Music update - July 2017

The past month has been pretty good in terms of the amount of new music that I have heard (although the albums are pretty old themselves)

The Suburbs - Arcade Fire - 2010

This album won the Grammy Album of the Year award in 2010. Before this, I had heard only the second track, Ready to Start. That I absolutely loved, but after listening to the whole album, I am thoroughly spoiled now and I don’t know what to pick.

We Used to Wait, Sprawl I, Sprawl II: I am not inseparable from these three now. The two Sprawls tie seamlessly into each other. And We Used to Wait is such a strong throw-back to the time before smartphones were ubiquitous. (I was born in 1996, so I might not be that old, but I certainly remember the time before all smartphones had great cameras and everyone was posting photos all the time a.k.a the pre-Instagram pre-LTE world)

These few lines from We Used to Wait, I connected with rather too much.

(I made that with Gimp and the Solarized color scheme.)

City with No Children, Month of May, Modern Man, Rococo and Speaking in Tongues are also great songs! The more I listen to this album, the more I realise how good it is as a package, as a story.

Finally, a paragraph from Sprawl I:

Cops shone their lights
On the reflectors of our bikes,
Said, do you kids know what time it is?
Well sir, it's the **first time I've felt like something is mine**,
Like I have something to give.
The last defender of the sprawl.
Said, well where do you kids live?
Well sir, **if you only knew what the answer's worth**,
Been searching,
every corner,
of the Earth.

Sprawl I is the shortest full track in the album and it has barely three paragraphs of lyrics and yet, it manages to capture so much of the singer’s emotions in it.

(I totally saw all the Suburbs interviews that Arcade Fire did in 2010, especially with Regine. * _ * )

Nothing but Thieves - Nothing but Thieves - 2015

Nothing but Thieves is fairly new and they started only in 2012 and their only album was released in 2015. Recently, their new song Amsterdam has been really popular on YouTube.

In any case, this whole album is really bass-heavy and a few of the songs have a leading bass guitar track (especially, Wake Up Call and Honey Whiskey) and in every song the bass guitar is clearly audible, you don’t even have to strain, provided you are on a fairly bassy speaker system. (My little JBL In-Ear headphones haven’t really felt bass ever, so when listening on them, the bass feels significantly cut. Funnily enough, that’s how I realised how bass-heavy this album is!)

I can’t choose favourites yet because all of the songs are groovy and there’s no one song that I clearly don’t like. I specifically like Excuse Me, Itch, Honey Whiskey, Hostage, and Trip Switch. It’s a 16 track deluxe album and I have named 5 already.

If I Get High and Neon Brother are slightly away from the over-all tone of the album but if you don’t listen to them as an album and rather as singles, then they too fit very well!

P.S. I started writing this post on 6th August and I have finished it today. Since then, I have also heard Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires in the City. It’s a 2013 cheerful, indie-rock album. It’s REALLY good!

Spotify discover weekly finds me something amazing, again pic.twitter.com/9rMeukPYdS

— Siddharth Kannan (@_icyflame) August 8, 2017