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.

Still Waiting for a New Tilly and the Wall Album

Tilly and the Wall are great. You may remember them as 'that band with a tap dancer instead of a drummer', but they are so, so much more than that one gimmick. Just listen to Rainbows in the Dark from their second album, Bottoms of Barrels:

This song is pretty much everything I want from music: heavenly horns, an insistent melody, a simple chord pattern, and loads of lyrics, passionately delivered. Oh, and two key changes. The tap shoes are in there too, but their presence sounds like the most natural thing in the world, not the deliberately quirky substitution that most people assume it to be.

Heavy Mood, Tilly and the Wall's most recent album, came out in October 2012, a solid three and a half years ago. If you ask me, a follow-up is long overdue, but the band have been worryingly quiet of late:

• Their official Facebook page hasn't been updated since last August.
• Their Twitter account has been dormant since September 2014.
• Most troublingly of all, the band's website - www.tillyandthewall.com - no longer even exists!

I don't mind waiting for my favourite bands while they work on their albums, but these omens seem to suggest that Tilly and the Wall are never coming back. If true, the world will be a slightly less colourful place for their loss.

New Year Wishes: Progress Report

Today - the 3rd of July - is the first day of the second half of 2015. The whole of next week will be dedicated to a halftime report, which means that I'll be looking back at some of my favourite songs and albums of the year so far, as well as highlighting a few records that I'm excited to hear in the latter half of 2015.

As for today's blog, well, now seems like a good time for a progress check. Back at the very, very end of 2014, I named five artists who I fervently hoped would release new albums in 2015. Those artists were:

• The Magnetic Fields
• Tindersticks
• Iron Maiden
• Tilly and the Wall
• Guillemots

So, now that half a year has elapsed...how are those new albums coming along, folks?

The Magnetic Fields

There's been no sign of a proper follow-up to 2012's Love at the Bottom of the Sea, although Stephin Merritt did play a couple of never-before-heard "micro-songs" to a small dog named Lola. That may well be it for this year, I fear.

New Year Wishes

Here we are, then: the last day of 2014. I've already weighed and measured the best albums of this year, so now it's time to look into the future, to wonder what musical marvels 2015 might have in store for us.

Now, we already have a few dead certs. Modest Mouse, for example, have assured us that they will be releasing a new album next year, as have The Decemberists. But today's blog post isn't concerned with these releases; instead, it's all about speculation, the unconfirmed classics of 2015.

Here, then, are 5 artists that I'd really, really like to hear more from in the next 12 months. As far as I'm aware, none of these bands have given any indication that new work is on the way, but hey, if you're going to indulge in a little wishful thinking, the 31st of December seems like an opportune time for it.

The Magnetic Fields

Wishful-O-Meter: 2/5

It doesn't seem too optimistic to hope for a new MF album in 2015. In fact, you might even say we're due one - Distortion came out in 2008, Realism in 2010, and Love at the Bottom of the Sea in 2012, so if Stephin Merritt keeps up this every-other-year workrate, there should be an extra album in the MF discography by this time next year. Failing that, I'd settle for some Merritt solo action, or another 6ths album.

Tindersticks

Wishful-O-Meter: 3/5

Wikipedia may count 2013's Across Six Leap Years - the latest Tindersticks release - as a studio album, but I don't. It was more of a career retrospective, and while it's cool that Staples et al bothered to re-record all of their old hits, I'm still waiting for a proper follow-up to The Something Rain (which came out all the way back in early 2012). Bonus points if the new one is on a par with The Hungry Saw - it's not my #1 favourite 'Sticks album, but demanding something as good as Tindersticks II at this stage just seems churlish.

Iron Maiden

Wishful-O-Meter: 1/5

If West Ham United's most famous fans fail to release a new album in 2015, this will be the longest Maiden drought the world has endured since the band's eponymous first album was released in 1980. The Final Frontier was almost four and a half years ago now, and so it seems perfectly reasonable to expect a follow-up before Christmas comes 'round again.

Tilly and the Wall

Wishful-O-Meter: 4/5

Things have been disquietingly, uh, quiet in the Tilly camp of late. Their official website still features 'upcoming' tour dates from June 2013, and nobody seems to have heard much of anything from them since Heavy Mood came out. Still, a boy can dream...

Guillemots

Wishful-O-Meter: 1/5...but also 5/5

"More and more gardens are coming into bloom" said Fyfe Dangerfield in a news post on the Guillemots website back in June. On Summer Island, the follow-up to 2012's springtimey Hello Land!, is now two years and three months overdue, and while Fyfe and Co are supposedly still working on it, we're still waiting for some kind of sign that it's nearing completion.

As you can see, I've given this release two completely opposite wishful ratings: a 1 because they can't possibly need another whole year on this, and a 5 because it's beginning to seem like this album will never see the light of day. Time will tell, I suppose, but one thing's for sure: if they continue at this rate then the seasonal quadrilogy that they promised us back in 2012 won't be complete until some time in 2019.

* * *

So that's it for this year! I'll maybe revisit this list in December '15 and see how many (if any) of my wishes came true. In the meantime, have a happy new year and cross your fingers for some great music in the months to come! 

Oh Damien Rice

Of all the myriad things you could call your album, why would you choose the letter O? It's hardly the strongest title, and yet there are two completely unrelated artists in my library who thought it would be a good idea.

The first is Damien Rice, whose 2002 debut album O contained such hits as Cannonball and The Blower's Daughter. The second is Tilly and the Wall, who already had Wild Like Children and Bottoms of Barrels under their belts before releasing the rather less interestingly-titled o (note the lower case) in 2008.

Michael Stipe Presents...

After the Alcopop bike blog on Monday, I toyed with the idea of a 'Compilation Week' - a whole week's worth of blog posts about compilations, samplers and mixtapes - but I eventually decided to forget about it because a) I wasn't really sure what else to write about, and b) I'm seeing the Young Knives tomorrow and - one way or another - I'll probably want to blog about that on Friday. 

So instead of padding it out for the rest of the week, I'm skipping straight to my favourite compilation of all time. I've been buying Uncut every so often for over eight years, and since every issue comes with a free CD, the lower end of my Album Wall is littered with things that came stuck to magazines. I've discovered a lot of great bands through those compilations, but I never spat out my retainer and signed up for a subscription because a) I'd soon have more free CDs I could handle, and b) of all the discs I've picked up on my own initiative, my favourite is still the one that was attached to the first issue I bought.

Image from The Dicko's Collectables

Let's travel back in time to the summer of 2005. I was 13 going on 14, and I'd only been buying albums and seriously listening to music for about six months. For reference, this was around the time when I discovered the Eels and The Flaming Lips, both of whom would go on to number among my very, very favourite bands.

Anyhow, I was on Albany Road for one reason or another, and I decided that it was time to pop my music magazine cherry. I purchased the current issues of Q and Uncut, because both of them promised stories about R.E.M. (my favourite band, then and now). Q just had a live review of a recent R.E.M. gig, but Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe were Uncut's cover stars for the month, and a multi-page feature about the band's history was that issue's centrepiece.

Here's where it gets complicated. That issue of Uncut came with three different covers, and all three had a different CD attached. Mike Mills, Peter Buck and Michael Stipe had each put together a compilation of their favourite songs, and the mix you got depended on the cover you bought. I plumped for the yellow one, depicting the band in their early '90s heyday, and consequently ended up listening to Mr Stipe's personal favourites.

And what favourites they were-slash-are. For starters, this was the collection that introduced me to Tilly and the Wall; if you take last.fm's word for it, Nights of the Living Dead went on to become my most-played song of all time.

It also gave me my first taste of Bright Eyes with a live version of We Are Nowhere And It Is Now, but perhaps even more important were the obscure tracks, the ones by artists I've barely even heard of since. Coming Down (an intimately soaring track) by Karen Elson (a model who married Jack White); Je T'Aime Scumbag (a celebration of sluttiness) by The Citizens Band (some kind of cabaret supergroup); H to the President (a futuristic political rage) by Flash to Bang Time (Stipe's sister's band). All gems.

Best of all, though, is No Boys by Leona Naess. This song doesn't even seem to exist outside of Michael Stipe's mixtape, and that's a shame because it's really beautiful and it deserves to be heard by everyone. I managed to track it down on GrooveShark, and I implore all who read this to have a listen:

As I mentioned above, Uncut have brought me all manner of goodies since - I found The Hold Steady, Okkervil River and Josh T Pearson through their free CDs - but none to match Michael Stipe Presents... 

It's probably on eBay if you dig deep enough.