Flux Capacitor vs. Painted Shut

Last summer, I discovered a wonderful album called Flux Capacitor by a wonderful band called The Burning Hell. Regular readers (if in fact I have any) may remember that I wrote a blog post around that time all about Flux Capacitor and how its characters repeatedly manage to find power in powerlessness.

More recently, I acquired an album called Painted Shut by Hop Along. Those hypothetical regular readers will no doubt have already heard the album's standout track - the spectacular Waitress - in my May playlist, but here it is again for everyone else:

"COMMON KIIIIND, COMMON KI-I-I-I-IND IT'S A VERY COMMON KIND"

While it managed to escape my attention until only a few weeks ago, Painted Shut actually came out last year. Shortly before its release, Hop Along gave an interview with Stereogum, and Frances Quinlan - owner of that tremendous voice you were hopefully just listening to - stated that the album was "about power and lack thereof...it's about powerlessness".

I came across that Stereogum interview just the other day (having already had Painted Shut on heavy rotation for a week or two) and Quinlan's description of her album's key theme sent me straight back to Flux Capacitor. Since then, I've been listening to both albums and thinking hard about the different ways that these songs and the characters within them respond to situations that make them feel powerless.

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.

On Women in Music & 'Classic' Albums

As you may be aware, I'm currently conducting a survey on how we consume music here in the UK (if you haven't already filled it out, please do so - your contribution will be much appreciated!)

One of the questions on my survey reads as follows:

Respondents are then presented with the same list under a different heading: "Which of these albums do you own on CD, vinyl, or cassette?"

I included this pair of questions in the survey because I hoped to compare the number of people who had heard those albums with the number of people who had actually bought a physical copy. At time of writing, for example, 101 people have said that they've heard Thriller, but only 51 people profess to own a physical version. Conversely, while only 65 of my respondents have heard Bloc Party's Silent Alarm, 43 of them also own a physical copy - that's nearly two-thirds of the people who've listened to it.

The twelve albums I chose for this part of the survey represent my slapdash attempt to cover several different genres so as to see if fans of a certain genre are more likely to get physical than fans of another. There's the hip-hop album (To Pimp a Butterfly), the heavy metal album (Master of Puppets), the classic rock album (A Night at the Opera), and so forth.

But while Queen, Metallica, and Kendrick Lamar are each associated with very different types of music, they all have one thing in common, as do all but three of the other artists on my list. Can you guess what it is?

They're all men.