April Playlist: Stick it in Your Arm

We've (almost) reached the end of April, and it's been a month of freshness and newness and sunshine all around. Here are 10 of the tracks that have soundtracked the last 30 days or so for me.

My March playlist can be found here.

1. Rainbow Road - Cloud

(from Zen Summer)

We'll start, perversely enough, with the closing track from Cloud's new album (which I reviewed earlier this week). I don't know for sure that this song's title is a Mario Kart reference, but I fervently hope it is.



2. Up on the Ride - Guillemots

(from Hello Land!)
Hello Land! is a spring-themed album, so it only makes sense to break it out of the vault at this time of year. Up on the Ride is the very essence of that fresh springtime feeling; if that spoken word bit in the middle doesn't motivate you to seize the day, I'm not sure what will.

3. Over and Over Again (Lost & Found) - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

(from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah)
A couple of weeks ago, I singled out CYHSY's eponymous debut (along with two other albums) as something of a springtime essential. This song in particular reminds me of that very special March/April period when you start to feel like you'll maybe be able to get away with wearing a T-shirt without a jumper.

4. Foolish Dreamer - Zervas & Pepper

(from Abstract Heart)
I couldn't find this track anywhere on the internet, but screw it - it's my personal highlight of Zervas & Pepper's new album, and I'm going to include it in my goddam end-of-month digest whether they want me to or not.

5. Last Chance to Lose Your Keys - Brand New

(from Your Favourite Weapon)
I rediscovered Brand New this month (click here to read the blog I wrote about them), and I was particularly surprised to find Your Favorite Weapon so chock-full of choons (I basically remember it being Soco Amaretto Lime, Jude Law and a Semester Abroad, and a bunch of other tracks I didn't much care for). This track has a chorus that's lots of fun to sing along with.

6. Sugar Boats - Modest Mouse

(from Strangers to Ourselves)
Ah, yes - the track that was solely responsible for at least two of my Modest Mouse predictions being just about accurate. The Ground Walks with Time in a Box is still my favourite song from Strangers to Ourselves, but this noisy number is a close second. Where's my sugar boat?!

7. We Oh We - The Hidden Cameras

(from Mississauga Goddam)

Last week, I wrote a few paragraphs about Joel Gibb's use of nonsense syllables (or 'non-lexical vocables', to use the technical term) in the songs he writes for The Hidden Cameras. This soothing cut, taken from my personal favourite HC album, is an especially egregious example of what I'm talking about: even the title is nonsense.

8. The Eleven Year Glitch - Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat

(from The Most Important Place in the World)

Here's another one I couldn't find on the web. The Eleven Year Glitch is the blissful breaking point of The Most Important Place in the World, which - as I pointed out previously- is packaged like a compilation of children's lullabies but actually turns out to be a savage, sordid break-up album.

9. Better Things - The Magnetic Fields

(from Realism)

Like Hello Land! and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Realism is another of those albums that simply sings springtime to me. Here's a song that I thought was kind of boring and filler-y when I first bought the CD; needless to say, I like it a lot more now.

10. Small Town Heroes - Hurray for the Riff Raff

(from Small Town Heroes)
I didn't mention this song in my recent blog post on Small Town Heroes, but it definitely deserves to be mentioned somewhere. It's a wonderful moment of stillness and honesty, and the perfect closer for this month's playlist.