September Playlist: Come What May

Blimey, another month over - this place will be filled with Christmas music before long!

In the meantime, here are 10 of the tracks that have been tickling my fancy over the last 30 days. Click here for last month's playlist.

1. Grown-Ups - The Burning Hell

(from People)
I spent roughly 700 words analysing this album's closing track last week. Today, I'd like to draw your attention to the equally ace opening track - from the awesome first line ("You were a Nazi hunter...") to the wistfully ambiguous ending ("By the time you read this..."), Grown-Ups is the perfect representation of what it's like to not be a kid any more.

New Grandaddy Album?!

Yesterday, Jason Lytle tweeted this:

GD, of course, is shorthand for Grandaddy, Lytle's scruffy sci-fi alt. rock band. After disbanding in 2006, Grandaddy reunited for a few gigs in 2012, but we haven't heard any new material from them since Just Like the Fambly Cat, which was released over nine years ago.

Frankly, I wasn't expecting to ever hear another new Grandaddy song (let alone a full album), and judging by the reaction to Jason Lytle's tweet, neither was anybody else:

However, it appears that Grandaddy are indeed hard at work on a new LP, and while we'll probably have to wait a while even to find out the release date, we can at least speculate on what the follow-up to Just Like the Fambly Cat might sound like.

ROPSWEDs

I love it when bands include references to their old songs within the lyrics of their new songs. Those little nods to previous work help to tie discographies together, making everything seem like one body of work rather than a series of similar-sounding but ultimately unrelated CDs.

The literature word for this is intertextuality, but that's a clunky word that makes you sound like a dork, so I've decided to give those little callbacks a new name: ROPSWEDs. It stands for:

Remember Our Previous Stuff? We Evidently Do!

So yeah, here are some of my favourite ROPSWEDs:

Sing for the Submarine by R.E.M. (from Accelerate)
Released in the spring of 2008, Accelerate was one big olive branch to R.E.M. fans after the disappointingly bland Around the Sun. The band deliberately returned to a more invigorating, rocked-up sound on their 14th album, and they played a whole bunch of cool tracks from their early days on the subsequent Accelerate Tour (check out the Live at the Olympia album for a sample of that).

Sing for the Submarine remains my favourite track from Accelerate, and it includes yet another nod to their past in the form of this great little ROPSWED:

"So this is where I give in to the machine. Lift up your voice, feel gravity's pull."

What I Got For Christmas

So Christmas Day is receding into the distance and all we've got left to remember it by are leftovers and, if we're lucky, some good presents. As you'd expect, CDs tend to make up a healthy percentage of my seasonal Stack O' Loot, and this December was no different. Here's a quick rundown of the albums I got for Christmas this year, along with explanations of why I asked for them in the first place.