Saturday 21 April 2012

March 2012 - Popular Music

Tori Amos
  • From the Choirgirl Hotel
  • Strange Little Girls
  • Abnormally Attracted to Sin
Patty Griffin - Living With Ghosts
Patty Griffin - 1000 Kisses
John Mayer - Continuum
John Mayer - Battle Studies
Joni Mitchell - Song to a Seagull
Joni Mitchell - Taming the Tiger
Moloko - Statues
Over the Rhine - Ohio
Radiohead - Kid A
Radiohead - In Rainbows
Simply Red - Picture Book
Something for Kate - Echolalia
Thrice - The Alchemy Index: Water, Air and Earth volumes
Thom Yorke - The Eraser

In the last few months, I appear to have been going through a mix of a Patty Griffin phase with a Radiohead phase. The two have to some extent alternated.  Very different artists, but both very close to the top of the 'popular music' tree for me.

For Radiohead it's the fact that they seem capable of imagining anything and then implementing it. I don't know anyone else who somehow gives me this impression that something sounds exactly the way it does because that's exactly the way they wanted it to sound. No slips between plan and execution.

For Patty Griffin, it's the incredible power of her voice and songwriting to connect in such a human way.  All the hopes and heartaches of the world can almost bypass my ears and hit somewhere much deeper.

I know that's much to say about either of them, but it's enough. Two instances of where I am very, very glad that people have stepped into a recording studio and I get to hear the results from half a world away.

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