The Album Wall is 3!

On the 10th of June, 2013, I published a blog post listing some of my favourite album openers (including Dance Yrself Clean by LCD Soundsystem and The Chad Who Loved Me by Mansun).

3 whole years and 450 posts later, The Album Wall is somehow still going strong. Writing this blog has opened my ears to all kinds of music I might not have heard otherwise; it's also given me an excuse to interview some of my favourite artists, interact with loads of other great bloggers/writers, and generally overthink my favourite music, old and new, like never before.

What I'm trying to say is thank you all for reading this blog, responding to my haphazard keyboard slaps, and enabling my albumwalling for 3 whole years. You are all ace and I hope The Album Wall has introduced you to something you like and/or encouraged you to think about something you already liked from a slightly different angle.

If you'd like to do something special for the blog's 3rd birthday, any combination of the following would make a fantastic present:

• Follow The Album Wall on Twitter! @TheAlbumWall


• Like The Album Wall on Facebook! The address is www.facebook.com/thealbumwall


• Subscribe to The Album Wall's mailing list! The signup form can be found here.


• Write a guest blog post! Guest posts are always welcome because a) it's nice to get some viewpoints beside my own on here occasionally, and b) each one frees up a little of my time and energy, which helps me to make my own posts better and more in-depth. Just pick an album you love, write some words about it, and email those words to thealbumwall@outlook.com.


• Download Songs About Albums: Volume 1! It's available for FREE at thealbumwall.bandcamp.com.


• Share thealbumwall.blogspot.co.uk with someone who might enjoy it! Whether you do it via Twitter, Facebook, message in a bottle, or plain ol' word of mouth, spreading the word is always very much appreciated!

Thanks again for staying interested for all this time - normal service resumes on Monday!

Review: British Road Movies by Kate Jackson

Kate Jackson (erstwhile lead singer of The Long Blondes) released her debut solo LP last month, and there was much rejoicing. British Road Movies is a loose concept album that checks in with numerous different characters as they hurtle along roads and around roundabouts en route to their respective destinations. Jackson finds a curious sort of romance in the beiges and greys of Britain's roadways - the gorgeous artwork, featuring Jackson's own portrait of a motorway flyover, is an excellent example of this - and like all the best long car journeys, the scenery remains diverse and varied throughout.

In Defence of Duran Duran (Guest Post)

Today's guest blogger is Joey Baltimore, a music and board game enthusiast from the USA. Joe has introduced me to lots of great bands (including Hallelujah the Hills and Hop Along, both of whom feature in my latest monthly playlist), and so I was a little surprised when this cool American guy - my portal to the States and all the awesome rock music being made there - offered to write a guest blog post about his appreciation for Duran Duran.

Now, I've never really listened to Duran Duran - to my mind, they were a bunch of aspirational New Romantic Tory boys who were mainly known for making videos full of scantily-clad women and music that was slightly worse than Spandau Ballet's. Still, I'm always happy to be proven wrong, so here's Joe on why you and I should give DD another go:

On April 4, 2016, The Album Wall had a nice entry discussing #realmusic meme nonsense. Then in May, when Joel was soliciting guest posts for the blog, this exchange happened:

Me: "I wonder how many words I can write about Duran Duran"
Joel: "I suspect you're joking..."

OUTRAGE. Why would anyone suspect I was joking when I referenced Duran Duran? According to the band's Wikipedia page, they were called the 'Fab Five' and compared to the Beatles (I cannot prove that Simon LeBon is not an avid Wikipedia editor). Why would people not take this seriously? Is it because they had a stylist before they had a record contract?* Is it because of this quote about the formation of the band?

"We wouldn't buy records by ugly groups," [Duran Duran keyboardist Nick] Rhodes told People, adding that when he and [John] Taylor decided to start a band they "had vivid ideas of what we wanted to look and sound like, but we looked at the instruments and said, 'Do we have to learn to play these things?'"

Whatever the reason is, I'm here to say I wasn't joking: if you love catchy pop songs, and you like music that makes people want to dance, go listen to Duran Duran again (or for the first time). There is no doubt that their second album, Rio, is their most popular and probably their best. But I've got a special spot in my heart for the band's self-titled debut.

I can't recall when I first heard Duran Duran, but it was probably in the late '80s, while I was visiting an older cousin. I was familiar with the singles Rio and Hungry like the Wolf from the constant MTV rotation (here's where people complain that MTV used to play videos...they did, it was great, move along). But then I got to borrow the full record, and hear the non-single tracks, and I was hooked. The bass on the album is great; it's moving around constantly.  The songs are pop songs, they're written with choruses that get stuck in your head, choruses that you want to hum after you've heard them. This is music that's meant to be consumed purely for entertainment purposes and it does a great job.

Who Stole the Record Industry?

Earlier this week, Roger Daltrey revealed that The Who have no plans to make a new album any time soon:

"We've talked about it, but it's not going to be easy. There's no record industry anymore. Why would I make a record? I would have to pay to make a record. There's no royalties so I can't see that ever happening...How do you get the money to make the records? I don't know. I'm certainly not going to pay money to give my music away free. I can't afford to do that. I've got other things I could waste the money on."

Let's ignore for a moment the fact that Roger Daltrey is a multi-millionaire who could easily come up with the money to make a record if he wanted to; as @metaboatchris correctly pointed out on Twitter the other day, the point isn't that The Who can't afford to make an album, it's that they probably wouldn't sell enough copies to recoup the costs.

So why is that, exactly? Daltrey clearly blames the rise of Spotify and other music streaming services that allow listeners to consume entire albums without actually having to purchase them. To be fair, there are a couple of good points lurking in the singer's tirade: I do agree that musicians deserve to be paid for their work, and it's no secret that artists make very little from Spotify streams unless they're racking up literally millions of them.

But Daltrey's insistence that the internet has "stolen" the record industry is kind of bizarre. There's plenty of evidence that albums sell in spite of Spotify et al, from the stampeding success of Adele's 25 late last year (it's been certified platinum nine times over) to the little music consumption survey that I conducted myself last month (in which the majority of respondents said that buying a physical copy is still the first thing they do when their favourite artist releases a new album). Believe it or not, some people even buy albums via the internet. The Who are a pretty well-known band - they headlined Glastonbury last year, for God's sake - so why is Daltrey worried that his fans wouldn't support a new release?

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.