Assorted Albums Almanac//August 2017

Last night my dreams involved a combination of a free-scoring Wayne Rooney returning to the England team, and Pennywise the Dancing Clown. It was surreal and confusing but not unenjoyable.

The featured artists this month (let’s pretend this is a monthly feature and not some totally irregular, basically biennial splurge of words) don’t sleep so easy. Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo sees nightmares of global gloom and knows war is coming (if you want it); James Murphy returns with LCD Soundsystem to ask us how do you sleep; and Nadine Shah, Tyneside born singer-songwriter of Iranian descent, is plagued by the plight of refugees in an intolerant, ungenerous world. EMA’s nightmares may not be veiled by sleep, but the world of a 33 year old nihilistic woman in 2017 is laid bare in her dreamy, angsty new record.

But first some quick ones – some choice singles from the past month or so and some sub-A albums.

Albums Of This Year

This has been a weird year for music. Save the really sad War on Drugs/Sun Kil Moon fight, it feels as if not much has really happened. U2 and Coldplay both released albums, but they were sort of under the radar and highly average. They weren’t bad – they had their moments – but they weren’t particularly memorable either. It kind of sums up most of the music this year. Lots of great songs, not many great albums.

Assorted Albums Almanac // Mid-Year Madness

So many albums. So so many albums. So so many things, generally. The last few months have been a haze of essays, exams and mutilated sleep patterns, all soundtracked by a weird mix of Beyonce, Deerhunter, St.Vincent, Owen Pallett, songs from Adventure Time, and the occasional strategic burst of Future Islands to jump-start my mind. I also got to see Annie Clark roll around on the floor like a total idiot on Jools Holland and make me feel bad about yet another person I find cool; hear Kasabian’s new, dubiously dancey, horrifyingly laddish (well, the video anyway) single ‘EEZ-EH'(Christ); and, of course, see a bearded woman win Eurovision.

I also got to fall completely behind all musical developments except for the ones I really care about – by which I mean Owen Pallett. But that’s probably for the best, since, as my review of The War on Drugs will show, I’ve also become hopelessly bored by miserable, bearded white guys singing over slightly lo-fi music. Unfortunately that seems to constitute most music nowadays, or at least a weirdly disproportionate amount of the music that gets good reviews. That hasn’t stopped me listening to everything Bradford Cox does, though, but then again he doesn’t have a beard and his misery is sort of justified by being born with a deformity.

Anyway, a bounty of reviews. Too many reviews some would say. Most would say that, truth be told.