You Can't Have That Band - They're Mine!

Last month, I conducted an informal music survey to find out more about how we consume music here in the UK. The final question on this survey was this optional extra:

Recommend me a great album I've never heard before.

148 of my 217 respondents rose to this challenge, and irritatingly enough, most of them were successful - that is, the vast majority of those 148 people did indeed recommend albums that were completely unknown to me.

This left me with a long, long, long list of albums that I now feel honour-bound to check out. Excluding the few albums I already knew like Wolf Alice's My Love is Cool, I've managed to listen to 4 of those recommendations so far, the first of which was Earth & Earthly Things by a Nothern Irish outfit called Cutaways.

I made Earth & Earthly Things the first step on my journey of discovery for one simple reason: it was free. It proved to be a good choice: the album is packed with great riffs and melodies, and its general feel is reminiscent of a slightly more approachable Los Campesinos! which is a big plus in my book.

May Playlist: My Heart Just Sunk

A new month means a new monthly playlist - here are 10 tracks, old and new, that made my ears very happy in May:

1. Waitress - Hop Along

(from Painted Shut)

Frances Quinlan from Hop Along (a band recommended to me in the wake of this blog post) is my favourite vocalist in rock right now. Her voice is at its best when she pushes it to and beyond its limits; there are moments in Waitress when it sounds like her throat is about to explode, and those moments are glorious. Top riff, too.