Wednesday 27 February 2013

January 2013 - Popular Music

Missy Higgins - The Ol' Razzle Dazzle
Maroon 5 - Holiday Gift
John Mayer - Heavier Things
John Mayer - Born and Raised
Ed Sheeran - Holiday Gift
Something for Kate - Leave Your Soul to Science
The xx - The xxmas single

iTunes was in a giving mood over Christmas with 'The 12 days of iTunes', so during January I dutifully listened to the music freebies.  The Maroon 5 one was fairly pathetic. Of the other 2 artists, who were both little more than names to me, the offering from The xx was reasonable and the Ed Sheeran one (3 live tracks) was rather good.  If these things are essentially advertising to get people interested in an artist's work, than Ed's campaign has succeeded. 

Apart from that, it's not so much that I didn't listen to a lot of music (although there was a holiday during which listening was minimal), it's more that when I did listen it was largely to the same things a lot.  The continuation of post-Christmas Missy Higgins and John Mayer was eventually terminated very late in the month by Something for Kate's 'new' album, which came out in the second half of 2012.

The first 3 days of listening to Leave Your Soul to Science were a gradual process, moving from "oh, that sounds a bit different to normal SFK..." to "I think I like this" to "I'm falling in love with this".  I mean, there's probably some element of that with most albums, but it's particularly the case when an artist has shifted their sound, and Something for Kate have definitely done that.  Although in some ways this is not so much a shift as a broadening. There's a wider range of sounds and styles than ever before.

Some of my initial unease was probably generated by the very first track, 'Star-Crossed Citizens', which completely threw me on the first several listens.  Just who thought up those pulsing guitars in the chorus, I don't know, but it sounds very odd... until you finally notice the beautiful melody that's floating over the top of that noise.

There's plenty of other oddities as well. 'The Kids Will Get The Money' sounds like it's a bit repetitive and not going anywhere... and then your perception shifts and you realise that being a broad soundscape is the whole point.  Some songs seem too straightforward and then all of a sudden they aren't. Others seem too breezily tuneful and then after enough listens you find you're addicted to the turns of the melody.

That's all I'm going to say about it for the moment, because that was the impression from the first few days of listening, in January.

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