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.

The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight (Guest Post)

Today's guest blogger is Libby O'Neil, a singer-songwriter from Lawrence, Kansas. Her EP, Not Enough, came out earlier this month - you can check it out on Libby's Bandcamp page or read my review of it here.

If, having heard her music and read her thoughts on this Neko Case album, you fancy following Libby on Twitter, her handle is @libbyoneilmusic.

I was first introduced to Neko Case through The New Pornographers, but her vocal additions to A.C. Newman's songs, while lovely, pale in comparison to the power of her solo work. Over the last three decades, Case has constructed an intimidating discography; anyone who's heard even just a few minutes of her work knows that her voice alone can make the hair on your arms stand to attention.

Case's most recent solo album, The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, was released in 2013 on Anti Records. Recorded after a series of deaths in Case's family, this album is her most emotionally incisive collection of songs to date. On her previous album, Middle Cyclone, Case's characters and emotions were painted into the forces of nature; on The Worse Things Get..., Case's writing is firmly rooted in the minutiae of human life, from the slog of being a touring musician on I'm From Nowhere to the heart-breaking portrait of a child being verbally abused by their mother in Nearly Midnight, Honolulu.

EP Corner: Not Enough

We're always being told to 'live in the moment', but is that ever truly possible? This is the question at the heart of Not Enough, a new EP from Kansas-based songwriter Libby O'Neil. Across the EP's five tracks, there's a sense of struggling to stay in the present; O'Neil is trying her hardest to put both the past and the future out of mind, but inevitably, this proves to be easier said than done.

Track one is The Edge, a pretty, piano-led number that features O'Neil describing a gorgeous dawn scene before begging "please don't tell me what's beyond the edge, please don't tell me yet".

This song does an excellent job of capturing what it's like to be in the middle of a beautiful moment and desperately trying not to worry about what comes next. When our narrator sings "I need a beautiful obstruction", she's searching - perhaps in vain - for the thing that will finally get her mind completely in the present and stop her from constantly thinking ahead.