February 2013 - Popular Music

Tori Amos - Little Earthquakes
Tori Amos - Under the Pink
Missy Higgins - The Ol' Razzle Dazzle
John Mayer - Born and Raised
Something for Kate

• Beautiful Sharks
• Echolalia
• The Official Fiction
• Desert Lights
• Leave Your Soul to Science
• Shotgun Karaoke EP

Thrice - The Alchemy Index

As can be seen, I went completely nuts for Something for Kate during February.

The reason was the ongoing transformation in my reaction to the new album, Leave Your Soul to Science.  In my entry for January I consciously stopped at the end of January in terms of my reaction, because (being rather tardy in my blogging... as I am again now) I was well aware that over the first couple of weeks of February I had completely fallen in love with the album and scarcely listened to anything else... except other Something for Kate albums.  And then I just shuffled them all together into a giant celebration-of-SFK playlist.

I simply could get enough of the soaring, intense melodies and Paul Dempsey's glorious voice.

Different songs on Leave Your Soul came forward at different points, as some took longer to appreciate than others. Although, even on an album that's quite strong throughout, tracks 2 through 6 represent a golden patch.  Five songs that are as diverse representations of this band as you're likely to get, but on different days in February each one of them became something that would get completely stuck in my head or have me pressing repeat or have me just living and breathing every moment of the music as I listened, feeling transported.

The fact that music can do that is, well, wonderful. Uplifting. Just like this...

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.