Songs About Albums: Volume 2 Coming Soon!

UPDATE (10 DEC 2016)

Songs About Albums: Volume 2 is now available to download from Bandcamp and SoundCloud!

* * *

Well, it's been a long time coming, but the second volume of Songs About Albums is finally almost ready!

For those who don't remember, Songs About Albums was a free-to-download compilation that The Album Wall released last year via Bandcamp and SoundCloud. It featured 10 songs by 10 different artists, each of whom chose a favourite album to sing about. There were heartfelt tributes to Murmur, Shoot Out the Lights, Transatlanticism, and a whole bunch of other LPs; it was rad, and now there's going to be another volume of it.

April Playlist: Shut Your Dirty Mouth

Another month has come to an end, and that means it's time for another month-end playlist. Here are 10 tracks that I thoroughly enjoyed listening to in April:

1. By the Throat - Laurence Made Me Cry

(from Titans' Daughters)

The first track from Jo Whitby's new EP signals a darkening of tone and a raising of stakes. Read my review of Titans' Daughters here.

EP Corner: Titans' Daughters

Jo Whitby (a.k.a. Laurence Made Me Cry) released her first album, The Diary of Me, back in 2013. It was, for the most part, a gently lovely folk album, but weirder tracks like Intelligent Mister Toad and Remedy demonstrated that Whitby had no qualms about putting down her acoustic guitar and  experimenting with electronic stuff when the feeling took her.

Three years on from The Diary of Me (which, by the by, was nominated for the 2013 Welsh Music Prize), we have Titans' Daughters, the first of two EPs that Laurence Made Me Cry will reportedly be releasing this year. From the off, it's clear that Whitby's interest in the more electronic end of the musical spectrum has overtaken her desire to write finger-picked acoustic numbers; as much as I loved All That Patience Brings and the bright Bagpuss beauty of Between Destinations, the redoubled focus on synthesised sounds gives this EP has a darker, more dramatic atmosphere that's difficult to resist. From By the Throat onwards, you can really hear that the stakes have been raised:

Songs About Albums: Volume 2 is Coming!

You all remember Songs About Albums: Volume 1, right? It was a free-to-download compilation consisting of ten musical homages to such excellent LPs as Murmur and Tindersticks II and The Blue Album. It came out back in June - you can listen to it here if you missed it first time around.

Now, if you enjoyed Songs About Albums: Volume 1, you'll no doubt be pleased to learn that Songs About Albums: Volume 2 is coming very soon indeed. There's no solid release date yet, but I've already sorted out a list of ten contributors, and all being well, their tributes to their favourite albums will be online by the end of January 2016 at the latest.

In the meantime, here are a couple of things to whet your appetite. The artwork, supplied once again by the fabtastic Nest of Cogs, is already in the bag - here's what it looks like:

Rather eye-catching, no? But that's not all, dear reader! It gives me great pleasure to reveal that one of the ten tracks that will eventually make up Songs About Albums: Volume 2 is already done, dusted, and available to hear RIGHT NOW.

Welsh Music Prize: 3 Months On

The nominees for the 2013 Welsh Music Prize were announced back in September, and since I'd only heard one of the albums on the shortlist, I resolved that I would listen to all of them before the award ceremony in mid-October. And I did - you can see the blogs I wrote for each album by clicking here.

Exactly three months have passed since (SPOILER ALERT!) Georgia Ruth took home the prize for her album, Week of Pines. I thought that today would be a good opportunity to look back on those twelve albums, and to see if my feelings towards them have changed. Let's go:

Fist of the First Man by Fist of the First Man

I'm still not overly keen on this, with one important exception: once I'd listened to all twelve albums on the shortlist, I made a playlist of the best songs from each one, and Volta Regulat made an excellent opener. The rest, well...I can take it or leave it. See them live if you can, but don't shed too many tears if you can't get your hands on their CD.

WMP Nominees - Laurence Made Me Cry

As you may well have noticed by now, I'm listening to each Welsh Music Prize-nominated album in turn and blogging my thoughts thereon. You can keep up with my progress on The Album Wall's dedicated Welsh Music Prize 2013 page.

First of all, I would like to say thank you to Jo Whitby - for Laurence Made Me Cry is she - for making The Diary of Me one of them 'pay what you want' albums. I was beginning to worry that purchasing every album necessary for this Welsh Music Prize adventure might well ruin me, and while I do feel a little guilty for not stumping up more than £2, my pockets are certainly glad to have had that option.

Anyway, on to the music. This is a very nice album indeed, and it makes great fodder for a game of 'Who Does This Song Sound Like?' Some tracks sound a bit like The Staves, other songs have a bit of Chairlift running through them. Remedy, the second track, sounds like a Tindersticks spoken word track in the verse and a skittery, post-millennial Radiohead song in the chorus. I could go on.

And in fact I will. Paper Chains is very Björk, while Intelligent Mister Toad reminds me of The Magnetic Fields (their very old stuff, with Susan Anway as lead vocalist instead of Stephin Merritt). You know I've got a raging music boner on when I mention them.

I can't find the album version of Intelligent Mister Toad on YouTube, so here's one of the songs it reminds me of instead. The dreamy atmosphere, the mishmash of sounds drifting in and out...it's very much that sort of thing. Jo's vocals are kind of similar too, although the mix on The Diary of Me is much less murky than this.

I haven't mentioned my two favourites yet. The first - and this one I did manage to find on YouTube - is a beautiful number called Between Destinations. It has that wonderful quality of sounding like something very familiar that you can't quite put your finger on, although if I had to compare it to something, I'd say that it sounds like a 21st century version of the music from Bagpuss. The faux train announcement is a sweet touch, too - speaking as someone who lives in Cardiff, it sounds very much like home.

The other song, which I perhaps like even more, is called A Channeling/Northern Lights. It's the album's penultimate track, and it's one of those songs that just builds up layers of different sounds and, unusually for a gentle folktronica record like this, really gets your body moving. Again, no YouTube clip of this one, so you'll have to use your imagination (or, y'know, get the album). 

So...is it better than Praxis Makes Perfect?

You know what? It might be. They're very different albums, and I think I'll need a week or so to decide for certain, but the signs are definitely promising. Where Praxis... is a very concise album, bringing the big choruses in bulk and sprinkling them with cold, cold synthesiser ice cubes, The Diary of Me is a nice, warm album that you can really get lost in, and sometimes that's just as enjoyable.

It's odd, really. My WMP odyssey has touched upon five albums so far (not including Praxis Makes Perfect), and my two favourites - this and February by Winter Villains - are also the two softest ones, the two that I expected to be a little bored by. Perhaps I'm just softening in my old age, but this shortlist has done nothing but surprise me so far and I hope it continues to do so.

Incidentally, I'm kicking this little adventure into high gear now that it's October. Every blog post between now and the big announcement will be about a Welsh Music Prize album; come back on Friday for my take on Zervas & Pepper's Lifebringer.