Tag: Indie

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Playlists

Playlist: New tunes from 2023, part one

Well folks, it’s that time again. It’s time to share part one and the first twenty-five tracks of my annual multi-part playlist of new songs of the year. The beginning of 2023 in music.

Personally, I didn’t get a great start to 2023. I started to feel under the weather on New Year’s Day and it developed into a real nasty cough. Like most, I’m sure, I hadn’t gotten sick much over the past few years, what with social distancing and other health measures during the pandemic, so this one hit me really hard. The cough was so bad most nights that it kept me from sleeping. The eventual trip to the doctor landed me a chest x-ray appointment to screen out pneumonia (negative, thankfully) and a puffer to help keep the airways clear. Still, the cough stuck with me for almost two months.

Then, my workplace started returning back to the physical office in March. I know many had returned much earlier so I’m not likely to get much sympathy here but I had been working strictly from home for three years and the return has been a bit of a shock to the system. Packing a lunch and putting aside clothes from the night before, and setting the alarm for 5am have all been a re-learning process and of course, public transit has been more ugly than good. Still, I try to look at the positive side in that it’s only two days a week so far. Just another new normal to get used to.

2023’s not been all bad though. I’ve been in relatively good health since surviving that monster cough and have been eating very well. With the warmer weather, I’ve been getting out for walks in the fresh air as much as possible. I spent a weekend at the cottage with my some old friends that I hadn’t seen in over a year. And with spring arrived and summer on the horizon, here’s looking at more of these.

But let’s get back to the task at hand.

This will mark the fifth year running that I’ve done this exercise and I’ve found it enjoyable to go back every once in a while to see what I was listening to at various points and see which songs have held up and which have not. For the first year or two, I broke the playlist down into three-ish parts and it wasn’t necessarily as structured, but of late, I’ve done one for each quarter of the year and have somehow managed to put together a hundred songs by a hundred different artists for each of the last few years. This first part here is made up of twenty five songs from albums released between January and March and all things being equal, you should see twenty-five more songs from the spring months at some point in late July.

So without further ado, I’ll present the music that has helped keep me going over the first three months of 2023. Highlights include:

      • The near eight minutes of “The golden age” by Molly, which is as dreamy as dreamy can be
      • The debut solo album by Blur drummer Dave Rowntree was a very pleasant surprise and “Downtown” is just a great groove
      • Samia is lovely and brutal and honest on “Kill her freak out” and she might just have you singing along
      • It’s been seven long years since the last album by New Zealand’s The Veils and “No limit of stars” and the rest of the new double album is exactly what we’ve been missing
      • “Colossal waste of light” is the title track off an album by Eyelids, a group of Portland-based indie veterans that I checked out simply because of the involvement The Decemberists’ John Moen and discovered a heck of a lot to like in their brand of jangle pop
      • “Ghosts again” is my favourite track by synth pop legends Depeche Mode since 2005’s “Precious” and this latest record is quite possibly my favourite since 1993’s “Songs of faith and devotion”
      • The highly anticipated and perfectly titled debut full-length by indie supergroup, Boygenius, has joyously lived up to the hype and “$20” is a prime, rocking example of what to expect

Here is the entire playlist as I’ve created it:

1. “When the cynics stare back from the wall (feat. Tracyanne Campbell” Belle & Sebastian (from the album Late developers)

2. “The golden age” Molly (from the album Picturesque)

3. “When you stop” July Talk (from the album Remember never before)

4. “City of angels” Ladytron (from the album Time’s arrow)

5. “Downtown” Dave Rowntree (from the album Radio songs)

6. “Kill her freak out” Samia (from the album Honey)

7. “My blood runs through this land” Black Belt Eagle Scout (from the album The land, the water, the sky)

8. “Sinatra Drive breakdown” Yo La Tengo (from the album This stupid world)

9. “Odd to even” Amber Arcades (from the album Barefoot on Diamond Road)

10. “Unglow the” Pearla (from the album Oh glistening onion, the nighttime is coming)

11. “Fingers of steel” Shame (from the album Food for worms)

12. “Magic powers” Death Valley Girls (from the album Islands in the sky)

13. “Oil (feat. Stevie Nicks)” Gorillaz (from the album Cracker Island)

14. “The people say” Steve Mason (from the album Brothers & sisters)

15. “No limit of stars” The Veils (from the album …And out of the void came love)

16. “Colossal waste of light” Eyelids (from the album A colossal waste of light)

17. “Come back” Frankie Rose (from the album Love as projection)

18. “Meshuggah” Unknown Mortal Orchestra (from the album V)

19. “Baby snakes” Death and Vanilla (from the album Flicker)

20. “Cut the cord” Black Honey (from the album A fistful of peaches)

21. “Right here” Emiliana Torrini & the Colorist Orchestra (from the album Racing the storm)

22. “Ghosts again” Depeche Mode (from the album Memento mori)

23. “Too late for an early grave” The Reds, Pinks and Purples (from the album The town that cursed your name)

24. “Sixers” The Hold Steady (from the album The price of progress)

25. “$20” Boygenius (from the album The record)

Apple initiates or lab rats can click here to let me know if this link works to sample the above tracks as a whole playlist.

And as always, wherever you are in the world, I hope you are safe and continue to be well. Above all, enjoy the tunes.

If you’re interested in checking out any of the other playlists I’ve created and shared on these pages, you can peruse them here.

Categories
Tunes

Best tunes of 2003: #17 Metric “Combat baby”

<< #18    |    #16 >>

As I’ve mentioned previously in these pages*, it was my friend Jez that introduced me to Canadian-based indie rock group, Metric. He loaned me a copy of their debut album, “Old world underground, where are you?”, a CD he had purchased at one their shows, which I promptly ripped to mp3 and listened to quite a bit during my morning walks to work.

Metric must have come to Ottawa a number of times in the early 2000s because it seems to me that Jez saw them multiple times at very tiny clubs. After the first time, he tried to get me to come out for the next one, raving about Metric’s live energy, especially that of frontwoman Emily Haines. He would go on to describe in great detail her peculiar dance, which I’ve since witnessed personally a few times. However, I’ve often wished that I had had the funds to join him for at least one of those early gigs because I think that her almost awkward dance and nervous energy would have translated even better on those intimate stages.

“Old world underground, where are you?” was like a breath of fresh air when it was released, especially for me. The first couple of years of the 2000s were a bit of a rough go musically. I had felt in a bit of a rut after the high of Britpop and was having a hard time getting motivated about new music. Metric’s debut was probably the first album I had heard from the new breed of Canadian indie rock bands that would go on to catch the music world on fire for the next five years or so. I had previously focused most of my attentions on music from the UK, through much of the 90s anyway, so having some favourites from my home country was almost a new thing to me.

“Combat baby” was actually released as a single from the album a whole year after the album’s release and it started to catch a lot of radio play. Before that though, it was just one of many tracks on an album I knew intimately from so many repeats on my MPIO mp3 player. Like many of the tunes, it is a quick hit, short and high energy and though when I think of “Old world underground, where are you?” I remember it as mostly a synth pop album, “Combat baby” is one of the more heavy hitting tracks. It plays almost to the angular post-punk scales, or to the borderline new wavers, definitely some Blondie vibes throughout.

“Said you would never give up easy
Combat baby, come back”

It kicks in with a chugging drum machine beat before the bass line picks up the barbells and starts flexing. The guitars just drive like the wind and you can almost picture Emily Haines strutting her stuff and wagging her head back and forth to get her blond hair flailing. And all the while, she is snarling wistfully about a lost lover, an antagonist, a bustle of excitement that didn’t settle for the status quo, but that might’ve since perhaps gone soft and settled, and she is missing that edge. By the end, though, you get the feels that she is kissing off, that she will be “fighting off the lethargy” and “painting the town black” going forward. Yes indeed.

*Back when one of Metric’s later tracks, “Breathing underwater”, came in at number 15 on my Best tunes of 2012 list.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2003 list, click here.

Categories
Vinyl

Vinyl love: Blur “The special collector’s edition”

(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: Blur
Album Title: The special collector’s edition
Year released: 1994
Year reissued: 2023
Details: RSD 2023 reissue, 2 x LP, Light blue translucent

The skinny: Long gone are the days when I would set the alarm to wake up early, drive downtown, and queue up in a massive line at one of my favourite independent record stores for a chance at purchasing one of that year’s Record Store Day exclusives. In fact, there have been some years in the last handful where I haven’t even ventured out at all and instead, tried and generally succeeded at tracking down some of the exclusives online. This year, though, I decided to head out for the festivities* in person, albeit arriving at the respectable hour of 11 am, instead of 7:30 am, when the employees at the store I chose to visit opened up early to a ridiculous amount of waiting customers. I had my own eye out for a couple of the special releases and yesterday, found one of the two at Compact Music, and so after flipping through the rest of that store’s wares on the racks**, I returned home satisfied with my limited participation. Then, last night, I gave Blur’s “The special collector’s edition” a proper spin for the first time and quite enjoyed it. Originally released as a Japan-only release back in 1994, this b-sides collection, from what I would consider the best period of one of my favourite bands, featured some tracks with which I was already familiar*** but others that I had never at all heard before. For even more fun, the artwork plays upon magazine pull out adverts for collector’s edition memorabilia that I always though no one ever purchased. Twenty-four hours and two full spins later, I am still quite pleased with my Record Store Day purchase.

Standout track: “When the cows come home”

*Unlike last year when I went out a day afterwards and still found what I was looking for.

**And finding a non-RSD exclusive to bring home with me.

***Including the above tune, a hidden track on the CD copy I had of 1993’s “Modern life is rubbish”, and one of my favourites on that particular album.