November Playlist: Winter's On The Phone

Hey everyone - it's December! But before you break out the Christmas hits, here are 10 non-Yuletide tracks that I really enjoyed listening to in November and that I hope you'll enjoy listening to right now.

1. Holy Hell It's Cold by Quiet Marauder

(from MEN)

I tend to revisit MEN (originally released in 2013 - read my three-year-old review of it here) every year at around this time, and this rib-tickling but also slightly sobering cut seemed like an appropriate choice given the current temperature outside.

2. Treaty by Leonard Cohen

(from You Want it Darker)

You Want it Darker - which it's probably safe to assume was written and recorded by a Leonard Cohen who knew that he would soon be dead - has a certain duality to it. Many of its songs make it sound like Len had made his peace with the world and was ready to go, but a couple of songs (including Seemed the Better Way and this beautiful number) suggest a certain amount of regret, a desire to go back and change something. More thoughts on You Want it Darker here.

EP Corner: Quarters

Matthew Pastkewicz was one of the many talented musicians heard on MEN, the record-breaking, quadruple-disc, 111-track debut album from Cardiff's favourite bedlamites Quiet Marauder.

Quarters, an EP that Pastkewicz released under his own name earlier this year, is absolutely nothing like MEN. For one thing, it has 109 fewer tracks, making it pretty short even by EP standards. For a second thing, its two songs have more in common with Mogwai and their Rock Action roster than with the lo-fi, melodica-heavy unfolk in which Quiet Marauder specialise. Pastkewicz's own press release thingy describes his sound as "drone based post-rock", but speaking as someone who briefly heard drone daddies Sunn O))) boring the Primavera crowd to death back in June, I will say that Quarters is far more exciting than that description might suggest.

June Playlist: Set the Silverware Shaking

Another month has come and gone, which means that it's time for another monthly digest playlist thing! Here are ten of the songs that kept me boppin' last month...

1. The Stranger Fair - Jack Hayter and Ralegh Long

(from Songs About Albums: Volume 1)

I could have chosen any of the ten tracks from Songs About Albums for this month's playlist, but this beautiful tribute to Richard and Linda Thompson's Shoot Out the Lights seemed like a wonderful way to kick things off. If you haven't downloaded the compilation yet, go here now - it's free!

11 Shades of Love: Track-by-Track

You may remember Quiet Marauder as the creators of MEN, the 111-track quadruple album that came out towards the end of 2013, topped my Albums of the Year list that December, and made us all think long and hard about what it means to be a man. Conversely, you may never have heard of Quiet Marauder in your life, in which case the previous sentence probably blew your mind a little.

Either way, Quiet Marauder are back. Their second album, entitled 11 Shades of Love, is out today (buy it here), and while it's only one-tenth as long as its predecessor, I'm pleased to report that the band are still needling humankind's little foibles and nonsenses with just as much accuracy as in 2013.

Songs of Innocence, Words of Nonsense

U2 did some sort of Q&A session on Facebook last week and things got slightly awkward when - to the surprise of no one - they were called out on their decision to force new album Songs of Innocence into every iTunes library on the planet. Here's how it went:

Q: "Can you please never release an album on iTunes that automatically downloads to people's playlists ever again? It's really rude."

Bono:  "Oops. Sorry about that...I had this beautiful idea and we got carried away with ourselves. Artists are prone to that kind of thing. A drop of megalomania, a touch of generosity, a dash of self-promotion, and deep fear that these songs that we poured our life into over the last few years mightn't be heard."

As my emboldening suggests, it's the last part of that sentence fragment in which I'm interested today. I'll admit that I did feel a pang of sympathy for U2 when I first heard Bono's apology - after all, I've written songs, and I know better than Bono what it's like to wonder if anyone will ever actually listen to them.

But yesterday, I found myself re-reading that quote, and my sympathy gave way to annoyance. Now I realise that, if Bono really cared about those songs, he chose the worst possible way to release them.

In Defense of Pretense

Today, I'd like to tell you about my friend Mark (don't worry, he won't mind - he never reads my blod anyway). Mark is a big music fan, but he does have a frustrating tendency to dismiss bands for being pretentious. It's very much his go-to excuse; if he doesn't like a song, or an album, or an artist, he'll play the 'pretentious' card:

"What do you think of these guys, Mark? I bought their new album the other day, and-"

"Ugh, they're a bit pretentious..."

Quiet Marauder, who of course released a 111-song album about men last year, are a prime example of a great band whom Mark considers 'pretentious'.

Hub Festival 2014: 5 of the Best

How's your bank holiday weekend been thus far? I've spent a fair chunk of mine on Cardiff's legendary Womanby Street, where the 2014 Hub Festival was in full swing until a few hours ago. It's been a hoot, although with three sets of my own to play (two as Shiny Tiger, one on the drums for Scriber), I must admit that I didn't see as many bands as I might have liked to.

Still, I did catch a few crackers - here are five of the best, listed in the order in which I saw them:

(One-sentence descriptions only, sorry. I'm tired, and it's Bank Holiday Monday!)

Zinc Bukowski

Noisy and awesome and the drummer looked like Jesus so that's always a plus.

Am I Supposed to Understand This?

"Beneath his surface of corruscating omniscience beats a kindly heart. He seems to want you to be in on his jokes, to share the joyous agility of his conceptual and linguistic leaps, the abundance of his cornucopiously stocked memory, and not to sit gazing at him from the cheap seats in resentful admiration."

The above quote is taken from David Gates' introduction to Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme, a book that I just started reading. Now, I've read some Barthelme before, and his stories are bonkers - they mess tirelessly with structure and language whilst constantly teetering on the edge of nonsense. Much of Forty Stories (the Barthelme collection I've already read) seemed designed to baffle; Gates' introduction was reassuring, in a way, because it suggested that Barthelme's writing actually does make sense if you read around it. Apparently, Barthelme was always happy to explain himself when questioned in interviews and the like. It's just that he draws from a very diverse reference pool, one that no normal human could hope to comprehend.

All of which got me wondering about albums. Do bands and artists do enough to help us fully understand their work? And how often do they actually want us to understand it in the first place?

Songs and albums are like frogs - it's hard to dissect them using only your ears. If my Silver Gymnasium blogs taught me anything, it's that hearing something is rarely enough to form an idea of its meaning, no matter how hard you listen. I mean, my guesses about that album were all over the place until I glanced at the liner notes - I thought it was about a hiking trip gone awry, when really it's Will Sheff taking a good, long look at his smalltown childhood.

That's one important distinction between books and albums: the liner notes, which give the artist a platform to flesh things out and reveal a little more about the songs on the CD. The Okkervil River album came wrapped in all kinds of supplementary material, and while none of the answers it provided were especially straightforward, it certainly helped to bring the album to life.

And that's before you discover the interactive map.

Of course, some artists squander this platform and opt to waste the inlay on band photos and artist credits. Do they do this because they don't want us to over-analyse their music when we should be enjoying it? Or because they think the meanings are self-evident? Or because they want us to listen for ourselves and draw our own conclusions, instead of being spoon-fed the 'true' meaning?

There's a whole 'death of the author' argument that I could get into here, but instead, I'm going to show you a conversation I had on Twitter recently. For reference, Fbb is a rather good song from Quiet Marauder's MEN (a.k.a the best album of 2013):

So this is an example of a guess theory I came up with when I didn't have any actual facts to hand. And, as it turns out, my guess theory was actually more interesting than the golden nugget of truth at the heart of it all. In fact, Simon from Quiet Marauder said it himself:

So perhaps this is why artists don't spell it out on the back of the sleeve. Not so much because they name their songs by slapping the keyboard and hoping that someone will read too much into it, but because song meanings are more interesting when the listener chisels 'em out on his or her own. Even if your guess theory is wrong, it's still valid and it ensures that the song will always mean that little bit more to you.

One plea, though, to songwriters. I don't care if you hide your song's meaning behind oblique poetry and obscure pop culture references that only Google will be able to explain to me. I don't care if you get all coy and evasive whenever an interviewer asks what the hell it all means (this, incidentally, is a crime of which Quiet Marauder certainly cannot be accused). I don't care if you take those secrets to your grave, leaving your fans to piece together whatever small meanings they can, forever frustrated by the knowledge that they're probably incorrect.

Just promise me that there's a meaning in there somewhere. It's no fun cooking up theories about, say, Monkey Gone to Heaven by the Pixies...

"See what I'm saying?" God, shut UP fourteen-year-old me.

...only to read in an earlier comment that the tantalising numerology of that song only came about because 'seven' rhymes with 'heaven'.

Why are you ruining my fun, Frank Black and cor_heaven?

3 Love Songs

For the last few days, I've been asking various bands and musicians if they'd like to cover a track from 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields. The plan, ultimately, is to cover all sixty-nine songs; quite a few people have already opted in, as evidenced by the big list on this page.

Last night, the first couple of recordings came in. Today, I received a third. Let's listen, shall we?

Want to submit a cover of your own? Go here, choose a song that's not already taken, and then let me know which one it is. You can do this via email (thealbumwall@outlook.com) or on Twitter (@TheAlbumWall); either way, I'll cross your track off the list and you can send over your version whenever it's ready.

A Conversation with Simon from Quiet Marauder

His was one of the brains behind my album of the year, and yesterday, Quiet Marauder's Simon M. Read very kindly gave up an hour of his time for a chat with me. As you'd expect, we spent most of that hour talking about MEN - the 111-track leviathan that pipped Okkervil River to my personal top spot last week - but we also found time to discuss The Magnetic Fields, the tragic life of Leslie Grantham, and, ooh, just about everything in between.

Here's how it went...

"I haven't murdered anybody - I want to make that clear."

Hi Simon. Are you doing anything good for Christmas?
I'm going to be in Plymouth for Christmas, seeing my family.

Is Plymouth your hometown, then?
Yeah, it's where I'm from originally. I don't go back there very much, and when I do go back it's changed significantly; it's got these big new shopping malls now. We only had a Virgin Megastore there when I was growing up, and we've got all the shops now. It's kind of exciting. But I don't know anybody there - apart from my family, obviously - so it's a bit dull. I tend to go down there just for a few days.

Top 10 Albums of 2013

Right, I've done the best songs of 2013 - now it's time for the albums. These are my ten favourite albums of the last 12 months, and each one is an outstanding testament to the album as a format. Some scale the highest of high concepts with subtlety and aplomb, while others simply succeed by filling a CD with corkers from one rim to the other.

One side note before we get started: The Crimea's Square Moon is noticeably absent from this list, but not because it's not good enough for the top ten. The band's double-length swansong was officially released this summer, but since I got a pre-order version way back in autumn 2011 (ner ner na-ner ner), I don't really count it as an album of 2013. If you like, you can read my tribute to Square Moon - and The Crimea generally - by clicking here.

Right, now that that's out of the way, let's crack on with that all-important list...

#10 - Reflektor by Arcade Fire
There are plenty of reasons to dislike it (not least its inescapable promotional campaign, which certainly ruffled the feathers of one Trent Reznor), but it's hard to deny that Reflektor is one of the best albums of 2013. It's easily been among the most talked-about, and that kind of hype will often lead to disappointment when things actually get released, but fortunately, the music on those two discs more than justified it. It was a more daring, more ambitious, and altogether more exciting album than The Suburbs, with songs like Afterlife and Here Comes the Night Time making up for the slight lack of truly brilliant tunes on the band's previous release. Oh, and even if it could quite easily have fit on one CD,  the second one makes it feel a lot bigger, and a lot more important.

Top 20 Songs of 2013

2013 has less than a fortnight left in it, so it's high time I started making some lists. I'll be sharing my favourite albums of  the year on Friday, but I figured I'd build up to it a little bit first.

To that end, here are my top twenty songs of twenty-thirteen. Some are from albums that I've been banging on about for months; some are from records that I've never even mentioned on the blog before. It was quite difficult to decide on the right order, but lists like this are so much better when somebody wins, don't you think?

One more note before we get started: I considered limiting myself to one song per artist, but then I decided to scrap that idea because, hey, if your album contains two really spectacularly amazing songs, I want to reward that. Reward it with kudos from my piffling little music blog.

Anyway, enough explanation. Let's rock...

#20 - Lately I've Found Myself Regressing by The Superman Revenge Squad Band
(from There is Nothing More Frightening Than the Passing of Time)
My list starts with the opening song of an album I've blogged about a lot recently. More or less every song on There is Nothing... is a lyrical corker, but on Lately I've Found Myself Regressing, they really knock it out of the park musically as well. The frantic drums, the warm-sounding instrumentation, and the "let's pack in as many syllables as we possibly can" stanzas come together to create something truly magical: a magnificent musical meditation on getting back to one's roots that bursts out of its two-minute runtime and leaves debris strewn about your mind for hours afterwards.

MEN and How it Makes Us Look

How does one review MEN? Quiet Marauder's four-disc, 111-track debut album is immune to all the usual tactics; a short summary couldn't possibly do it justice, while any attempt to properly plumb its murky depths is doomed to fall tragically short. It would take a 10,000 word dissertation to really get to the bottom of it.

So here's what I'm going to do. The following paragraph will be the quick review, a 'long story short' version that Metacritic can quote from if they so desire (I'll even give it a rating!). That way, those of you without much time on your hands can see what I thought of MEN without having to scroll too far down. Once that's out of the way, I'm going to dig a little deeper and take a look at just how accurate the album is as a portrayal of the male psyche.