June Playlist: This Ledge I'm On

Welcome to the second half of 2016, motherfuckers! As June is now over, here are 10 of the tracks I've been rocking on the regular over the past month...

1. It Was Christmas When I Fell Apart - Little My

(from Beeps)
Contrary to what this song's title might suggest, Little My's Beeps is a lovely, summery listen with loads and loads of fun pop moments. Read my review here.

The Midnight Organ Fight

Roughly five years have passed since I heard Frightened Rabbit's The Midnight Organ Fight for the first time, and yet it was only a few weeks ago that I looked at that title again and said to myself, "Hey, that's a euphemism for fucking, isn't it?"

In fact, upon revisiting Organ Fight, I found a lot more references to sex than I remembered. Okay, Keep Yourself Warm was always pretty obviously about casual sexual encounters ("It takes more than fucking someone you don't know to keep warm"), but I never really noticed until now what Scott Hutchison was singing about on songs like The Twist and Fast Blood.

"Midnight organ fight, yours gives in to mine..."

Knees Up!

To be honest, today's blog is going to be a bit quick and rubbish because I'm preparing to hit the Knee Deep Festival for the second consecutive year (I'll be playing the drums for Scriber, just one of the many brilliant people mentioned on my new 'Friends of This Blog' page).

3 New Beginnings

I wanted to do an Easter-themed blog for Good Friday, but what exactly does an Easter-themed blog about albums look like? Easter doesn't have nearly as much good music as Christmas does - once you've listened to Jesus Christ Superstar, you've pretty much exhausted this holiday's repertoire.

I considered 'songs about chocolate' as a topic (Chocolate Jesus by Tom Waits, Chocolate by Tindersticks...that could have been quite a fun one actually), but since Easter is all about fresh starts and the arrival of springtime and fluffy bunnies and newly-hatched chicks and that sort of thing, I thought I'd do this one instead.

Here are three albums that marked bold new beginnings for the artists who made them. Each one represented a press of the reset button, a departure from the ditches that had previously been dug, or a shift onto new shores at the very least. Happy Easter!

Embryonic by The Flaming Lips

At War with the Mystics and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots weren't exactly anodyne AOR unit-shifters, but compared to 2009's Embryonic (and everything that The Flaming Lips have released since), those albums look like bubblegum. This album demonstrated just how weird Wayne Coyne and his merry men could be when they cut loose; out went the whimsical songs about autumn birds and karate girls, and in came a faintly nightmarish collection about goodness knows what. Pressing 'play' on this one and hearing Convinced of the Hex for the first time must have been quite an experience for anyone who expected another Yoshimi.