Welcome to the second half of 2016, motherfuckers! As June is now over, here are 10 of the tracks I've been rocking on the regular over the past month...
1. It Was Christmas When I Fell Apart - Little My
(from Beeps)
Contrary to what this song's title might suggest, Little My's Beeps is a lovely, summery listen with loads and loads of fun pop moments. Read my review here.
Oxfordshire's most elusive sadsacks have been keeping pretty quiet for the last few years; they haven't played any gigs since 2012, and their most recent album, The King of Limbs, will turn half a decade old next month. Yesterday, however, it was announced that Radiohead are to appear at several European festivals in 2016, and now we're all wondering whether this uncharacteristic willingness to go outdoors is a sign than the Popes of Mope are preparing to release their long-awaited ninth LP.
In other words: OMG guys there could be a new Radiohead album on the way!
Weirdly, though, I'm not all that excited by this prospect. Yes, Radiohead are one of my all-time favourites (I still can't believe that, when Ed O'Brien did a Q&A session at my university back in 2011, I actually managed to ask him a coherent question instead of just giggling inanely), but The King of Limbs was - truth be told - a bit of a disappointment, and I'm kind of concerned that its follow-up will sound equally unremarkable next to OK Computer and In Rainbows and so forth.
I was recently asked the following question on Twitter:
Now, that may seem at first glance like an odd question to ask - Up and Kid A are two different albums by two different bands from two different continents, so why hold them up against each other? But I think I understand Charlie's line of thinking: both albums were considered pretty major left-turns for their respective authors, and each one sounds like a deliberate attempt to experiment and take things in a more electronic direction than its guitar-based predecessors.
I answered Charlie's question on Twitter by stating that I preferred Up to Kid A; today, I'd like to explain why.
I've long thought that the most depressing music is that which doesn't immediately announce itself as such. The work of Radiohead, for instance, is often dismissed as 'music to slit your wrists to', but it's not like Thom Yorke et al make any secret of that; nobody is going to mistake No Surprises for a happy song, and for me, that obviousness kind of dulls the emotional impact.
Conversely - and this is an example that I've used previously - Jonathan Coulton's Shop Vac sounds upbeat and chirpy the first time you hear it, and only later do you realise how depressing the song truly is.
To wit: the narrator and his partner have become almost completely detached from each other, to the point where they never spend any time together any more. Still, it doesn't matter if she cries about it, because he'll be downstairs, and her sobs will be drowned out by the Shop-Vac (whatever that is).
Have you ever seen a movie or a TV show where one of the good guys unexpectedly turned out to be a baddie? Remember how shocked you were when that person revealed their true loyalties? Well, that's similar to what I'm talking about here - Radiohead don't make me feel depressed, because I'm not expecting their songs to be anything but misery and doom. The truly upsetting songs, the ones that really make you feel hollow and horrid inside, are the ones that let you get close to them; the ones that let you listen several times and believe that you've found the feel-good hit of the summer before they spin you around and plunge a knife into your back.
All of which brings me to Day-Glo Dreams by Helen Love.
Surely these Scott Pilgrim-esque funsters don't have anything depressing to say? Right...?
At first, this record sounds like the soundtrack to Super Monkey Ball or something. There are shiny synths and catchy choruses and all sorts of sparkly sonic bells and whistles that hide, for now, the album's true subject matter.
The Album Wall turned one year old yesterday, and so today's blog feels like the start of a new chapter - the Season 2 premiere, if you will (that's right, my blog is a TV show now).
This was the first thing I posted, all the way back in June '13 - that one was all about opening songs, and so I thought I'd start TAW's sophomore year with a few of my favourite track twos. The second track of an album is arguably even more important than the first; many is the LP that starts with a bang and fizzles out immediately afterwards, presumably because they hoped that everyone would form their opinions and switch off the hi-fi before the end of the first song.
Since Monday's blog was all about cheap albums, I thought I'd use today's blog to talk about the most expensive album I've ever bought. Y'know, for balance.
I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings is a live album by Radiohead. If I remember correctly, it cost me £14.99 from my local Virgin Megastore (this was back in the mid-noughties, when Megastores could still be found outside of the Middle East).
I realise that fifteen quid is hardly yacht money, but bear in mind that you'd only need ten or eleven pounds to successfully purchase a CD that came out this week. When I Might Be Wrong landed in my shopping basket, it had been out for a solid five years, so I was paying well above the odds given the album's age.
Now, I've already documented my viewpoint on matters like this, and when I was brainstorming ideas for today's blog post, I considered straight-up trolling the 'but they don't even write their own songs!' camp. I very nearly wrote an evil little thing about how One Direction are basically the same as The Beatles - something tailor-made to get The Gatekeepers of Musical Authenticity all riled up.
I eventually decided that 'Are One Direction The New Beatles?' wasn't an article I wanted to write, but I still see plenty of similarities between the two acts. I'm sure that many other people have made this point, but for all of their envelope-pushing, The Beatles had obsessive fans, feature films, and loads of hits, just like 1D.
Last Proper Album: The King is Dead, released in January 2011.
Recent Activity: They put out a live album, We All Raise Our Voices to the Air, in March 2012, but haven't released anything since. They've got a few gigs in May - a festival and a couple of benefit concerts - and singer Colin Meloy recently recorded an EP of Kinks covers, but aside from his vague assertion that he's "starting to dabble" with new Decemberists material, there's been no word on when we might get a new set of songs from the band.
Why I'm Desperate for New Material: The King is Dead was good, but it represented a conscious effort to strip things back after the proggy song structures and epic rocking that littered The Crane Wife and The Hazards of Love. As enjoyable as it is, the slender, folksy LP that the band left us with in 2011 simply isn't enough to keep us going for this long. We need more (and I personally need more of the aforementioned proggy epic rock).
Mind-blowing debuts are all well and good, but it's the second album that shows us what a band is really made of. Countless acts have released stellar first albums, only to let out a thin little fart of a follow-up before fading into obscurity.
This is known as 'second album syndrome'. Most people agree that the most common cause is a lack of time; artists have years to polish and hone their first set of songs, but once that record has topped the charts and the fans are grinding against their mattresses and moaning for more, the band is under pressure to get the creativity flowing again as quickly as possible.
Of course, the other explanation is expectation. The songs that made up your debut are now lodged in the heart of the nation, and everyone is expecting some serious fireworks from album number two. So you write the best stuff you've ever written, the hotly-anticipated album hits the shops, and...everyone is disappointed, because nothing you could have written would ever have fulfilled the hopes they had for it. The first LP had nothing to live up to, and if you make the mistake of releasing a good first album, the second one will have a pretty long shadow to stand in.
Fortunately, not everyone falls prey to SAS. Here are five bands who sidestepped second album syndrome and whether by craftsmanship, inventiveness, or just sheer audacity, proved that second albums could be even better than their predecessors:
Yeasayer
First album: All Hour Cymbals, an engaging indie/world offering with intricate sounds and semi-chanted vocals.
Second album: Odd Blodd, a far more poppy affair which spawned such hits as Ambling Alp and O.N.E. (the latter of which was featured in FIFA '12). It was still weird, but far more immediate and quite a bit more enjoyable for it.
* * *
Eels
First album:Beautiful Freak, a grunge-tinged debut with plenty of great songs...even though a lot of people seem to remember it solely for their first hit, Novocaine for the Soul.
Second album: Electro-Shock Blues, a deeper, darker set of songs. Where Beautiful Freak was all about being unable to fit in, this album dealt with the death of his sister (by suicide) and his mother (by cancer). Not always a cheery listen, but very, very good nevertheless.
* * *
Mansun
First album: Attack of the Grey Lantern, which proved that Britpop could be artistically ambitious and still reach the top of the charts. One of my favourite albums ever.
Second album: Six, and while I personally prefer Grey Lantern, there are many who disagree with me. Instead of trying to emulate the success of their debut, Paul Draper 'n' Palz just went bonkers with this album, throwing in all kinds of ideas both musical and thematic. While there are lots of proggy, challenging tracks (Shotgun and Cancer, to name two examples), there are a few classic singles on there as well - try Negative, Legacy, or Being a Girl for a slightly easier way in.
* * *
Grandaddy
First album: Under the Western Freeway, a classic in its own right - any album with Summer Here Kids on it is dandy in my diary - although it did have a few funny loose ends that didn't seem to have any reason for being, e.g. Poisoned at Hartsy Thai Food.
Second album: The Sophtware Slump, which improved on ...Freeway in almost every way. It was more cohesive, there were themes that ran throughout the album, and by and large, the songs were better, too. The Crystal Lake and He's Simple, He's Dumb, He's the Pilot are fairly well-known (that guy from My Name is Earl even named his kid 'Pilot' after the latter song, presumably because he wanted his child to be simple and dumb), but even the less consequential tracks like 'Chartsengrafs' are gold.
* * *
Radiohead
First album: Pablo Honey, actually a pretty good album, but everything except Creep has since been overshadowed by their more recent work.
Second album: The Bends, perhaps the quintessential non-disappointing second album. It still bore a few remnants of Pablo Honey - see Black Star and Sulk - but everything else represented an astounding leap forward. Who could have imagined that the 'I'm a creep/I'm a weirdo/What the hell am I doing here?' guy would be singing the lyrics of Street Spirit only two years later?
Have a great weekend, everyone! If you think of any other second albums that were notably unterrible, leave 'em in the comments.
