “No Cities To Love” by Sleater-Kinney. Sleater-Kinney “No Cities To Love” I had heard of Sleater-Kinney before their boxed set “Start Together” was released in 2014. I was quite impressed that they curated their own Spotify playlist with the contents of the box.

One of the first lines of “The House That Guilt Built”, the soft cricket-laden lament that opens The Meadowlands by The Wrens, is “I’m nowhere near where I thought I’d be”. The last line of the whole album is “this is not what you had planned”. These bookending lines set the tone for this shimmering, ramshackle masterpiece - a fatigue and careworn pride in failing to meet impossible standards writ large over its first and last eighty or so seconds.

Album Digest September 2014 contains four amazing albums, including the long-awaited return from the Aphex Twin, and an album from Cymbals Eat Guitars released about a week after I wondered what had happened to them. Spooky. Rounding out the selection this month are a cool punky-disco album by The Juan Maclean and a truly remarkable offering by Vessel. Aphex Twin SYRO SYRO is the sixth album by Aphex Twin and his first official Aphex Twin release since Drukqs in 2001.

The album digest returns with five albums by four artists. Karl Hyde & Brian Eno Someday World & HIGH-LIFE Lone Reality Testing FKA twigs LP1 Mogwai Come On Die Young: Appendix Karl Hyde & Brian Eno Someday World & HIGH-LIFE I’m a big fan of both Karl Hyde’s work with Underworld and of Brian Eno’s stuff so Someday World seemed like a dream collaboration to me when it was released last May.

I have already given some of the personal background to why I love this album and now it’s time to give a bit of love to the music itself so I’ll stick to giving a track by track account of “A Ghost Is Born”. If you are familiar with Wilco’s first few albums, you’ll know that A Ghost Is Born is on the line of best fit through Being There, Summerteeth, and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

I recently spruced up a post I wrote four years ago about Biosphere’s wonderful album Substrata. I added the following footnote about the difference between voice samples and found sound: I suppose I am distinguishing between found sound and vocal samples here. Perhaps there is very little difference, or that one is the other? When is a vocal snippet something more than found sound? Is it the fact that one has meaning?

Or at least its subversive soundtrack… I listened to The Orb’s amazing live album “Live ’93” the other day (after discovering the insipid “History Of The Future” collection on Spotify) and I was amazed at how countercultural and subversive it was. I was listening to this stuff at the age of 14 and now that I’m old enough to be a parent, that makes me a bit uncomfortable. Actually it does nothing of the sort, because it’s frigging awesome.

I’ll tell you about punk rock: punk rock is a word used by dilettantes and ah… and ah… heartless manipulators about music that takes up the energies and the bodies and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds of young men who give what they have to it and give everything they have to it and it’s a… it’s a term that’s based on contempt, it’s a term that’s based on fashion, style, elitism, satanism and everything that’s rotten about rock ’n’ roll.

Watter are a “supergroup” composed from various members of Grails, Slint, and other bands. I did not know anything about Hundred Waters before this month: “The Moon Rang Like A Bell” is their second album. In fact second albums by bands I know nothing about are a something of theme because “Sunbathing Animal” is Parquet Courts’ sophomore effort and I don’t know anything about them either. Meanwhile, I’ve meant to write about “The Four Seasons Recomposed” since April.

This month was strange. I didn’t listen to much new music and after last month’s bumper digest there’s probably a reason for that. Not to mention that Spotify gives you more reasons to look backwards than forwards. Nevertheless, this brief post features new albums by Little Dragon and Coldplay, along with the mini-album collaboration between Röyskopp and Robyn. Little Dragon “Nabuma Rubberband” I discovered Little Dragon, like most people, I imagine, via Gorillaz’ “Plastic Beach” album.

I’m back in the UK so it’s back to posts about albums each month. This one is a bit different because I didn’t listen to very much new stuff while I was away so not all of the albums are up to date. I had to write about the new album by Liars though because it’s awesome and I couldn’t wait to discuss it! Here’s the list of albums: Tegan and Sarah Heartthrob Fanfarlo Let’s Go Extinct Liars Mess London Grammar If You Wait Tegan and Sarah Heartthrob I would argue, as I have throughout my sequence of understated classics posts, that a great album is one that changes you as a person.

Four great albums this month for the last album digest in a while. CHVRCHES “The Bones Of What You Believe” I first got into CHVRCHES on Record Store Day, one of my purchases was an Irn Bru coloured 12" of the Recover EP that, according to eBay, tripled in value over night. Judging by this, their full debut, my see-through orange slab of happiness may hold its value, because it’s clear that CHVRCHES should be around for the long haul.

A nice diverse selection of albums this month: Arctic Monkeys “AM” BT “A Song Across Wires” Goldfrapp “Tales of Us” Janelle Monáe “Electric Lady” Arctic Monkeys “AM” This whole review is basically me catching up with the rest of the world and realising that the Arctic Monkeys are ace. To be fair, I did notice how awesome they were at the opening ceremony of the Olympics last year, and I have liked the odd one or two of their singles, but up until now I haven’t really wanted to listen to any of their albums.

The single biggest fact of life is that you are always going to be alone, you just might not realise it. Listening to The Cardigans’ excellent 2003 “Long Gone Before Daylight” will help you see that all our relationships are essentially screwed – but at least it sounds great while it does so. “Long Gone Before Daylight” (“Long Gone Before Daylight”) plays the role of “The Empire Strikes Back” in a trilogy of great albums that The Cardigans released between 1999 (the arguably better and slightly happier “Gran Turismo”) and 2006 (the unarguably inferior and definitely happier “Super Extra Gravity”).

For reasons that will become apparent, there will be a short period soon where I will not be writing album digests. Until then, I’m clearing a backlog of some albums that I’ve been listening to but haven’t had enough time or motivation to write about. Only one of this month’s albums was released this month, something that’s not that uncommon at this time of the year as it is not the best time to release things.

Another four albums for you this month. Sometimes the problem is not finding albums to listen to but actually finding time to listen to them! Often it is not because I don’t have time but because I have already found some great albums this month and I am busy listening to those instead. As a result, a couple of these albums are ones that I have only listened to for a week or so, but they are interesting enough to write about.

Just two albums this month as I am still enjoying last month’s albums so much (and I spent loads of time getting reacquainted with Boards Of Canada at the start of the month). I listened to a few more albums but not often enough to write loads about them so there is an “honourable mention” section at the end of the post that briefly discusses a few more albums. Without further ado, the two albums are:

I have written a lot in these posts about how music gets indelibly tied up with places, events and feelings. For me this album by Fanfarlo is tied up with all three of these. It makes me happy and sad at the same time in memory of great times that are now gone but are fondly remembered. I am aware that this is the youngest album on the list so far and so it might be a bit early to endow classic status upon it, but “Reservoir” is a fine album and to my ears it stands up really well.

Lilacs & Champagne Danish & Blue You might remember that last year I reviewed the first Lilacs & Champagne album and I liked it a lot. This album sees them back with more of the same: taking the approach that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. There are very few changes to the formula apart from the fact that the spoken word samples are not quite as good this time and there’s a bit more Grails-like guitar solo action.

It was quite hard to choose an 808 State album for the understated classics series for two reasons. The first is that I was introduced to 808 State quite late through a friend’s sister’s cassette copy of The Shamen’s En-Tact (the original version recorded from vinyl that had a thirteen minute version of “Evil Is Eden”) that also had – to fill out the C90 – the full length sweary version of “What Time Is Love?

Some great albums this month! The Flaming Lips The Terror Wire Change Becomes Us James Blake Overgrown The Knife Shaking The Habitual The Flaming Lips The Terror How you view The Terror pretty much depends on how much you have kept up with The Flips output since their last official album, the clanking double behemoth in Merkin packaging that was Embryonic. The irony being that I used Embryonic to deal with a break-up and The Terror is pretty much about… a break-up.

Just the David Bowie album this month as it’s pretty much the only new music that I’ve listened to. I must admit that I had no idea what to expect of “The Next Day”. It comes almost exactly ten years after “Reality”, an album that I have never really got into despite it having some pretty decent fun tracks like “New Killer Star” and a nice cover of “Pablo Picasso” that has never sent me in search of Jonathan Richman’s original.

“Walking With Thee” is the second album by Liverpool band Clinic. It was released in 2002, which seems like an age ago now. Even longer ago they released the single “The Return of Evil Bill”, which was got me interested in them in the first place. I recently got back into “Walking With Thee” when I picked “Vulture” in my A-Z of Animals playlist last month. I’d forgotten just how great a song it is, both musically and lyrically.

I have had a lot of ideas for posts swirling around in my head in recent days. This is because I have actually done quite a lot of cool things in that time, and because I have hung out with some great people who make me think, and because I always have a whole load of things bouncing around in there anyway - space junk of the mind. I was thinking about how to put together these thoughts I have been having about art and about stories and yes, about love too.

Most Februaries are quite quiet when it comes to albums (though this was not the case back in 2011) and although only the Foals album is a major release, I was quite surprised to find myself with four decent albums to write about. They are: Darkstar “News From Nowhere” Foals “Holy Fire” Daniel Hope “Spheres” Apparat “Krieg und Frieden (Music For Theatre)” Darkstar “News From Nowhere” I don’t need to give too much biographical background for the Darkstar album as I don’t know too much about who the are.

Only one of this month three albums was actually released this month. Nelly Furtado’s Mi plan was actually released over three years ago - I only discovered it last year when I wrote the September album digest following the release of “The Spirit Indestructible”, or it might have been when I wrote about “Folklore” at around the same time. Anyway, I guess these are albums that I bought with my Christmas gift vouchers!

Three albums (one very Christmassey one!) and an EP this month. Tracey Thorn “Tinsel and Lights” Woob “Have Landed” Tim Hecker and Daniel Lopatin “Instrumental Tourist” Burial “Truant / Rough Sleeper Tracey Thorn “Tinsel and Lights” “Tinsel and Lights” is that rarest of records, a Christmas record that is perfectly suited to the season and is not in any way overbearing or irritating. Most albums that are Christmas themed are usually centred on lots of covers that are taken from a small subset of well worn classics.

Pretty much a sliding scale between songs and electronic wibble on this month’s albums and a particularly damp, chilly feeling to proceedings too. Bat For Lashes “The Haunted Man” Ital “Hive Mind” and “Dream On” Björk “Bastards” Brian Eno “Lux” Bat For Lashes “The Haunted Man” When it comes to Bat For Lashes, I prefer her first album “Fur And Gold” to her second “Two Suns” because when I listen to the latter I don’t feel connected to any of the songs.

The second Woob album (AKA “Woob 4495”) is probably the greatest ambient album ever made and is certainly the best one you have never heard of. Originally released in 1995 on the em:t label it is also a rare record. I don’t have an actual copy but I have seen one! I downloaded it off the internet and even that is quite difficult to do. My friend is an avid collector of all the em:t releases and it is easy to see why: all the albums are titled in a specific way that is very appealing to people who like to collect things and they also have very striking nature photography on the covers.

It has been a strange month and I found that I didn’t listen to a lot of new music. I have been a bit down and when that’s the case I tend to take refuge in music that I know well, stuff that cheers me up. I have listened to last month’s fave a lot, Nelly Furtado’s “The Spirit Indestructible”. I said a lot of nice things about it but it probably didn’t come over in my writing just how much I really liked it.

I had a bit more time to listen to this month’s albums because I was on holiday for two weeks. I didn’t manage to write about them while on holiday though! In fact I bought and listened to a few more, but I will save them for next month. The albums I will discuss now (in order bought) are: Four Tet “Pink” The xx “Coexist” Nelly Furtado “The Spirit Indestructible” Grizzly Bear “Shields” It’s quite a diverse collection and, Four Tet apart, quite song based.

It’s rather spooky but shortly after deciding to write about Nelly Furtado’s “Folklore” as the next understated classic, I found out that she has a new album out this week. As a result, I have been listening to a lot of her music while writing this post, and I’ve been enjoying it too. As always with these choices of mine, “Folklore” is a record that I can link to particular events and emotions in my life and so I guess my perception of it is coloured by that.

Album Digest August 2012 is also from the stack of albums that I mentioned last month. I chose this selection (along with the Passion Pit album) because the colours looked good together in the mosaic of covers that I make each month. Last month’s digest was about the right amount of detail so this will be another briefer digest. These are all good albums but not ones that will change your life, they’ll just happily sit alongside it.

“I see the people working and see it working for them.” (Sat In Your Lap) The Dreaming by Kate Bush is a strange 1982 album that many believed had destroyed her career. Two weeks before her first ever performance of “Running Up That Hill”, the NME had written an editorial asking whether she had burnt herself out completely. Obviously “Running Up That Hill” (recently used to great effect in the Olympic Closing Ceremony) and the parent album “The Hounds Of Love” that followed showed that she had plenty more up her sleeve.

Just a short album digest this month. I bought a stack of CDs and am parcelling them out over the next few months (together with important additional releases as they crop up). This is in the hope that I can write more considered pieces about each one. This month I’ve grouped together albums with monochrome covers and a BT album from June that I found out about recently. These albums are not just linked by their artwork, they also form a cohesive whole.

Three fantastic albums for Album Digest June 2012: Saint Etienne Words and Music by Saint Etienne Liars WIXIW Hot Chip In Our Heads This month is a curious selection in that the albums are all by bands that I already own a few records by. When there is so much other directly related material that you can write about, it makes focussing on the album in hand quite difficult. I am always thinking up rankings and comparisons.

This arrived on Monday and I thought I would give it a post of its own because at over 3 hours of music, I am unlikely to do more than dip into it before writing the album digest next week. It is a far bigger and more enjoyable artefact than I thought it was going to be, so it probably deserves special attention for that reason too. CAN are a German (“Krautrock”) band that I got into about four years ago after my interest in the genre was sparked by the “Neu!

Say what? We’re allowing compilations now? Yes. Why not? A good mix is as much an artistic statement as a full-blown single artist album. It takes a lot of skill to get from A to B and keep everything on the boil in between. This Fabric mix by The Amalgamation Of Soundz is one of my favourites because it is a downtempo (but, crucially, not too downtempo) compilation delivered with flair and using what I consider to be unconventional sources (soundtracks, tribute albums, hip-hop) to do it.

Four albums for Album Digest May 2012: Jack White Blunderbuss One Little Plane Into The Trees Beach House Bloom Oxia Tides Of Mind The April album digest was rather short on songs, so this month I decided to look for albums that were more based around songs not tracks. Electronic music is relatively easy to write about: the music is often simple (but not always), there are recognisable structures and genres (but not always), and there are conventions that are adhered to (but not always).

A mostly instrumental month with a comeback from Orbital, an excellent remix collection from Battles, an amazing movie documenting a live performance by the Chemical Brothers and Austin Wintory’s soundtrack to the game Journey. Orbital Wonky Battles Dross Glop The Chemical Brothers Don’t Think Austin Wintory Journey (Original Soundtrack) Orbital Wonky I am quite keen on Orbital, though perhaps not as keen as I am on the similarly named Orb. I think I have got all the Orbital albums, mostly bought on eBay after the fact.

Sit back and let it happen, / Let us take your time away. Nearly God is Tricky’s second album, which was released under a different name either because Island rejected it as the follow-up to Maxinequaye or because it came too quickly after and Tricky just wanted it released. I had this album before Maxinequaye because back then it wasn’t as easy to go back and catch up with albums that you had missed as it is now.

Five albums for Album Digest March 2012 Fanfarlo Rooms Filled With Light The Shins Port Of Morrow Grails Deep Politics New Build Yesterday Was Lived And Lost Scuba Personality A nice collection of albums this month - things usually pick up in March after a slow period after Christmas. One of these is a “catch-up” (the album by Grails) but apart from that one, everything else was released in the last five weeks or so… I should probably have included the album by Racehorses that I bought on my birthday but I will have to leave that for next month as I haven’t listened to it that much.

Among Fields of Crystal / Wind in Lonely Fences I have written about a fair number of ambient albums in this series (and there are at least two more to come!) but perhaps none are as unobtrusive as this one by Howard Budd and Brian Eno. It’s a subtle collection of music that sits at the margins of your consciousness: for a long time it was the music that I turned to when I could not sleep but I could just as easily imagine it as (ahem!

One EP and three albums for Album Digest February 2012: Burial Kindred EP John Talabot fIN Lilacs & Champagne Lilacs & Champagne The 2 Bears Be Strong Last February was a pretty good month for song based albums, although the likes of Radiohead and James Blake provided plenty of electronic noodling in and around their song structures. (Interestingly, out of the two out-and-out song based albums, one was one of the worst albums of the year and the other one of the best).

Five albums to see in the new year: FOE “Bad Dream Hotline” Leila “U & I” Diagrams “Black Light” Pyramids & Horseback “A Throne Without A King” FabricLive 61 mixed by Pinch FOE Bad Dream Hotline I listened to “Bad Dream Hotline” about four times thinking “who does her voice remind me of?”. In the end I realised it was Sophie Ellis-Bextor, though in parts she sounds like KT Tunstall too.

I got into Début via a cassette from the library, much like I did with Together Alone by Crowded House. I suppose it is less obscure than many of my choices for this strand but I do think that Post is more well-known (because of It’s Oh So Quiet, which we shall mention here only briefly) and that Homogenic is probably more popular among her fans. What I really like about Début though, as much as the album itself, is the panoply of remixes and alternative versions that surround the release.

Some rather brief pen pictures of this month’s albums. I’ve been a bit busy! Radio Slave - Collected Remixes Thud thud thud. This is pretty much how all Radio Slave remixes go. I really liked his fabric mix and borrowed a few tracks for a playlist I made called “Dancing In Space”. Anyway, back to the thudding: it’s no bad thing, the remixes have a nice formula that works well for discovering new tracks like UNKLE’s Burn My Shadow (Ian Astbury’s vocal is given plenty of room to shine) and K3’s Play To Win.

Just three albums this month as I’ve been listening to a lot of Brian Eno records ready for an upcoming understated classic. First up is 50 Words For Snow by Kate Bush, the second album that she has released this year. Back in May I wrote about Director’s Cut, which presented re-recorded and re-mastered versions of songs from her albums The Sensual World and The Red Shoes. This time around it is an album of brand new material, the first since Aerial in 2006.

I think it’s time to discuss your philosophy of drug use as it relates to artistic endeavour… That quote is from the movie “The Naked Lunch” directed by David Cronenburg (see also this) and it also opens “Bug Powder Dust” by Bomb The Bass, the five star single that opens “Clear”. A rollicking piece of rock rap dripping with pop culture references that runs for four and half minutes and does not stop until another quote from “The Naked Lunch”, it is probably one of my favourite songs of the 90s.

This month we have albums by Björk, Coldplay, M83, and Radiohead. Album Digest October 2011 - Intro I listened to Wilco’s The Whole Love again the other day. I happened to be walking past the venue in Portsmouth where I went to see them live back in 2004 and it seemed the right fit. I really enjoyed the album after a period of not having listened to it and I found that being familiar with the songs allowed me to better appreciate the production of the album.

Hmmm, a rather grey looking selection of covers this month. The albums I have listened to most are: John Beltran Ambient Selections FabricLive 59 mixed by Four Tet The Rapture In The Grace Of Your Love Wilco The Whole Love I have actually only had the Wilco album since Monday of this week (the 26th) but it has inveigled its way into my consciousness quite quickly. As I have said before, this blog owes its name to a Wilco song and they are quite an important band to me.

FUN FACT: It was because of the artwork to this album that I obsessively scrawled onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome on my pencil case at school. I also had a very passable u.f.orb logo drawn on it too. In The Blue Room I had my first “close encounter” with The Orb in 1992 when the single Blue Room was in the charts.

I bought a collection of electronic music this month. I mixed them all up in a smart playlist on iTunes, the smart aspect being to limit to tracks that had been played fewer than five then six then seven times etc. This made sure I was still listening to all the tracks equally often, despite the randomness. Biosphere N-plants Ford & Lopatin Channel Pressure Gus Gus Arabian Horse Instra:Mental Resolution 653 Jon Tejada Parabolas Biosphere N-Plants I think this album makes Biosphere the most reviewed musician on this blog at the moment but I don’t mind too much, he makes some great stuff.

Happy Birthday! No matter how intellectual one gets about these things, the primary function of music is to have fun. With this in mind it is a good time to turn to Roxette then, as they are almost always the epitome of fun. I received Look Sharp! as a present for my ninth birthday. This was probably a bit young to fully understand all the emotions expressed on the record. It’s just as well that it is also crammed with the kind of pop confections that made “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus!

Quite a mixed bag this month. SBTRKT SBTRKT Zomby Dedication Brian Eno Drums Between The Bells Bon Iver Bon Iver Washed Out Within and Without This month’s collection of albums is a rather mellow bunch. The SBTRKT album (self-titled) is probably the most frenetic of the five though even that does not exactly pound four to the floor. Most of it is pretty calm, though the occasional burst of pop to spice things up: sometimes it is as downtempo as the rest (Right Thing To Do and Trials Of The Past) but at other times things spark into life, as on Pharaohs.

Your rails, your fins, your thin paper wings Second Toughest in the Infants (STITI) is the second album by Underworld, released in 1995. This was just ahead of the mania caused by the .NUXX version of Born Slippy appearing on the Trainspotting soundtrack a little later. Born Slippy itself, the blippy techno confection released between their début Dubnobasswithmyheadman and this album. STITI then is very much the calm before the storm and features a band (in the truest sense, which is unusual among electronic acts) in full flow.

I have had the sort of month that is not conducive to listening to much new music. Therefore this month’s post is only going to consider two new albums and two albums that I have bought behind time. Because of various bits of stress and poor mood, I have ended up going back and taking refuge in some old favourites and not listening to new stuff. At other points I have also gone back to the Fleet Foxes’ album that I wrote about last month, which has grown on me even more since.

I admit that it was the artwork that got me interested in Tubular Bells II. Trevor Key’s wonderful icon of the twisted tubular bell is even more mysterious rendered in yellow and blue. Seeing it one day in Woolworth’s in Leigh Park back in 1992 aroused my curiosity. The huge display must have been part of the massive publicity drive for the album. Despite dwindling sales for his newer albums, a sequel to Tubular Bells represented a huge potential for sales.

Four albums this month: Kate Bush Director’s Cut Africa Hitech 93 Million Miles Fleet Foxes Helplessness Blues TV On The Radio Nine Types of Light There is a pleasing red hue to all the covers this month. I had time to write four full reviews of the major albums I listened to. Like last month I have included a video at the foot of each review. Enjoy! Kate Bush Director’s Cut Director’s Cut is not a new album from Kate Bush but a collection of re-visits to old songs, four from The Sensual World (1989) and seven from [The Red Shoes](http://en.

Background Tiger Bay is Saint Etienne’s third album and I think it is among their best. It was released in June 1994 on Heavenly records. I first owned a copy in 1998 when I picked it up while living in halls as an undergraduate. The reason for including this album in the understated classics series is the same as for Second Light by Dreadzone: it marries traditional forms to newer electronic music1.

Album of the month: Mirrorwriting by Jamie Woon Jamie Woon was brought to my attention late last year by Pitchfork who wrote an article about the video for lead single Night Air. I’ve put that video down below because I think that it is very good, a simple well executed and the tune itself is brilliant, probably my favourite individual track of 2010. It’s a downtempo tune full of dark spaces and empty beats, full of nocturnal promise and mystery.

This is not an Album Digest March 2011 Well as I said at the end of last month’s album digest post, I took a bit of a break from pursuing new music quite as closely as I have been. As promised, I sidestepped the new R.E.M. and Elbow albums - although I had been promised the latter as a birthday present it is yet to show up, maybe I will look at in April.

In the understated classics series, I try to alternate between pop/rock and electronic albums. Keeping with this trend number eight is the wonderful dub-infused album Second Light by Dreadzone. Released in 1996 it was well-received critically and four of its tracks featured on John Peel’s best-of-year list that year. Little Britain received a lot of radio play, a popular choice for that flag-waving period of britpop and assorted other demons.

February, the shortest month, harbinger of such delights as Groundhog Day and Valentine’s Day. Could it possibly produce any good albums? Well the candidates are the eponymous début album by James Blake, Zonoscope by Cut/Copy, Let England Shake by PJ Harvey and Smart Flesh by The Low Anthem. Furthermore, there was an unexpected bonus when Radiohead announced that their new album would be out and available to listen to this month too.

Here’s to 2011 and the start of a monthly album digest. I want it to be a brief trot through some of the albums I have listened to each month. Sometimes January can bring a few quiet releases by big name bands. This happens if the previous album did not do as well as the record company hoped or if it is the kind of artist who would get lost under the hype of all the Christmas releases.

Idewild are a solid band who have released four or five albums that I could consider for this series. I’m even in the sleeve credits of one: Post-Electric Blues, if you’re asking. In the end I went for 100 Broken Windows because it means a lot to me. It has more of a place in my life than the others. Usually I find that this happens if I can remember where I bought an album.

Background Ask anyone into pop music between 1991 and 1993 about The Shamen, and you’ll either receive a flood of euphoric good will about excellent tracks like Move Any Mountain, LSI, and Phorever People1; or they will rant at you about the evils of Ebeneezer Goode. The Shamen are either one of the pantheon of great acts from early 90’s dance and electronic music, or they are a shameless vaudeville novelty act.

A Weekend In The City: Background This is the youngest album I have chosen for this series. I try to pick albums that are at least ten years old but every now and then, I will think of an album that matches the sort of things I want to write about. That’s the case here. A Weekend in the City is an unusual album that, in a reversal of the old adage, is “easy to love but hard to admire”.

I bought this album in the summer between my two years at college. I remember listening to this music under skies glowering with clouds so 1997 must have been a poor summer. I’d just bought a book of photography too, which placed photos from the north and south poles on opposite pages. I bought it mainly for the penguins that were, of course, on pretty much every other page. The pictures of snow and ice soon became the ideal companions to this album.

When is understated not understated? The trouble with writing a series of articles all themed somehow is that eventually you might find something that sits naturally in the sequence but at the same time goes against the grain a little. Et voila, I give you “The Circle & The Square” by Red Box. An album that hardly anyone has heard containing two top 10 UK singles that probably everyone has heard.

I discovered The Aloof while listening to the Top 40 When I was younger, I used to listen to the Top 40 every Sunday. To begin with, this was partly an endurance thing and partly an obsession with one day seeing Roxette top the charts - alas, they never did, though for one thrilling spring “Joyride” did flirt with the upper reaches of the chart. Listening to the charts is probably the best way to become a lover of music.

This week Arcade Fire released their hotly anticipated third album “The Suburbs”. I loved “Neon Bible” but critics found it preachy, as overbearing as the religious folk it sought to satirise. I disagree and think it was an impressive continuation from an exciting debut. “The Suburbs” steps on from their previous two albums, both in subject matter and tone. It’s sad, thoughtful, resigned, angry and tetchy - among other things. “The Suburbs” isn’t the understated classic that I want to discuss though: with all the praise and plaudits, it may never suit this new thread of posts.