October Playlist: Can We All Please

October's over, the clocks have gone back, and as we all know, music sounds better at this time of year. Here are 10 tracks that have been sounding pretty good to me over the last few weeks...

1. I Don't Want Love by The Antlers

(from Burst Apart)

And neither would you if you'd survived Hospice, the Antlers album that preceded this one. Here's something I wrote about Burst Apart (originally released in 2011) a few weeks ago.

2. Simultaneous Contrasts by Warehouse

(from Super Low)

Probably the most accessible track from Warehouse's unpredictable new album Super Low, which I reviewed here.

On Getting Excited for Sad Albums

When I learned last year that Nick Cave's 15-year-old son Arthur had fallen to his death, my reaction was of course one of sadness and horror and deepest sympathy. However, when I learned earlier this year that Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds had a new album coming out, I was excited - not just because I like Nick Cave's music, but because the circumstances surrounding the new album's conception would surely make for an extremely emotive listen.

As long-time and possibly even short-time readers of this blog will know, I love depressing music. I love listening to sad songs and sinking into that sadness and luxuriating in it, feeling what the artist is feeling as I listen. Here's something I wrote in anticipation of Skeleton Tree, that at-the-time forthcoming Bad Seeds album, back in July:

This, Nick Cave's sixteenth album with The Bad Seeds, has the potential to be a very harrowing listen indeed. It's Cave's first set of new material since his son died at the age of fifteen last year, and one can only speculate how he will translate this tragedy into music. I'm personally hoping for something along the lines of 1997's gloomy The Boatman's Call.

When I wrote that, I was actively trying not to sound too ghoulishly thrilled that Arthur Cave had, in death, provided his father with some A-grade material for his next album, but in truth I was really, really looking forward to hearing the bleak aftermath of that accident (Nick Cave described himself as feeling 'paralysed' after it happened) set to music. And that's kind of horrible, isn't it? Obviously I would never hope for Death to darken the doorstep of a favourite artist and cast the shadow of sadness over their songwriting, but I have been feeling kind of guilty nonetheless.

Skeleton Tree came out last month and it proved, if anything, to be an even bleaker listen than miseryphiles like me could reasonably have hope for. It doesn't sound very much like The Boatman's Call at all; whereas that record took a simple sadness that we're used to hearing in pop songs (the sadness felt at the end of a relationship) and expressed it using death as a metaphor, the altogether more complex new album looks into the abyss of death itself, inevitably resulting in a far more confrontational listening experience. Listening to The Boatman's Call is like putting on a hoodie that you purloined from an ex-lover: it might make you feel a little melancholy, but it's warm and it's comfortable. Neither of those adjectives could reasonably be applied to Skeleton Tree, on which the Bad Seeds create a sparse, barren soundscape just to see if life can still flourish there. Skeleton Tree is the sound of Nick Cave unflinchingly challenging himself to find wonder and beauty and reasons to carry on in a world that was harsh enough to rob him of his child. In the end, he manages it - Rings of Saturn and Distant Sky offer a glimmer of hope, a sense of life somehow going on - but this is still easily the most devastating CD you'll put in your stereo this year.

Albums of 2016: 3 to Look Forward To

About a month ago, I shared my ten favourite albums of the first half of 2016. The big question now, of course, is how many of those albums will stick with me long enough to make my proper end-of-year list in December.

To be fair, I've already heard some albums that would've made my halfway list in June had I heard them in time - Mitski's superb Puberty 2, for one. But today, I'd like to look ahead to the coming months and focus on a trio of forthcoming albums that I'm very excited to hear. Don't be surprised if all of these end up in my final countdown come December - if the ten artists who made the list last month are wondering who they ought to be worried about, I'd suggest that these are the top three contenders:

Away by Okkervil River

Release Date: 9th of September

 I love Okkervil River. I have loved them since my first year of university, but I've fallen even deeper even love with them recently, mostly thanks to the release of The Silver Gymnasium (which I spent a whole week blogging about) in 2013 and my belated discovery of the even better Down the River of Golden Dreams early last year. Now they've got a new record on the way - I already adore it for its gorgeous cover art (above), and the two songs they've released so far are very promising indeed. Check out nostalgic heartstring-tugger The Industry below.

3 Halloween Party Alternatives

The 31st of October has had relatively few songs dedicated to it over the years. Whereas innumerable artists have released Christmas albums, I'm not sure anybody has ever entered the studio and recorded an LP's worth of Halloween-themed material; even Halloween singles are few and fairly far between.

This dearth of spooky music means that every Halloween party in the country will be dancing to the same handful of songs this coming weekend. The Monster Mash, Warren Zevon's Werewolves of London, the entire Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack...these are the songs that soundtrack our fancy-dressing and apple-bobbing year after year after year.

So, if you're throwing a party of your own this Saturday, why not shake things up a little? Here are three appropriately Halloweeny albums that you can toss on if you fancy a change from the usual stuff:

The Royal Society by The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster

A slightly lengthier listen than its predecessor, the blink-and-you'll-miss-it Horse of the Dog, this album is a ghost train rollercoaster ride that's almost cartoonishly fiendish in places.

Key Halloweeny Track: Puppy Dog Snails

Break-Up Albums Lied to Me

First, some news: I recently broke up with Sarah, my girlfriend of five years. There was no massive, explosive argument, no unforgivable betrayal from which the relationship couldn't possibly recover; we just agreed that things had run their course and that, while it had been a wonderful experience for both of us, it was time to call it a day.

Obviously, the last week or so has been somewhat stressful (breaking it to my parents was the hardest part), but I was also a little bit excited - believe it or not, this is the first and only break-up I've ever been through, and once things were set in stone (that is, once I'd changed my Facebook status from 'In a Relationship' to 'Single), I was perversely thrilled to finally have an excuse to listen to all of the horribly depressing break-up albums I've accrued over the last decade or so.

"Wait, is that R.E.M.'s Out of Time? Is this idiot trying to tell us that the album with Shiny Happy People on it is 'horribly depressing'?"

Reports of Snow

Break-up albums are at their best when they're painting the break-up as if it were something bigger and badder. Nick Cave spends much of The Boatman's Call acting like his lover died instead of merely leaving; Secrets of the Witching Hour takes the end of a relationship and turns it into the apocalypse, like an epic pop update of The End of the World by Skeeter Davis.

And then there's Reports of Snow. Abe Davies, the man behind Reichenbach Falls, sent me a copy of his album to listen to and, hey, it's good! If you like Wilco and Ryan Adams and the like, you should hop over to bandcamp and give Abe a go because you'll probably like him too.

But I digress. Reports of Snow pulls The Crimea's trick several times over, framing its earth-shattering breakup as a blizzard, a plane crash, a murder, and goodness knows what else. I'm gonna spotlight a few tracks to dig out the guts of this set:

• Drink & Drive
  This is the opening song, and it serves as a warning of the trouble to come. It opens with a soft, tinkling piano figure that - appropriately enough - sounds just like falling snow; in the chorus, Abe observes that "she's just another way to drink and drive", already aware that this relationship could well end in disaster.


• In The Wreckage
  By the time we reach track 4, the inevitable split has already hit. In The Wreckage finds Abe waking up on the morning after the break-up as the memories come flooding back to him: "I woke with the blast and remembered, felt myself feeling it all". He then follows "the smoke and the sirens", returns to the place where they "put [them]selves to rest", and picks through the debris, exploring the remains of his dead relationship. Some things, he discovers, were "dead before the blast", suggesting that this calamity may have been a long time coming.
  
  Oddly, the song's repeated refrain is a holler of "its a miracle!" Is it a miracle that he survived? Or is he happy, on some level, that the dreaded break-up is now over and done with, a thing of the past? Perhaps there is a sense of ripped-off plaster relief in the aftermath: "I think of us as the fallen leaves that never have to fall again".


• Blessed Blush
  This is where the album's title comes from: "I made up dreams about dying, I made up reports of snow." Why did he make this stuff up? I'm not completely sure that I'm hearing the lyrics correctly, but I think Abe sings that it was "just to leave a trace". When I initially thought about the title, I assumed that the "reports of snow" were those tragic, tell-tale signals that your relationship is heading into dire straits. In the light of that line, though, I wonder if those reports were actually the little lies that our protagonist told his lady friend in the hope that she'd find him a little more interesting, or at least think of him a little more fondly after the end.


• In The Woods
  When I mentioned murder, this is the track I was talking about. It starts off sounding very creepy indeed: "In the woods, there's a search party now, but...in my room I hid the body" Wow - is this a poetic metaphor, or is he telling us that he literally murdered his girlfriend for breaking up with him?
  
  But later lines make it clear that the murder simply stands for the end of whatever it was they had: "The grave was the bed where we slept, and carved on the headstone the secrets we kept". If the relationship has died a death, then this song is the funeral, and we are watching the pallbearers lug away the remains.

I recently finished reading a book called This Will End in Tears; it's all about miserable songs of various types, and there's a whole section dedicated to break-up songs. The author mentions the common "heartbreak=death" trope, as seen in He Stopped Loving Her Today by George Jones and the Nick Cave material that I mentioned earlier. For the various ways in which it portrays breaking up as something far more disastrous, Reports of Snow may well merit a mention in the second edition.

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.

Orpheuses

Greek mythology lends itself to rock music surprisingly well, and there's one myth in particular that I've heard retold in quite a few different songs. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice seems to be very fertile ground for songwriters; in today's blog post, I'll be looking at three artists who have tackled the tale and taken it in their own unique direction.

What I Missed - Uncut's Best of 2013

So December is here and the end-of-year lists are rolling in. I will be posting my own list on the blog in due course, but I thought I'd do a small disclaimer first. I haven't listened to anything like the number of albums that most listmakers will be drawing from this month; where magazines and proper music websites probably get sent a tonne of new releases each month, most of the albums in my Top However Many will be ones that I went out and bought.

This leaves me with a pretty limited longlist - my favourite albums of 2013 will by no means bear any resemblance to the actual best albums of 2013. I've pretty much finalised my list already (I just need to put everything in order), but for the sake of diversity, I thought I'd have a look at some of the other albums of the year to see if I've missed anything big.

As I mentioned in this blog post, I'm a semi-avid Uncut reader, so while I was faintly curious to see what the likes of Q and Mojo had at number one, it was the Uncut list that I was really interested in. Since their end-of-year issue rather handily came supplied with a free CD of ongs from their favourite albums of 2013, I figured that a quick blast through those 14 tracks would be a good way to dip a toe in the murky musical waters that I failed to explore this year.

Kill 'Em All

Please note: this blog post has nothing to do with Metallica's first album. In fact, I've never even heard Metallica's first album. Is it good?

So I really like Game of Thrones, and one of the best things about watching it is trying to guess who will die next. Given the programme's 'anyone can die' reputation, relatively few major characters have been killed off so far (see the full list here), but my dad has read the books and he gleefully assures me that the worst is yet to come.

It's hard to create engaging, three-dimensional characters over the course of a song, and harder still to get your listeners so attached to those characters that they're upset when you kill them off. None of three albums listed below ever emulate Game's ability to make you go 'holy moly, I can't believed they did away with him', and frankly, none of them really endeavour to. You'd need a proper concept album with recurring characters to make that happen, and that's not what these LPs are about.

But just because each song has its own set of characters doesn't mean that the artists are any less excited at the prospect of giving those characters a grisly death. Without further ado, then, here are three albums with a body count that George R. R. Martin would be proud of:

Picaresque by The Decemberists
Colin Meloy and Co. have never shied away from a gruesome tale, and by my count, Picaresque is the most corpse-strewn of all their albums.

Final Body Count? At least five: the suicide lovers in We Both Go Down Together, the mother in The Mariner's Revenge Song, and Eli the Barrow Boy and his lady friend. Then we have the "fifteen celebrity minds" and the "sixteen military wives" who get served to the cannibal kings in Sixteen Military Wives; assuming they all get eaten, that brings our total to 36. It's probably a safe bet that both mariners in the Revenge Song cop it as well, given that we leave them inside a whale (not to mention the fact that one is about to be murdered by the other). That makes 38, and that's ignoring the countless unnamed seamen who were "chewed alive" by that whale.

Too Long In This Condition by Alasdair Roberts & Friends
A collection of traditional folk songs (always good for a grim demise or two) as interpreted by the Scottish singer and his pals. More or less every song features at least one kick of the bucket.

Final Body Count? I counted 14, but that figure doesn't include the people who presumably perish in The Burning of Auchindoun or the crew of the "Spanish galley" that is sunk by the boy from The Golden Vanity.

Murder Ballads by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
An obvious choice. At just under an hour long, this murderous little platter averages out to roughly one death per minute.

Final Body Count? A whopping 65, according to Wikipedia. It isn't clear whether or not that number includes the dog that gets "crucified" in The Curse of Millhaven.

The Lyre of Orpheus

I closed Friday's blog post with Supernaturally by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, and at some point during the intervening weekend, it occurred to me how often I listen to its parent album, The Lyre of Orpheus, and how seldom I listen to the other half of that album, Abattoir Blues.

There are plenty of double albums in my collection, but Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus is the only one that I tend to take as two separate albums (possibly along with that Outkast album). I think if the two sets were simply labelled Disc 1 and Disc 2 - as 95% of other double albums are - I would be more inclined to listen to the whole thing as one sole work, but since Mr. Cave was kind enough to give each CD a proper name, I sometimes forget that they're two halves of the same album.

As for why I prefer TLoO to AB...well, my tough-eared teenage self would cringe if he could read this, but The Lyre of Orpheus is just an easier listen. Abattoir Blues is good fun, sure, but there are a lot of harsh sounds that make it somewhat harder to enjoy. Aside from the demonstrable Cave classics like Nature Boy and There She Goes, My Beautiful World, the half-album mostly manifests itself in the form of drawn-out jams with silly, slightly violent lyrics. Again, it's fun, but not as out-and-out excellent as its counterpart.

Of course, TLoO isn't short on gore - listen to the title track for a prime example - but on the whole, the focus is on love and relationships, which is much easier to swallow than AB's unhealthy obsession with more visceral stuff. Compare these two tracks; the first is from Abattoir Blues, the second is from The Lyre of Orpheus:

Hiding All Away is plenty enjoyable, but the stuff about the chef making the woman climb inside his oven puts me slightly ill-at-ease. For one reason or another, I'd much sooner listen to Nick Cave sing about putting his hand down someone's panties.

Oddly enough, I had assumed pre-purchase that I'd prefer Abattoir Blues. I had it in my head that the first disc was full of big, rocked-up numbers, while the second disc was softer and more acoustic. I wasn't entirely wrong, but as it turns out, sensitive Nick Cave can sometimes be even better than rocked-up Nick Cave. I was surprised, but just listen to Breathless and tell me you'd rather listen to something with a drumkit and a Marshall stack behind it:

Besides, The Lyre of Orpheus isn't devoid of rockers - Supernaturally demonstrated that quite ably on Friday.

Can you think of any other double-disc sets that really do feel like two separate records? Leave your suggestions in the comments.

Thou Shalt Not Track-Skip

My girlfriend's father - he could write a blog or two about albums, I don't doubt - has often preached that track-skipping is a cardinal sin, and that when listening to an album, one ought to listen to it properly. Of course, he's a vinyl man, and track-skipping on a turntable is more trouble than it's worth, but I listen to most of my music on portable devices and I hold more or less the same view. Even when I'm not enjoying a song and I'm keen to proceed to the next one, I very seldom hit the skip button; if the artist deemed this song worthy of a place on their LP, who am I to pooh-pooh it?

Recently, though, I've realised that I might not be the saintly, skip-shunning listener I took myself for. After all, I was all too happy to lop two tracks off the Public Service Broadcasting album, reconfiguring the band's artistic vision for my own listening pleasure - is skipping a track in the middle really any different?

Well, yes, I'd contest that it is. When you hit the skip button right in the middle of a song, you're interrupting the flow of the album, raising your palm to the band as they rock out and going "nah, not keen on that one, what else have you got?" If you like an album, you'll listen to the whole thing, even the naff bits; if you find yourself skipping all over the place, you probably like the individual tracks more than you like the album. In fact, my main reason for beheading the PSB album was the presence of Spitfire, an earlier single that had already found a good home on their previous EP and felt like a bonus track on the full album. If you just want to hear your favourite songs, make a playlist and listen to that instead!

This is kind of related to my hatred of being interrupted while I listen to an album. Even if I pause the music and start listening again from the exact same spot, the effect is ruined. I'm no longer immersed in the world that the album has created, and now I'm starting again from some random spot in the middle of a song.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of songs that I love even when taken out of the album context. Heck, I could name quite a few albums that are rubbish apart from one song, and I appreciate that there's no point wading through forty-five minutes of dross to reach a track that you could have just listened to on its own.

But if this amazing song's parent album is even halfway decent, I always find it far more rewarding to hear that song in context. Its place on the tracklist gives it an extra dimension, and like the heart-in-throat first chords of the song you came to the gig to hear, it will sound all the better for the journey.