Tori Amos - Scarlet's Walk
Beyonce - Lemonade
Toni Childs - House of Hope
Paul Dempsey - Everything Is True
Paul Dempsey - Strange Loop
FKA twigs - EP1
Jars of Clay - The Eleventh Hour
Elton John - Tumbleweed Connection
k d lang - Invincible Summer
John Mayer - Born and Raised
Joni Mitchell - Mingus
Over the Rhine - Ohio
Radiohead - The King of Limbs
Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool
REM - Automatic for the People
Something for Kate
- Beautiful Sharks
- Echolalia
- Desert Lights
- Leave Your Soul to Science
Right. Having left this post lingering in draft mode for far too long, I'm going to dispatch it fairly quickly. I did listen to a much greater variety of pop music than I had in the previous couple of months, though in truth it's not quite that various in terms of how many artists I listened to.
July was the month that I got hold of a physical copy of the new Radiohead album. And at first, my reaction was mixed. I felt that it has a strong start, but I wasn't entirely sure whether the mellow feel of the album was a good thing or whether it was a bit monotonous.
Over a few more listens I came to appreciate the album more, which was no real surprise because that's what happens with most music. Familiarity with the songs means picking out the details and the distinctions. It's not yet at the point where I would rank it highly among Radiohead albums, but I've certainly enjoyed listening to it.
The other feature of the month was Paul Dempsey's new album, Strange Loop. Which led to a general binge of listening to Paul Dempsey both in solo form and as the lead of Something for Kate. It didn't take long at all for me to really start enjoying this album, with a couple of standout songs lodging themselves in my brain very quickly.
The singles are all standouts, with the first single "Morningless" being one of the most driving songs (um, no pun intended) of Dempsey's solo work, closer to Something for Kate than usual.
But on the whole it's the quieter, moodier songs on the album that have real magic. Dempsey now seems to have a very strong understanding of how to use a palette of sounds to create a mood.
And the song that I couldn't stop playing over and over, and completely failed to get tired of, was "Idiot Oracle". It floats so delicately, avoiding all square rhythms. "Morningless" avoids square rhythms too, as indeed is the case for many of Dempsey's songs, but where that one is neurotic, "Idiot Oracle" is light and air.
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