January Playlist: Let's Not Think About Tomorrow

So here's a new thing. From now on, my last blog of each month will take the form of a playlist, a recap of what I've been listening to (and indeed blogging about) each month. I'm afraid I can't be bothered to compile and share a proper Spotify playlist, but I do encourage all of you to do so for yourselves.

Anyhow, here are 10 of the songs I've been loving since New Year's...

1. Summer Here Kids - Grandaddy
(from Under the Western Freeway)
My first blog of 2015 was all about Grandaddy's debut album, and how it's arguably just as good (and as depressing) as its more popular sequel, The Sophtware Slump. This song in particular is a corker, and what better way to kick off a January playlist than with a song about summer?

Decemberists: Doing It for the Fans

Here are some facts about The Decemberists:

• Prior to this month, they hadn't released a new studio album since 2011.
• Their last album, The King is Dead, was something of a departure from their previous work. It scrapped the epic prog-rock structures and fantastical narratives that had characterised albums like The Hazards of Love and The Crane Wife, and it erred instead towards a more folksy, down-to-earth sort of songwriting.
• While The King is Dead was reasonably well-received by critics (its metascore of 77 trumps the meagre 73 achieved by The Hazards of Love), I personally consider it their weakest album to date. It had far less personality than any of its predecessors, and fewer stories to tell; furthermore, the album's musical backdrop was significantly blander than the band's spectacular, accordion-pumping norm.

With all of the above in mind, you can probably guess how I felt going into What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World, the first fresh batch of Decemberism in almost precisely four years. I was excited, certainly, but that excitement was cut with more than a little trepidation; any artist could be forgiven a small foray into the ho-hum after a project as ambitious as Hazards of Love, but if this new album had proved as ordinary as The King is Dead, I'd have had no choice but to assume that the Decemberists I had once loved were dead, buried, and surreptitiously replaced by indieblah clones of their former fun selves.

Review: Innovation In The Trade by Pulco

Ash Cooke (a.k.a. Pulco) describes his new album, Innovation In The Trade, as an effort to "immerse myself in a growing love of all things Dada...reject reason...prize nonsense, irrationality and intuition."

If you're unfamiliar with Dadaism and its ideas, this song is as good an introduction as any.

All of which sounds like great fun, but it does make my task as a reviewer rather tricky - how can one find meaning in deliberate nonsense? Short of producing an equally surreal, equally Dadaist write-up, how might I shed light on an album that goes out of its way to avert all reason and logic?

Supergrass and Their Not-So-Sloppy Second

Second albums are notoriously sticky wickets. The best bands - the Radioheads and Mansuns of the world - overcome Second Album Syndrome by going bigger and more ambitious; other bands are content to simply rest on their laurels and phone it in on album number two.

At first glance, Britpop bruisers Supergrass seem to fall into the latter category. Their sophomore effort, 1997's In It For The Money, sounds in many places like it was written on the spot - most of the lyrics are nonsense, and song structure seldom strays from the classic verse/chorus/verse/chorus/Rob does a solo on whatever instrument he's got handy/chorus/chorus format.

In this song, that instrument was a theremin.

Even the song titles appear to betray a stark lack of effort; G-Song, for example, is a song in the key of G minor, and given how little the lyrics Richard III actually have to do with King Richard III, I'm forced to assume that the late monarch just so happened to be in the news that day, and that his name seemed as good a title as any.

Björk Battles the Leakers

Björk's new album came out yesterday, which is weird because it wasn't supposed to come out until March. Who do we have to thank for this earlier-than-anticipated release?

Why, the good people of the internet, naturally! Vulnicura was leaked online a few days ago, and so Björk and her record label responded by rush-releasing the album on iTunes, presumably to stop people from downloading the leaked version and forgetting to buy the real thing in two months' time. The digital version is available now, although you will have to wait until March if you want it on CD.