April Playlist: Stick it in Your Arm

We've (almost) reached the end of April, and it's been a month of freshness and newness and sunshine all around. Here are 10 of the tracks that have soundtracked the last 30 days or so for me.

My March playlist can be found here.

1. Rainbow Road - Cloud

(from Zen Summer)

We'll start, perversely enough, with the closing track from Cloud's new album (which I reviewed earlier this week). I don't know for sure that this song's title is a Mario Kart reference, but I fervently hope it is.

Review: Zen Summer by Cloud

The title of Cloud's second LP gives us a pretty big clue as to its content. If Comfort Songs was an autumn album (and it was - the first track was literally called Cars & It's Autumn), then Zen Summer is one for the warmer months.

This expansive, mostly gapless album has a hazy, psychedelic sound that, while not a complete departure from what we heard on Comfort Songs, certainly feels a lot brighter and more optimistic than what preceded it. Tyler Taormina is sounding less anxious these days; Comfort Songs, as I mentioned back in early 2014, dealt primarily in harsh truths, whereas Zen Summer gently reminds us that today is big and beautiful and ours for the taking. Ironically, it's actually far more comforting than its misleadingly-named predecessor.

Small Town Heroes: Fun with Feminism

Small Town Heroes by Hurray for the Riff Raff is an album that I bought last year after reading about it in Uncut magazine. This week, while revisiting Small Town Heroes and its twelve terrific country-folky cuts, I happened upon the Twitter account of Alynda Segarra, the woman behind Hurray for the Riff Raff:

Songs About Albums: Release Date & Teaser Track

"Hey, Joel! Remember that Songs About Albums compilation you announced a little while back? What's going on with that? Is it still happening?"

Indeed it is, chum. In fact, it even has a release date:

Saturday 13 June, 2015

Mark that day in your diary, because that's when Songs About Albums: Volume 1 will officially be made available for download - FREE download, mind you - from Bandcamp and Soundcloud. It will also be the 45th birthday of Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo, which is a cool coincidence (Weezer's debut album is the subject of Sweet Benfica's contribution to this project).

The Non-Lexical Cameras

I've spent a lot of time listening to The Hidden Cameras since I shared my first impressions of AWOO two summers ago. That album has since been joined in my library by Mississauga Goddam, AGE, The Smell of Our Own, and Origin:Orphan, which means that I am now familiar with five sixths of the band's entire discography.

Each of these albums is its own unique beast, but I have noticed some things that are common to all of them. For one thing, Joel Gibb loves talking about sexual taboos (Smell of Our Own closer The Man That I Am With My Man is perhaps the ultimate example of that), but the subject that I'd like to talk about today isn't so much a running theme as a recurring musical device.