Popular Music - October 2017

Tori Amos

• The Beekeeper
• American Doll Posse
• Abnormally Attracted to Sin
• Midwinter Graces
• Native Invader

Fiona Apple - When the Pawn...
Christine and the Queens - Christine and the Queens
Missy Higgins - The Ol' Razzle Dazzle
Level 42 - Running in the Family
John Mayer - Battle Studies
Mike and the Mechanics - Mike and the Mechanics
Joni Mitchell

• Don Juan's Reckless Daughter
• Mingus
• Wild Things Run Fast
• Dog Eat Dog

Roisin Murphy - Overpowered
Megan Washington - There There
Megan Washington - Saint Lo (single)

The Tori Amos/Joni Mitchell face-off continued in October, though at a slower pace with only 4 pairings of albums. Both artists were, at this point in their careers, changing styles and becoming less popular than before.

While most Tori Amos albums get a hearing pretty frequently, it sometimes surprises me how long I haven't listened to something. Which I guess is one reason I keep proper records in the first place, but it was startling to discover that these particular Missy Higgins, John Mayer and Roisin Murphy albums were all last listened to in 2014. All of those albums seem familiar, as if I've heard them pretty recently. And apparently, this was the first time I'd listened to Mike and the Mechanics since I began keeping pop music data.

Not only does a lot of time elapse between listens, but sometimes a lot of time elapses before I discover music. Yes, it can take me years to buy an album, but it turns out that it's possible for me to miss the existence of music, even from artists I like a great deal.

And so it was that it took me almost a year to realise that Megan Washington (who has reverted back to calling herself just "Washington") had released a new song, Saint Lo.

And it's heavenly.

I thought her last album There There was a major breakthrough and one of the best pop albums I'd heard in a long time. Saint Lo is just one song, but it's possibly even better. Certainly, I became utterly obsessed with it once I found out about it. I bought it on iTunes soon after first hearing it, and played it to death over the next couple of days.

It's moody, it's sensual, and it has a heck of a groove.

I won't go on a rant about the stupidity of an official YouTube account engaging in geoblocking, but the video below might not work for everyone.

So here is a link to a version on Vimeo which is more likely to work for everyone. If you find it as addictive as I do, don't blame me. You have been warned.

Popular Music - September 2014

Tori Amos

• To Venus and Back (Venus Orbiting disc)
• Strange Little Girls
• Unrepentant Geraldines

Bat for Lashes - The Haunted Man
Beyonce - Beyonce
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - No More Shall We Part
Toni Childs - Union
Toni Childs - House of Hope
Paula Cole - This Fire
Sheryl Crow - Tuesday Night Music Club
Gotye - Making Mirrors
Moloko - I Am Not A Doctor
Radiohead

• The Bends
• Amnesiac
• Hail to the Thief

Seal - Human Being
Sixpence None the Richer - This Beautiful Mess
Sons of Korah - Shelter
Washington - Insomnia

A couple of years ago,  I wrote about Washington's debut album and expressed my disappointment. I also mentioned that I had bought Insomnia at the same time. And now I've finally listened to it.

That gives you some idea about just how long things can sit in the listening pile, if they're not my primary focus for some reason at the time of acquisition.

The silly thing is that I suspected, even then, that it would be better than I Believe You Liar, and yet that apparently didn't induce me to open up the CD and confirm that suspicion. Well, the suspicion is finally confirmed. Insomnia is considerably better because it showcases Washington's finest weapon - her voice - in a way that the first album never did. Double-tracked vocals and thickening of texture is now the exception, not the norm. The arrangements get the hell out of the way and let you listen to the bittersweet sound of a voice that sounds a little sad even when it's upbeat.

I've in fact left listening to Insomnia so long that Megan Washington (now with first name intact) released her next album about the same time, and from first samples THAT sounds like it might be even better. But please, don't wait for the reviews from me...

This month was also the first time in a surprisingly long while that I listened to Moloko's I Am Not A Doctor. An absolutely fascinating album, this. It seems to have been the band's least commercially successful album. In many ways it's also the one that I would expect to like the least, as it's full of music that Wikipedia tells me is called "trip hop" and "drum and bass" and other things that I wouldn't head towards in a store.

It's also a really consistent album that's a fantastic listening experience.

I think one of the reasons it's so excellent is that it's thematically pretty consistent. From the opening track and single 'The Flipside', it's an album that openly acknowledges how weird and strange it is by including references to bending the mind. Hypnosis and possession come up in the lyrics on multiple occasions. This is an album that is intentionally taking you on a 'trippy' experience and tells you that you're powerless to resist.

 

Now, I might not be in the mood all the time for being told how my will is going to be overridden by a bunch of skittering beats, but if it's going to be done it should at least be done with flair and imagination. And Moloko delivers.

July 2012 - Popular Music

Tori Amos - Strange Little Girls
Fiona Apple - Extraordinary Machine
Fiona Apple - The Idler Wheel...
Joni Mitchell

• Song to a Seagull
• Blue
• For the Roses
• Hejira
• Don Juan's Reckless Daughter
• Wild Things Run Fast
• Night Ride Home
• Shine

Radiohead - OK Computer
Sixpence None the Richer - Sixpence None the Richer
Sting - The Soul Cages
Sting - Live In Berlin (DVD version)
Washington - I Believe You Liar
Rachael Yamagata - Happenstance

A tale of two albums... neither of them by Joni Mitchell despite the preponderance of her works in the list above.

Washington is, as far as I can tell, Megan Washington - and by that I mean that she appears to be operating as a solo artist, not as the lead person in a band like Bon Jovi or Van Halen.

Megan Washington has a beautiful, beautiful voice. My first encounter with it was, I think, also the first encounter for many people, when she appeared on the much beloved quiz show Spicks and Specks singing completely inappropriate lyrics in a little game called 'Substitute'. But singing them oh so well.

Part of the reason I think this helped her career is that her music shot up the iTunes charts the very next day.

I bought Washington's first full-length album, I Believe You Liar, a couple of months ago (at the same time as Gotye's Making Mirrors).  And I didn't really take much time to listen to it then.  I took a bit more time in July to sit down with the album properly.

And I'm disappointed. There's no other way to say it. It's not terrible by any means.  But THAT VOICE is most noticeable by its absence.

This is because much of the album aims for a 60s, Phil Spector Wall of Sound aesthetic. The production is thick, with Washington's voice multitracked. Even when the music is quieter, she's still multitracked more often than not. It's bright, it's fairly poppy, and it totally fails to show off her biggest musical asset.  Most of her singing comes across as merely pleasant, instead of utterly magnetic. The lyrics are nothing special, either, and fail to elevate the material.

Only the closing title track really allows me to hear the same thing I heard in that television show several years ago.

I haven't lost hope. I also bought the following Insomnia EP at the same time (which includes material that has been released on a revamped international version of I Believe You Liar) and, while I have yet to open it, it actually sounded like the better release from what I sampled before purchase.

Contrast my reaction to Liar with my reaction to, to give it the full title, The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do. The new album from Fiona Apple was something I picked up this month for a number of reasons, including excellent reviews and a very cheap price for a recent release.

And where Washington disappointed me, Apple thrilled me.  Here is an album that absolutely showcases a vocalist using her instrument - and it really is treated as an instrument.  The accompanying music is sometimes little more than punctuation while Apple coos, growls and everything in between. The most frequent combination of sounds is percussion, piano and voice, and this album demonstrates pretty effectively that you don't need any more than that to create powerful music.

And yes, even though I'm generally much more about the music than the words, Apple's songwriting is also more interesting lyrically.  Her wordplay may not be to everyone's taste, but there are all sorts of surprises thrown in, rather than picking the obvious way of saying something.  I can't think of a much better way of saying how a lover makes you feel than Apple's statement, in one of the happier songs, that "he makes my heart a cinemascope screen showing a dancing bird of paradise".

All of those reviews on Metacritic making this one of the best-reviewed albums of the year are, in my humble opinion, right.  Not that I hear many albums in the year they're released.  But this is certainly right up there in terms of albums I've heard any time recently.