November Playlist: Winter's On The Phone

Hey everyone - it's December! But before you break out the Christmas hits, here are 10 non-Yuletide tracks that I really enjoyed listening to in November and that I hope you'll enjoy listening to right now.

1. Holy Hell It's Cold by Quiet Marauder

(from MEN)

I tend to revisit MEN (originally released in 2013 - read my three-year-old review of it here) every year at around this time, and this rib-tickling but also slightly sobering cut seemed like an appropriate choice given the current temperature outside.

2. Treaty by Leonard Cohen

(from You Want it Darker)

You Want it Darker - which it's probably safe to assume was written and recorded by a Leonard Cohen who knew that he would soon be dead - has a certain duality to it. Many of its songs make it sound like Len had made his peace with the world and was ready to go, but a couple of songs (including Seemed the Better Way and this beautiful number) suggest a certain amount of regret, a desire to go back and change something. More thoughts on You Want it Darker here.

Beautiful Freak's Beautiful Freakishness

Beautiful Freak, the first Eels album, turned 20 earlier this year, so I thought I'd look back and offer my take on its weird wonderfulness.

The first Eels album I ever heard (and the one I recommend that you start with, too) was Blinking Lights & Other Revelations, Mark Oliver Everett's bittersweet magnum opus that was both an outstanding double album and a kind of musical autobiography. Over 33 tracks, it charted the ups and downs of Everett's life, starting from his birth and ending with its sights set firmly on the future in Things the Grandchildren Should Know. Released in 2005, Blinking Lights contained a few breakneck pop moments (such as euphoric lead single Hey Man) and a few noisy wig-outs (such as Mother Mary), but on the whole it was a downbeat, introspective listen that deftly demonstrated how life's quiet moments could be even more powerful than its loud bits.

The second Eels album I heard was Beautiful Freak, originally released in 1996  and officially two decades old as of a few months ago. This album came as a huge surprise - Blinking Lights had offered up a pretty rich stew of different sounds, but not one of those 33 tracks indicated that Eels had once been a grunge band.

Goodness

I haven't listened to Home, Like Noplace is There by The Hotelier, but you can sort of tell that it was a dark and harrowing album simply by listening it to the album that came next. Goodness was released earlier this year, and it's a textbook example of a 'morning after the dark night of the soul' album. If you've heard Tomorrow Morning or Daisies of the Galaxy by the Eels, you'll know exactly what I mean; those albums were released after End Times (one of those break-up albums that compares the end of a relationship to the end of the world) and Electro-Shock Blues (a musical memoir of a period during which the songwriter lost his sister to suicide and his mother to cancer) respectively, and both are relatively bright and optimistic, hopeful glimmers of light at the end of two long, dark tunnels.

That's exactly what Goodness is. It has a 'back to nature' hippie commune kinda vibe, thanks in part to the outdoorsy renditions of popular lullaby I See the Moon that serve as interludes and in larger part to the artwork, which features a group of men and women standing naked in a field: 

Fun fact: my copy of the Goodness CD was packaged in a sleeve bearing a censored version of this image, because heaven forfend that anyone should accidentally see a boob or a willy.

Goodness evokes the feeling of going outside and feeling the sun on your skin for the first time in months. It's an album about emerging from a period of isolation and reconnecting, both with the people you love and with the world around you; it's about relocating your place in the universe and learning to love and share and feel at peace again, man.

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.

Eels: Where to Start?

With 11 studio albums, 7 live albums, a couple of compilations, and goodness knows what else to choose from, newcomers would be forgiven for not knowing where to start with Eels. Do you begin with Beautiful Freak (home of Novocaine for the Soul, probably the best-known Eels track of all) and go from there? Or is it better to work backwards from The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett, the band's most recent release?

The first Eels album that I bought was Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, released in 2005. As a ninety-minute double album that's slap-bang in the middle of the band's back catalogue, Blinking Lights is hardly the most obvious entry point for an Eels virgin, but if you were to ask me which album you should start with, I'd almost certainly recommend this one.

Blinking Lights is a concept album that tackles the largest concept of all: life, and what it's like to live it. We follow Eels mainman Mark Oliver Everett (better known as 'E') through all the ups and downs of his turbulent lifetime, from the very beginning to the almost-end: Disc 1 begins with E's birth (From Which I Came/A Magic World), and Disc 2 ends with him as an old man looking back on it all (Things the Grandchildren Should Know).

Fresh from 2013

What were you doing back in 2013? I mostly remember it as the year that I, flush with unspoken thoughts about my favourite music, started this blog; who'd have guessed that I would still be updating The Album Wall three times a week almost three years later? Had you asked me back in June '13, I probably would have bet against it.

Of the many albums I listened to in those early days, one of the most enjoyable was Furniture by Aberystwyth's Race Horses, which came to my attention after it was nominated for the 2013 Welsh Music Prize (in spite of the fact that it was actually released in 2012). You can read my thoughts on that album here.

Of course, by the time I first wrapped my ears around Furntiure, its creators had already called it a day. As I was belatedly discovering fantastic tracks like Mates and My Year Abroad, Race Horses singer Meilyr Jones was living in Rome, discovering Italian culture and percolating ideas for his solo album.

That album, titled simply 2013, came out last month, and you can really hear the notes Jones took during his stay in Italy. The album's overall sound is like the sonic lovechild of Gruff Rhys and Ennio Morricone, conceived while Neil Hannon watched through a peephole and quietly jerked off. No expense has been spared on the orchestration here: string and brass instruments mingle with harpsichords and recorders*, and Jones's bright-eyed pop sensibilites are smushed up against more classical influences to create something very fresh indeed.

Carrie & Lowell

"This is not my art project; this is my life."  

  -  Sufjan Stevens, speaking to Pitchfork in 2015

How, as a music writer, can you criticise somebody else's grief?

For one thing, it seems extremely callous to subject an expression of mourning - and that's effectively what Carrie & Lowell, the latest Sufjan Stevens album, is - to the same scrutiny as an album that aims to entertain or challenge. When I was thinking about what to write in today's blog, I considered comparing C&L to Electro-Shock Blues by the Eels; both albums were written in response to family deaths, and I could draw a lot of similarities between the two, as well as some interesting differences.

Here's the problem: I like Electro-Shock Blues more than I like Carrie & Lowell,  but to explain why would require a degree of heartlessness on my part. Tracks like Dead of Winter (below) have a dark, defeated feeling that, for me, is absent from the songs that make up C&L, and Sufjan's vocals have always had a polite emotionlessness that falls a bit flat on a record that's supposed to bare his deepest, darkest feelings. True, bleak lines like "We're all gonna die" (from Fourth of July) are arguably made more striking by the balanced, inflection-free tone in which they're delivered, and there's some shock inherent in hearing the word 'masturbate' from the buttoned-up voice that once sang "I almost touched your blouse" like a guilt-stricken monk in a confessional booth...but, crucially, Sufjan Stevens never sounds to me like a man who's just lost his mother. Mark Oliver Everett, on the other hand, kinda does:

But I shouldn't really be writing any of this, because what I'm basically saying is that Sufjan's grief isn't as good - or as affecting, or as powerful - as the grief I've heard expressed elsewhere. And that's horrible! You don't go to a funeral and give the son of the deceased notes on how his heartfelt eulogy could have been impoved, and that's kind of what I feel like I'm doing when I say that Carrie & Lowell doesn't wreck me like it seems to have wrecked everyone else.

Get Happy!

If you read this blog frequently then you'll probably have spotted that I really like listening to sad, depressing music. It's not that I myself am sad and depressed, and nor do I wish to become sad and depressed; I just love music that makes me feel, and it just so happens that 95% of the truly emotive music out there is sad and depressing.

Occasionally, however, I'll encounter an album that's moving in the opposite way. It's difficult for a happy album to have the same impact as an overwhelmingly sad one - I suppose sadness is generally felt much deeper than happiness or contentment - but it does happen, every once in a great while.

Lupercalia by Patrick Wolf is a tremendous example. I purchased this album (released in 2011 and named after an ancient pagan festival) on Amazon recently, and it's just so joyful and so at peace with both past and present that it's impossible not to feel that same happiness yourself. Here's House, one of the album's many happy highlights:

I think the thing that makes Lupercalia so potently jubilant is the fact that Patrick Wolf didn't exactly make his name by singing happy songs about how wonderful everything is. Lupercalia was preceded in the Wolf discography by The Bachelor, an album of real conflict and strife; PW spent most of that record besieged by vultures and lost in thickets, making the peace and joy of Lupercalia all the more striking by contrast. In the context of PW's back catalogue, Lupercalia is not mindlessly happy fluff but a moving and much-deserved resolution to the unhappiness that marked its predecessors.

10 Fucking Songs

Last week, I went on Twitter to complain about how long it had been since I last sat down and made a proper playlist. Eager to crack my knuckles and exercise my track-selecting skills, I asked people to suggest potential themes; Ash Cooke's suggestion (famous painters) proved too tricky, especially given my self-imposed "no songs I don't have" rule, but this suggestion from @Archrawr seemed a lot more doable:

In fact, I decided that "sweary songs" would be too broad a playing field, and so I added an extra restriction of my own: my playlist would solely consist of songs with the word 'fuck' in them.

My Sad Songs

Last Monday, my good friend Josh blogged a list of his Top 10 Sad Songs. Today, I'm doing the same - here are my favourite nuggets of lachrymose musical loveliness, roughly arranged from least to most upsetting:

Mistakes by Tindersticks (from The Bloomsbury Theatre 12.3.95)

Stuart Staples' stunning song of regret first appeared on Tindersticks II, but this live performance, recorded at London's Bloomsbury Theatre, is the version to seek out - the lush orchestral arrangement is brought even further to the fore, significantly upping the songs 'curl up in a ball and weep' credentials.

Track Twos

The Album Wall turned one year old yesterday, and so today's blog feels like the start of a new chapter - the Season 2 premiere, if you will (that's right, my blog is a TV show now).

This was the first thing I posted, all the way back in June '13 - that one was all about opening songs, and so I thought I'd start TAW's sophomore year with a few of my favourite track twos. The second track of an album is arguably even more important than the first; many is the LP that starts with a bang and fizzles out immediately afterwards, presumably because they hoped that everyone would form their opinions and switch off the hi-fi before the end of the first song.

Mark Oliver Everett

The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett is the eleventh Eels LP in total, but it's the first to bear its creator's full name. That bearded, bespectacled man on the cover has dropped his one-letter pseudonym before - most notably for his book, Things the Grandchildren Should Know - but every album from Beautiful Freak (1996) to Wonderful, Glorious (2013) credited him as 'E', with no mention of this Everett character.

Review: You by My Name Is Ian

Music is a pretty self-centred thing, and so it's refreshing to hear a few songs that are focused on 'you' rather than 'I'. This record's obsession with the second person is apparent from the moment you read its title; You, for the most part, is a breakup album, and its central protagonist isn't giving up without a spell spent wallowing, obsessing, begging, pleading, et cetera.

5 Songs for the New Year

Tomorrow is New Year's Eve, and this is my last blog post of 2013. I'd love to do a great big review of the last twelve months, but to be honest, my memories of early '13 aren't all that detailed. Besides, I'm sure you're all busy buying alcohol and newspapering the floor in preparation for the big blowout tomorrow night, so I'll keep this one short.

Here are five songs that are ideal for a brand new year:

This Will Be My Year by Semisonic (from Feeling Strangely Fine)
A defiant ode to the hope that, this time, you'll win. The fact that I first purchased Feeling Strangely Fine (also featuring big hits like Closing Time and Secret Smile) around this time of year only cements its newyeariness in my own mind.

5 Hidden Tracks

Last week, the NME posted a list - voted for by their Twitter followers - of '28 Magnificent Hidden Tracks'. They covered all the obvious ones like Endless, Nameless by Nirvana and Train in Vain by The Clash, as well as a whole bunch that I'd never come across before.

But they (or their readers) missed a few gems. Here five of my favourite hidden tracks:

An Open Letter to the Lyrical Trainspotter by Mansun

"The lyrics aren't supposed to mean that much..." Hidden at the end of Attack of the Grey Lantern, this wonky little jam debunks all of the bonkers concept album theories in mere moments. Or does it?

How to find it: It's tacked onto to the end of the (already quite long) epic Dark Mavis, with a bit of silence in between.

I'm Not Over You by R.E.M.

That rare hidden track that's in the middle of the album rather than right at the end. This is a short little torch song that numbers among Up's sweetest moments.

How to find it: It arrives right at the end of Diminished.

Mr E's Beautiful Blues by Eels

How many hidden tracks were also their album's lead single? Beautiful Blues was not listed on original copies of Daisies of the Galaxy, although it seems that later pressings opted to draw a little more attention to it.

How to find it: It's track 15 on Daisies of the Galaxy, separated from everything else by a moment's silence at the end of Selective Memory.

It's a Heartache by Arab Strap
Ten Years of Tears wasn't so much a greatest hits compilation as a collection of bits and pieces with the odd hit single thrown in for good measure. The last track is a triple-header, starting with an abridged version of There Is No Ending from The Last Romance and culminating in some bizarre electro business. This Bonnie Tyler cover is right in the middle, and it sounds perfect coming out of Aidan Moffat's mouth. Nice violin work too.

How to find it: It comes straight after There Is No Ending on the Ten Years of Tears compilation.

Untitled by R.E.M.

Can I have two R.E.M. songs? Yes? Alrighty then. I've heard unkind words said about this song - apparently Peter Buck did the drums, and apparently people weren't very impressed - but the emotive, circular vocals are the perfect goodbye from Green.

How to find it: It's the 11th track on Green - just keep listening after the end of I Remember California, which is listed as the last song.

Second Album Syndrome (and 5 Bands that Beat it)

Mind-blowing debuts are all well and good, but it's the second album that shows us what a band is really made of. Countless acts have released stellar first albums, only to let out a thin little fart of a follow-up before fading into obscurity.

This is known as 'second album syndrome'. Most people agree that the most common cause is a lack of time; artists have years to polish and hone their first set of songs, but once that record has topped the charts and the fans are grinding against their mattresses and moaning for more, the band is under pressure to get the creativity flowing again as quickly as possible.

Of course, the other explanation is expectation. The songs that made up your debut are now lodged in the heart of the nation, and everyone is expecting some serious fireworks from album number two. So you write the best stuff you've ever written, the hotly-anticipated album hits the shops, and...everyone is disappointed, because nothing you could have written would ever have fulfilled the hopes they had for it. The first LP had nothing to live up to, and if you make the mistake of releasing a good first album, the second one will have a pretty long shadow to stand in.

Fortunately, not everyone falls prey to SAS. Here are five bands who sidestepped second album syndrome and whether by craftsmanship, inventiveness, or just sheer audacity, proved that second albums could be even better than their predecessors:

Yeasayer

First album: All Hour Cymbals, an engaging indie/world offering with intricate sounds and semi-chanted vocals.

Second album: Odd Blodd, a far more poppy affair which spawned such hits as Ambling Alp and O.N.E. (the latter of which was featured in FIFA '12). It was still weird, but far more immediate and quite a bit more enjoyable for it.

* * *

Eels

First album: Beautiful Freak, a grunge-tinged debut with plenty of great songs...even though a lot of people seem to remember it solely for their first hit, Novocaine for the Soul.

Second album: Electro-Shock Blues, a deeper, darker set of songs. Where Beautiful Freak was all about being unable to fit in, this album dealt with the death of his sister (by suicide) and his mother (by cancer). Not always a cheery listen, but very, very good nevertheless.

* * *

Mansun

First album: Attack of the Grey Lantern, which proved that Britpop could be artistically ambitious and still reach the top of the charts. One of my favourite albums ever.

Second album: Six, and while I personally prefer Grey Lantern, there are many who disagree with me. Instead of trying to emulate the success of their debut, Paul Draper 'n' Palz just went bonkers with this album, throwing in all kinds of ideas both musical and thematic. While there are lots of proggy, challenging tracks (Shotgun and Cancer, to name two examples), there are a few classic singles on there as well - try Negative, Legacy, or Being a Girl for a slightly  easier way in.

* * *

Grandaddy

First album: Under the Western Freeway, a classic in its own right - any album with Summer Here Kids on it is dandy in my diary - although it did have a few funny loose ends that didn't seem to have any reason for being, e.g. Poisoned at Hartsy Thai Food.

Second album: The Sophtware Slump, which improved on ...Freeway in almost every way. It was more cohesive, there were themes that ran throughout the album, and by and large, the songs were better, too. The Crystal Lake and He's Simple, He's Dumb, He's the Pilot are fairly well-known (that guy from My Name is Earl even named his kid 'Pilot' after the latter song, presumably because he wanted his child to be simple and dumb), but even the less consequential tracks like 'Chartsengrafs' are gold.

* * *

Radiohead

First album: Pablo Honey, actually a pretty good album, but everything except Creep has since been overshadowed by their more recent work.

Second album: The Bends, perhaps the quintessential non-disappointing second album. It still bore a few remnants of Pablo Honey - see Black Star and Sulk - but everything else represented an astounding leap forward. Who could have imagined that the 'I'm a creep/I'm a weirdo/What the hell am I doing here?' guy would be singing the lyrics of Street Spirit only two years later?

Have a great weekend, everyone! If you think of any other second albums that were notably unterrible, leave 'em in the comments.

Concept Albums

I'm having a bit of a rest this week, but rather than neglect The Album Wall entirely, I thought I'd take this opportunity to share with you some blog posts from the past. Today's update was originally posted on my last.fm journal back in August '07:

Confession: I am a total concept album freak. If I so much as hear the same word in two songs on the same album, I'll set about looking up lyrics and drawing somewhat fanciful lines between them.

Okay, so we've got the ones that everybody knows are concepts - The Wall, Tommy, and so forth - but I'm talking more about the excitement you (well, I) draw from spotting recurring themes and ideas nestled in the records that didn't otherwise scream 'concept album'. Let's look at a few examples, shall we?

1) Attack Of The Grey Lantern

I've only recently got into Mansun. Apparently, when they were big, there was a big debate between their fans over whether or not ...Grey Lantern does, in fact, stow a concept. Yes, all the tracks flow together perfectly (I feel sorry for the Americans who had the whole thing minced up), but does it tell any kind of story? Well, one look at the lyrics should at least persuade the naysayers to reconsider their position. The title character from Dark Mavis pops up in several songs, as does the Stripper Vicar. Mansun's lyrics are pretty oblique, mind, so it's hard to work out exactly what's going on. Don't let the chorus of the hidden track, An Open Letter To The Lyrical Trainspotter ("The lyrics aren't supposed to mean that much/They're just a vehicle for a lovely voice"), put you off; apparently, lead singer Paul Draper has since admitted that the song was meant ironically.

2) Secrets of the Witching Hour

If you haven't heard of The Crimea, I would first advise you to hop over to their website (here) and download this album for free. Yes, free! I suffer from a serious case of CD scruples, so I had to get the physical version, but I'm sure the less ridiculous of you will happily take it for nothing, especially now that it has my "Seal of Approval". Download it now, I'll wait.

Now then. Secrets... is an altogether different beast to the Mansun album. Whereas the tracks of ...Grey Lantern all run into each other, some punchy with big choruses, some widescreen experiments, Davey and Co. give us 11 relatively compact pop songs-gone-bad (like a neurotic, self-loathing Beach Boys with more complex arrangements and a less camp Brian Molko doing vocals). They seem to document a) the breakup of the relationship between the narrator and his girl, and b) the end of the world. Whether these two are happening simultaneously, or if the latter is simply a metaphor for the former, or if it starts as a metaphor and then actually happens, or WHATEVER, the songs are certainly deeper than your average 3-minute pop song. Just to pick out some pivotal moments in what might be the plot: Bombay Sapphire Coma sees our protagonist regretting "disown[ing]" the girl, Don't Close Your Eyes On Me is a sort of "We ain't finished here yet" song, while Wierd [sic] is the epic final curtain (as a sidenote, it also contains the darkly brilliant line "Rapunzel above me, recieving chemotherapy/Throw down your- oh, sorry, how stupid of me").

3) Beautiful Freak

If you thought I was clutching at non-existent straws up 'til here, just wait 'til you've read this one. I reckon, right, that all Eels albums have at least an element of concept to them (most notably Electro-Shock Blues, which is pretty definitely about the death of his sister and mother). This one, however, requires a bit of imagination. I first imagined this a concept album when I noticed the similarity in theme between Beautiful Freak and  My Beloved Monster; both are about E's affection for a social outcast. Most of the other songs also deal with the narrator's OWN status as a bit of a pariah (Mental sees all of his peers describing him as such; Rags To Rags documents a down-on his luck loser's arduous struggle to the same exact spot). If you're like me, and willing to claw at whatever tiny links you're given, you might say that the borderline agoraphobia experienced in Not Ready Yet is caused by the events of Susan's House, or that the girl to whom the lyrics of Manchild are addressed is the titular "freak". Or you might not. Up to you.

4) Fevers & Mirrors

If the mock interview at the end of An Attempt To Tip The Scales is anything to go by, Conor Oberst - Mr. Bright Eyes himself - was deliberately using a lot of repeated imagery in the writing of this record, if not actually telling a story. Fevers, mirrors, scales, clocks and calendars all crop up multiple times, not to mention this enigmatic Arienette lady. Now, I have to admit, if there is a straight concept here, then I'm not entirely sure what it is. I've often considered that Arienette (who, remember, is made up, and yet "as real as you or I") may be a mental manifestation of Conor's "dream girl", who, even in his head, can make his life miserable one minute and bring him great joy the next (although, admittedly, the "great joy" to be seen in these ditties is sparse). At any rate, I'm going to leave the gaps in this one for you to fill in yourself, as I'm tired and I'm obviously unsure what I'm on about here.

5) Through The Windowpane

Last one, promise! I like to envisage this one as a sort of musical, if you will, featuring Guillemots main man Fyfe Dangerfield as our overly romantic protagonist. The album documents his (ultimately fruitless) attempts to woo his girl (a lot of girls in this list, ain't there?), including "leaving [his] best friend" (Redwings) and embarking on some big journey with her (Come Away With Me; not in a creepy rapist way, of course, more a romantic trip kinda way). Eventually, however, her constant rebuffs get to him, and he goes a bit mad (Sao Paulo). Bless. The whole "musical" idea works best if you imagine the curtain opening after the interval to reveal a lone, despondent-looking Fyfe, who bursts into Blue Would Still Be Blue, accompanied only by those weird boopy noises. Magic.

* * *

So those are my thoughts. If you're not a "lyrical trainspotter", you might just view all of this as the ramblings of a crackpot who ought to get a job. Hopefully, though, you'll have at least partially understood what I'm getting at, and you'll have some could-be concept albums of your own at the ready.

P.S. If anyone could explain to me the concept behind Modest Mouse's We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank, that'd be great, 'cause I've got no idea.

The Great Discography Binge

Above is a screenshot of the Twitter conversation that spawned today's blog post. Having never really listened to Hot Club de Paris, I can't express much of an opinion on them, but what I can do is take a look at my own library and think about which back catalogues I would happily gobble up in the space of an afternoon.

R.E.M. were my obvious first thought, and while they do have a rack-flexing fifteen albums* to get through, I'm not sure it would be all that challenging. That said, if we assume that I have to listen to all the albums in the order they were released, I would probably start losing interest in R.E.M. around the turn of the millennium. I think Reveal and Around the Sun get more criticism than they deserve, but considering what came before (not to mention how long I'd have been listening by the time Reveal came on), I think the chances of me turning off at The Lifting would be pretty high.

So I tried to think of bands with slightly slimmer discographies**, but the recurring problem is that one album that isn't as good as the others. Mansun have Little Kix. Guillemots have Walk the River, which is mind-blowingly amazing at times but does drag a little in the middle. Regular readers will already know where I would call it quits in an Arcade Fire marathon.

And then I realised that I'd known the answer all along. Eels didn't initially strike me as a particularly binge-friendly band; they average about 14 tracks per album***, and I was looking for lean, mean, bite-sized records that I wouldn't get bogged down in.

But yesterday, I listened to Shootenanny!, Beautiful Freak, Souljacker, Blinking Lights & Other Revelations, and Wonderful, Glorious all in one go, and I wasn't bored once. That's got to be at least four and a half hours of music (let's not forget that Blinking Lights... is a double album), and I never even considered switching it off. And while that admittedly isn't the order they came out in, it's not like I was only listening to the cream of the Eels catalogue; Electro-Shock Blues and Daisies of the Galaxy are E's twin masterpieces as far as I'm concerned, and I didn't even need to resort to them!

I think it's because each Eels release has such a unique, distinct personality. Souljacker is the fuzzy garage rock one. Beautiful Freak is the weird debut. Blinking Lights is the aural equivalent of an autobiography. They've all got their thing; the same could be said of R.E.M. albums up until about the mid-noughties, but Eels have yet to release their Around the Sun. Even E's less brilliant albums remain fun and colourful, adding another layer to the discography as a whole.

So if you've got some time this weekend, treat yourself to an Eelathon. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll have the time of your life.

*I'm not counting best ofs, live albums, B-side compilations, or EPs. Full-length studio albums only.

**Although I decided that less than three albums would hardly count as a 'binge'.

***And it's only that low if you count Blinking Lights & Other Revelations as two.

My Favourite Albums of 2013 So Far

It's the first of July today, and with 2013 half-gone, I wouldn't be much of a music blogger if I didn't cobble together a list of the best albums of the year...so far!

Except I don't feel especially qualified to tell everyone what 2013's "best" releases are because, well, I haven't listened to all of them. I do try to stay abreast of the good stuff, but I've glanced at some other mid-year best-ofs, and there are albums on those lists that I've not even heard of, much less listened to. So, instead, I've just grouped together a few of my favourite albums that were released in the last six months - they're not necessarily The Best, they're just the best I've heard.

Now, without further ado, let's all gaze down at the atrophied legs of 2013...

We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic by Foxygen

This album sounds like it was made in the seventies and, unlike a lot of albums that actually were made in the seventies, I love it! The slightly hippie-ish classic rock vibe ties everything together nicely, but the songs themselves are diverse enough to keep things interesting. San Francisco is a slightly twee summertime song with a lovely boy/girl duet in the chorus, while In the Darkness is more theatrical and the title track is an unhinged freak-out. Melody is never in short supply.

Praxis Makes Perfect by Neon Neon

I wonder if I'd like this record as much were it not for the jaw-dropping National Theatre Wales performance that it spawned, but I suppose that's kind of moot. This is an album with a story to tell, and while that story isn't quite as lucid when it's not being performed by actors, the LP still bristles with the intrigue and danger that typified the life of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Check out his Wikipedia page if you're curious to find out more; I'm just going to say that if you want to hear synth music that remains perfectly cool and detached while it grabs you by the balls, this is the album for you.

Pale Green Ghosts by John Grant

I've already written a lot about this album, so go and read my track-by-track review and we'll leave it at that.

La Costa Perdida by Camper Van Beethoven

This could yet prove to be my album of the summer. I'm already head-over-heels for Northern California Girls (a slow-burning, skyscraping come back to me), Peaches in the Summertime (a frantic ode to a sexy lay-day), and the title track (a sweet-ass murder song), and the other seven tracks will surely follow given another listen or two. It might be presumptuous to put a record on my Best of 2013 list before I've truly gotten into it, but frankly, those three songs alone would be enough.

Wonderful, Glorious by Eels
As lyrical content goes, this is far from E's best, but you can't fault the music. The last three albums - Hombre Lobo, End Times, and Tomorrow Morning - got a slightly mixed reaction from critics, and while I've got time for all three of them, this album is definitely superior. On the surface, it's a fuzzed-up rocker in the same vein as Souljacker (and, hey, that would have been great), but it's actually something of a rattle-bag; You're My Friend is a stuttering, staggering laptop anthem, while Accident Prone and On The Ropes are softer numbers that allow a little bit of light to shine through. Even the big, rocked-up numbers have their little diversions, which make the whole thing feel slightly proggy. I'm a big Eels fan, can you tell?

Honourable mention goes to Mosquito by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (uneven, but worth a tenner just for Despair) and Inform-Educate-Entertain by Public Service Broadcasting (great, but not as cohesive as I'd hoped). I also purchased new albums by Tullycraft, Future Bible Heroes, and Mikal Cronin over the weekend; I've not had a chance to listen to them properly yet, but they could all prove to be better than anything on this list.

Which awesome albums have I overlooked? And what will you be looking out for in the next six months? Let everybody know in the comments. 

Things Found in Liner Notes, Volume 1

If, like me, you're an advocate of buying the CD or record instead of downloading, then you've almost certainly used liner notes as an argument for the physical artefact at some point. But is an inlay booklet really worth forking out for? 90% of the time, I'd say no. But occasionally, you leaf through the liner notes and find a hidden Easter egg that makes it all worth it.

Here are some cool things I've found in my CD cases recently. This is just a smattering of stuff - the result of an afternoon's browsing - so I'll most likely share another selection of interesting inlays before too long.

• The liner notes for Key Lime Pie by Camper Van Beethoven contain interesting snippets about the band members, including a lot of information about shoes. One anecdote tells the story of how lead guitarist Greg Lisher once "lost a shoe in the Mojave Desert". There then follows a description of this shoe (black, size nine) and an address that you can send it to should you happen upon it.


• Some of the people whom Bikini Atoll saw fit to thank in the liner notes for Liar's Exit: 'Lynchriderlulu', 'The Porn', and 'That fat kid who loves cakes'.
  
  
  
  
• Manowar, being Manowar, aren't satisfied with merely listing the people who were involved in an album's creation. The Kings of Metal booklet refers to the various producers and engineers as the 'Digital Death Squad'; instead of a management team, they have a 'Vanguard of the Elite'. Oh, and their live crew are credited as 'The Magnificent Soldiers of Death'. Sounds better than 'roadie', doesn't it?


• The Young Knives have often been described as a quintessentially English group, and their first album, Voices of Animals and Men, is lined with information on such quintessentially English activities as Morris Dancing, beekeeping (see below), and Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling.
  
  
  
  
  
• While scanning the 'This album couldn't have happened without...' acknowledgements inside Jarvis Cocker's first solo album, I noticed that he'd mentioned someone named Joel. Since Jarvis didn't bother to include a surname, I can only assume that he was referring to me.


•  Electro-Shock Blues gives us Eels lyrics, yes, but the booklet also contains a few black-and-white comic strips that seem faintly pertinent to some of the songs. Here, for example, is the Baby Genius comic:

Image taken from boards.ie. Thanks to Pacifico for uploading it.

• Sufjan Stevens opted to embellish his 'here are the people who played on/contributed to Illinois' list with little comments about their performances. Example: "James McAllister plays all the sophisticated drum parts. Man, he's good!"


• The lyrics booklet for Okkervil River's I Am Very Far includes the words to a song that isn't on the album. It's called Weave Room Blues, and it was the B-side to Wake and Be Fine.


• Anyone who sprung for the CD edition of Hello Land! by the Guillemots will find this nice little poster inside the case:

As I say, there are probably loads of other cool bits and pieces hidden away in my CD collection, so I'll report back if I find anything else of interest. That's it for now, though; it takes more than a couple of hours to scale The Album Wall.