- To Venus and Back (studio disc)
- The Beekeeper
- Night of Hunters
Crowded House - Together Alone
Patty Griffin - Impossible Dream
Janelle Monae - Metropolis Suites I to V
Radiohead - Amnesiac
Rachael Yamagata - Loose Ends
Hmm. There's not actually a lot I want to talk about here. This was the first time I listened to Night of Hunters for quite a while and I found myself quite moved by it at unexpected places, in other words in songs that I hadn't previously ranked as favourites.
The new entry is Janelle Monae, and while I'm not going to talk about the music much at this point it would be remiss of me not to discuss my chosen terminology. Because you'd be hard pressed to go and buy any of these suites except the first. They don't come in this form. The second and third suites come as the album The ArchAndroid, and the fourth and fifth suites comes as the album The Electric Lady.
I find myself compelled at the moment to listen to these 'albums' in suite form. The musical pointers aren't all leading to that conclusion: yes, there are overtures to each suite that are clearly designated as such, but the overtures tend to borrow from the neighbouring suite on the same album, and there isn't even a clean break between the end of suite IV and the overture of suite V. But in general each suite does tend to sound like a work in its own right, with a sense of ending, and with stylistic differences from it's neighbour.
Plus in all honesty, around 35 minutes of Janelle Monae at a time is probably enough right now. Not because her music is bad, but because it's so dense in terms of the number of ideas. More on that next month, I expect...
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