Tag: Indie

Categories
Albums

Best albums of 2023: Five honourable mentions

Happy Friday! And happy first day of December!

It’s now officially the last month of the year and you know what that means… the start of the infamous end of the year extravaganza.

I’ve been doing this thing, counting down my favourite albums of the year for every year that this blog has been in existence. Indeed, I’ve even been doing it for longer if you count the years that I was ranking my favourite annual releases on my old blog, Music Insanity.

This additional post I’ve allowed myself, though, kicking things off and sharing some additional great albums that didn’t quite make the top ten is something I started last year and have decided to carry it forward into this year. As you might’ve guessed by now, I do enjoy making lists but sometimes I find my own rules constricting and worry that they result in some excellent releases not getting their due on these pages.

So… these five albums are just some of the great ones that deserve some honourable mention, ones that if you haven’t listened to them yet, I highly recommend you do. They are not ranked but listed alphabetically. The ranking will start with the next post.

Emma Anderson “Pearlies”:  Emma Anderson was a founding member and principal songwriter of 90s shoegaze icons Lush and then, one half of indie pop duo Sing Sing in the 2000s, and here in 2023, we’re finally getting her debut solo album and it’s just as fantastic as you’d suspect.
Check out: “The presence”

Nation of Language “Strange disciple”:  The third album by the Brooklyn-based indie pop trio sees the group building upon their OMD-influenced sound, moving in slightly different directions, but just enough to keep their tight, synth pop tunes fresh.
Check out: “Weak in your light”

The National “First two pages of Frankenstein”:  It’s been four years since their last record and members of The National had themselves admitted to finding the well a bit dry. However, 2023 has seen them release two new albums*, though in my opinion, “First two pages of Frankenstein” is the more compelling of the two.
Check out: “New Order T-shirt”

Postdata “Run wild”:  Wintersleep frontman Paul Murphy started Postdata as a side project in 2010 and “Run wild” is the fourth in a string of very excellent introspective and atmospheric albums that he has released since.
Check out: “Try”

The Rural Alberta Advantage “The rise & the fall”: To put together their first full-length album since 2017, the Toronto-based indie folk rock trio added an additional seven tracks to the six already released as an EP last year and the results are more of the frenetically told tales of Canadian minutiae that we know and love.
Check out: “Real life”

*The other is “Laugh track”, released in mid-September.

I’ll be back very soon with albums #10 through #6 for my Best albums of 2023 list. In the meantime, you can check out my Best Albums page here if you’re interested in my other favourite albums lists.

Categories
Tunes

Best tunes of 2020: #17 Ezra Furman “Every feeling”

<< #18    |    #16 >>

I recently wrapped up watching the final season of Sex Education on Netflix and almost immediately, I found myself wanting to start over and rewatch it from the beginning. To me, that’s a sign of a great show and when it happens with books, it’s the same – the feeling of missing the characters and their stories and their worlds.

I wasn’t immediately sure when I started watching the first season back in the fall of 2019. It felt a bit weird to be watching a show that explicitly detailed the sex lives of teenagers, even though I knew that all of the actors would be of the age of consent. It did a great job, though, playing with reality, making the stories not about their age or the place and time*, and more about the great characters and how they reacted to universal problems and situations related to love and relationships and yes, sex.

The show lasted four seasons of eight episodes a piece, which seems quite long for British television in my own limited experience. Each episode in each season was quite excellent and of course, I loved the music throughout, a pastiche of hip music from the 70s to the present, with many songs that I recognized and some that I didn’t. A quick google search explained that many of those excellent songs I didn’t recognize were supplied by American singer-songwriter Ezra Furman.

In late January 2020, about a week after season 2 appeared on Netlix, Furman released “Sex education original soundtrack”, which collected together all of her songs that appeared in the first two seasons of the show. Of course, I made sure to peruse it and then found myself perusing more of her work and it was then, that I realized that though some of the tracks were written for the show, many were songs that were repurposed from her previous recordings.

One of the tracks that Furman wrote new for the show appeared at the end of episode three of the first season. “Every feeling” fits the mood of scene perfectly: the wind-down of an emotionally draining day. At the time, the song wasn’t available anywhere and viewers  immediately started clamouring to find out where they could get a copy. It’s a short piece that focuses on Furman banging away at her acoustic guitar like it was cause of her hurt and depression and her drained voice shaking out all the f-bombs. Because sometimes that’s the only word that’ll do to get your message across.

“I’m gonna feel every feeling
And only love
Only love will remain”

It’s a track full of pain but it’s also damned uplifting.

*Though there were plenty of homages to John Hughes’ teen comedies of the eighties, the hints to past and present technologies and trends made it feel out of time completely.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2020 list, click here.

Categories
Vinyl

Vinyl love: No Joy “Wait to pleasure”

(Vinyl Love is a series of posts that quite simply lists, describes, and displays the pieces in my growing vinyl collection. You can bet that each record was given a spin during the drafting of each corresponding post.)

Artist: No Joy
Album Title: Wait to pleasure
Year released: 2013
Year reissued: 2023
Details: 10th anniversary, tan vinyl

The skinny: Here’s another great shoegaze album celebrating an anniversary this year and while this one is not quite widely recognized as a classic, it certainly is held as such in some circles. No Joy’s sophomore album “Wait to pleasure” was my introduction to the Montreal-based outfit led by Jasamine White-Gluz. They came up on my Facebook feed one day in 2013 from a group about shoegaze that I had forgotten that I’d joined. When I checked out the album and its mix of My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth crunch with Cocteau Twins and early Lush gauze-y goodness, this fan was sold. Ten years later, their Canadian label Hand Drawn Dracula* has reissued and repressed one hundred copies of the album to translucent tan vinyl to celebrate its anniversary. I pulled the trigger on Bandcamp as soon as I saw it there, which also happened to be a Bandcamp Friday. So win-win-win all around.

Standout track: “Hare tarot lies”

*Quite possibly my favourite indie label of the moment.