Top 10 Albums of 2014

And once more with the lists. Picking my top 10 this year was actually really hard, because there was a lot of great music this year. Pretty much all of my favorite artists put out new music, some after having made us wait nearly a decade, others having made us wait even more than a decade (sorry D'Angelo, your album will have to wait until next year's list). I always pick my favorite albums and then listen to them over and over slowly changing the order until I've got my top 10. Usually the long list will be max 20 albums, but this year it made it up to like 30. It was a good year. So it actually takes me longer to order my top 10 than to pick it. But anyway, now it's picked and ordered and here it is for you.

It's a pretty good mix of new music by old favorites and debut acts. There's 3 debut albums on here, which I love to see. So without further ado, I'll count it down.

Warpaint
Warpaint




Little Dragon
Nabuma Rubberband




St. Paul & The Broken Bones
Half the City




Leif Vollebekk
North Americana




Sharon Van Etten
Are We There




alt-J
This Is All Yours




St. Vincent
St. Vincent




My Brightest Diamond
This Is My Hand




Adult Jazz
Gist Is




Sylvan Esso
Sylvan Esso




So there you have it.

And for those of you who are interested, here's that long list I put together. After the top 10 it's only somewhat in order. I get focused on the top 15 or so once I think I've got my top 10 to make sure I got it right, so everything after gets moved around some but not so much. But they're all great albums.

Sylvan Esso - Sylvan Esso
Adult Jazz - Gist Is
My Brightest Diamond - This Is My Hand
St. Vincent - St. Vincent
alt-J - This Is All Yours
Sharon Van Etten - Are We There
Leif Vollebekk - North Americana
St. Paul & The Broken Bones - Half The City
Little Dragon - Nabuma Rubberband
Warpaint - Warpaint
First Aid Kit - Stay Gold
Strand of Oaks - HEAL
Phantogram - Voices
Banks - Goddess
Wild Beasts - Present Tense
Kishi Bashi - Lighght
Chet Faker - Built on Glass
Saintseneca - Dark Arc
Hozier - Hozier
James Vincent McMorrow - Post Tropical
SOHN - Tremors
Fanfarlo - Let's Go Extinct
Cymbals - The Age of Fracture
Lo-Fang - Blue Film
Caribou - Our Love
Temples - Sun Structure
Damien Rice - My Favorite Faded Fantasy
Bear's Den - Islands
The War on Drugs - Lost In The Dream
SOS - SOS
Tycho - Awake

And the Spotify playlist of all of that is here:

So enjoy, and see you next year!

Favorite songs of 2014

It's time for the annual superlatives (which generally also means it's not story time). I've been seeing other people put theirs out, which I always love because it usually helps me find great new music that I missed this year, but it seems as though I did a pretty good job of keeping on top of music this year, so that's good.

Anyway, now it's my turn. I've never done a top 10 songs before, and I was thinking of doing it, and then it just turned into a big playlist of all the songs I loved this year. So I made a Spotify playlist out of them all and now it's here for you. Some are actually from 2013 or even earlier (like Pompeii, by Bear's Den), but I felt it was ok to include them if they were released on an album in 2014.

There are some songs which I do consider to be the best, and those would be the first 9 tracks sandwiched in between the Alt-J songs. Plus there's the Kacy Hill song Experience which unfortunately is not on Spotify, but luckily is on Soundcloud. So that rounds out my top 10 songs for the year. But they are not in any particular order. That would be way too difficult. Everything after Hunger of the Pine is just kind of there in a random jumble, but it's all wonderful. So please enjoy. Special shout out to Banks, who has 3 songs on there, which should be the most of any artist. Also special shout out to Bonobo who never ceases to amaze me. He put out my favorite album last year (The North Borders) and my favorite song (Cirrus), and then released a 3 song EP this year from which the title track (Flashlight) made it into the top 10 songs. Impressive man.




I should have my top 10 albums in the next few days. Unfortunately I do have to put those into a specific order, so that's gonna take me a bit of extra time, but it's almost done.

Nick Hakim

Aside from one quick post just to remind myself of something in the future, it's been 4 months since I've been here. I kept meaning to come write something, but things were busy and there was so much going on and it would have taken me forever to write it all, so I just didn't. It also didn't help that I moved to China, where just about every website you could possibly want to use is blocked, including my blog. I have a VPN to access it all, it just makes it much more annoying to write. I also got into the habit of writing at work to kill time when I was in Germany, and I have had no time to kill since I moved to China. Things have been crazy. Actually, I'm still quite busy, but it's calmed down a lot and I'm exhausted today so am purposely trying to procrastinate for the first time in 4 months. Thus, here we are.

Like I said, it would take a very, very long time to write everything that happened in the last 4 months, because the last 4 months have been very eventful. So as I've done before, here's the quick rundown, in chronological order:

1. Leave Germany and spend a week in Singapore getting packed up
2. Move to Shanghai
3. Find an apartment
4. Find many problems with said apartment and initiate arguments with the landlord to get them fixed, which he still refuses to do and which still continue. Hopefully lawyers will not be involved soon.
5. Spend a week at home while I process my new China visa.
6. Go to South America with my sister for a month. Visit Lima, Cuzco, Machu Picchu, Puno/Lake Titicaca, La Paz, Salar de Uyuni/Bolivian Altiplano, San Pedro de Atacama, Santiago, Puerto Montt, Punta Arenas, Puerto Natales, El Chalten, Glaciar Perito Moreno, Torres del Paine, Ushuaia and Buenos Aires. Good food, pretty places, lots of spanish, lots of dogs, good trip.
7. Come back to China and run a massive trade show

And here we are. Pretty much each of these could be a blog post (or multiple blog posts) in and of themselves, but I'll spare you that.

Let's suffice it to say that I am very happy to be living in Shanghai, I'm still working on making friends and building a community but it's going well, I'm very glad the trade show is over, I'm no longer bored at work all the time, and South America was a wonderful experience which in a way rekindled my passion for travel and served to melt away a lot of stress and frustration that had been building over the last couple of years. So generally speaking, life is quite good.

I did drop the ball a bit on keeping up with new music, though. I've still done an alright job, except while I was traveling, but what bit I have done has been somewhat disappointing. The first 2/3 of this year were great for music, but recently I've been in a kind of rut with finding new music I love. It's going to last a bit longer, too, because I'm busy deciding my Top 10 albums this year, which will hopefully be my next blog post next week or something. However, the lack of amazing new music did change recently with Kacy Hill, and now also with Nick Hakim.

Nick Hakim is a DC native who makes wonderful soul music. He's got 2 EPs out, and I'm gonna go ahead and put him on my 2015 watch list in the hopes that he might be putting out a full album. My favorite song by him is probably Cold, off of his Where Will We Go, Pt. 1 EP.




There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I could listen to it over and over. And I have. It's been very helpful in filling a small part of the void left by D'angelo 13 years ago after he released Voodoo and disappeared.

I actually heard is second EP first, which coincidentally has the same name as his first EP, except with a 2 instead of a 1 at the end. I really liked it, but I wasn't sold on it until I listened a few times. And once I started listening to it on my iPod with headphones I realized how good it actually was, and slowly fell in love with Lift Me Up, the closing track.




He actually does a lot of this lo-fi soul stuff, which took getting used to but now I love. And I love how this song builds. So simple, but so good.

Anyway, that's it for me for now. The goal is to post twice more this month, once with my Top 10 which is nearly finished, and once with some artists to watch for 2015. I'll for sure at least do that first one. We'll see from there.

Kacy Hill

Wow I haven't been here in a long time. Things have been busy and I keep putting it off and meh.

Now I just want to put this here because I really like this song and it's not on Spotify for me to save there. So don't mind me. Although chances are putting it here won't help me remember it considering how often I come these days. Maybe that'll change. Doubtful.

Anyway I want to remember Kacy Hill, partially because I like this song a lot and want to hear more, but also because I really like her freckles. Experience is her first song. She needs more songs.

The Cast of Cheers

I finally made it out of Europe and back to Asia. And since getting back to Singapore on Tuesday, I've realized that my life in this city seems to revolve around food. Which is totally fine with me, because this city is famous for its food and is not great in many other aspects.

After five months of German food, which I consider to be pretty bland, and very few other options, I had a long list of things I wanted to eat. And in the last 48 hours since arriving, I have eaten the following:

• Laksa
• Dumplings
• Char siew bao
• Chicken rice
• Stingray
• Satay
• Malay food

And tonight I'll be having Nando's before beginning my annual pack-up-my-life-and-move-to-a-new-country tradition. So I'm pretty pleased with myself.


I did have a great last weekend in Europe, though. I spent the weekend up in Berlin, with my "cousin" who started her Eurotrip a few days early so we could hang out before I left. The highlight was probably going to visit this town called Halberstadt, about 2 hours outside of Berlin.

The houses have been refurbished and decorated really beautifully

 

Remains of one of the synagogues

At the end of World War II, my grandparents were both in Buchenwald, and when they were liberated they made their way to Halberstadt. We're pretty sure that this is where they met, and they ended up getting married not long after, then moving on to Belgium where my dad was born. The story I remember from my grandpa is that he met my grandma and some of her friends in Halberstadt and they needed a place to stay, so he went into an apartment and commandeered it for them. I'm guessing it was probably empty, because we learned that Halberstadt was very badly damaged during the war, but it's still very indicative of my grandpa's nature. He had a very strong survival instinct, always making the best of a bad situation and finding solutions no matter the obstacles he was faced with.

They probably weren't there for very long, but I was hoping to find some sort of records of their stay. Everything was closed by the time we got there, but there is an organization dealing with Jewish history in Halberstadt, of which there is a lot. The community dates back to the 12th century, and at its peak one in every seven town residents was Jewish. There are still the remains of three synagogues as well. So my dad will probably try to email the organization that keeps these records and see what he can find.

Memorial to deported Jews in front of the cathedral

But for now, it was great to see the place. I was expecting a small village like Schrobenhausen, but it's actually a large village. It's a dying place, everyone is leaving, which is unfortunate because it's really beautiful. It's probably one of the nicest and most unique places I've been in Germany. The town was designated as a model town by the government, so they now get money for refurbishment of old buildings, which they're doing a great job of. We expected to be there for like 20 minutes, but we ended up staying for about 4 hours, just wandering the town.

Something else I've realized since my last post is that I was wrong about Sharon Van Etten. When I wrote about her last month, I said that her last album, Tramp, must not have been great, because it left me with absolutely no impression whatsoever. But because I love the new album, Are We There, I went back and listened to the older stuff. And Tramp is a fantastic album. The album and EP that came before that are nothing special, but Tramp is great. Case in point: Serpents.



I don't know how I missed that when it first came out a couple years ago. I definitely listened to it, so I don't know how I didn't realize how good it was. In fact, since listening to Tramp a few times, I might even go so far as to say that I would rearrange my Top 10 albums of 2012 to include it.

And while we're on the topic of music from 2012, we might as well talk about The Cast of Cheers. I only found out about them a few weeks ago, but apparently they put out their first official album, Family, back in 2012, with one more self-released album before that.

I actually don't remember where I first heard the Dublin band, even though it was just a few weeks ago. But I loved them at first listen. I'm pretty sure it was actually Animals that I heard first, but I could be wrong about that.



The obvious comparison would be to Bloc Party. They do everything Bloc Party did on their first two albums that made me love them, then stopped doing on their last two albums. At times they sound exactly like Bloc Party to me, except maybe a bit more in tune vocally. Then there's a bit of a Foals in there, too, which I only noticed later.

Like I said, I loved the band as soon as I heard them, so of course I went and bought their album, which I also love. I've listened to it like half a dozen times since first buying it, and it is a great album, but that's not the reason I keep listening. I actually keep listening because as much as I love the album, there aren't very many stand-out tracks to me. I find that I listen to albums like that even more than albums I think are incredible because I expect there to be individual songs which match the quality of the album overall. Then when I can't identify those tracks, I keep listening thinking that I just missed something.

In this case, there is one stand-out track, Marso Sava. The rest are great, but Marso Sava is the only one good enough to get a 5 star rating on my iPod.



This one is less Bloc Party and more Foals. And it leads to hyper-localized dance parties in public, which normally just take place in my hands or fingers.

That's about it for this week. In other news, I've started the online apartment hunt for my move to Shanghai next week. So next blog will be from China, and if I'm lucky from a new apartment. Though chances are it'll be a couple more posts before that one happens.

Bear's Den

I'm finally leaving Europe on Monday, and if I'm being honest, I can't wait. It's been 5 months that I've been here, and although I've had plenty of chances to travel and see and do things, the majority of my time here has been spent bored, whether at the office or just in Schrobenhausen in the evening.

In fact, I'm even getting a bit burnt out on the traveling. It's not the first time it's happened to me either. When I was in living in South Africa I was on a plane every week, pretty much. In my 15 months there, there were only 3 times when I was in South Africa for 2 or more weeks in a row. Otherwise, I was on a plane every week leaving the country. It worked out because it meant that I could get by without a visa, though I was sure I was going to get deported every time I entered the country. Luckily that never happened.

Anyway, while all that traveling sounds pretty exciting, I spent most of it going to Africa cities, which are not very exciting. Most African cities are more or less the same, and there isn't much to do in them. So I would spend a lot of time alone in my hotel. I'd be out and about for work during the day, and if I had a weekend free I'd go and do something, but for the most part I tried to be somewhere I had friends for the weekend, be it Johannesburg, Nairobi or Accra, which were my 3 bases in Africa. Which means that the majority of my travel time was spent alone in a hotel room. Not very exciting.

After a while of doing this, I got to the point where I lost any excitement about visiting new places. It even poured over into a personal trip to Madagascar that I took with 2 of my close friends who came to visit. I had a great trip, and I loved spending time with them, but that sense of excitement about visiting a new place and seeing a new country was totally gone, even when I was visiting one of my Top 5 countries to visit. It was pretty sad.

After I left Africa I spent a couple of months traveling around Europe, and luckily that's when my wanderlust came back. Once I started traveling and actually experiencing things again, rather than traveling to sit alone in a hotel room, I got that feeling back again.

Now, after 5 months of traveling around Europe every weekend, I seem to have lost it a little again. Not to the same degree as when I was in Africa, but I definitely have no sense of excitement about going on my own to some random town to spend the weekend exploring. I still get it when I travel to new countries, and when I'm going somewhere to visit friends or with friends, but traveling on my own at the weekend has begun to lose some of its charm. I was in Salzburg a couple of weeks ago, a beautiful city that I've been wanting to go to for like a year and a half, and I just wasn't that bothered with seeing anything. Same last Saturday when I went to Regensburg on Saturday. But then when I went to a castle with friends on Sunday, including my 4-year-old best friend Henry, it was a great day.

So the timing to go back to Asia couldn't be better. I'll be headed back to a place where I actually have friends in the place I'm living and don't have to go exploring on my own every weekend, in towns which, although I recognize their beauty, all begin to look the same after a while. I've still got plenty of travel coming up for work, but I'll be able to see friends regularly, and for the most part I'll be spending my weekends juts hanging out, which will be nice. This all comes together with the move to China, which I've been waiting for since I started this job a year ago, so I'm very much looking forward to it.

And something else I'm looking forward to is Bear's Den possibly releasing an album in the near future. I first heard these guys because they were the opening band for Daughter, one of my favorite bands, and one of my favorite albums of the year last year. It's not often that I hear a band live for the first time and really like them, normally it works the other way around for me. But I loved Bear's Den from the first time I saw them back in 2012. At the time they had one EP available to buy online, Agape, which I did, and they had a few other songs I found on Soundcloud. My favorite song after seeing them, and probably still today, is actually Pompeii, which at the time I could only find on Soundcloud.



Only later did I learn that song actually comes from their self titled debut EP that they only used to sell at live shows and I don't think is available anymore, not even digitally. Unless you look for it illegally. Then you can find it. But I would never suggest to you to do that.

After the frustration of not finding Pompeii for a while was finally overcome, Bear's Den managed to frustrate me again. They're British, and they had released another EP called Without/Within last year, but it was only available in the UK, and maybe Europe. I'm not sure, all I know is it wasn't available until early this year in the US. It's a great EP, so I was not very happy about having to wait and not even being able to stream a lot of the songs I found, but finally I was able to get it earlier this year. Overall it's their best EP, and my favorite song is definitely Sahara Pt. II. It's the second track on the album and flows seamlessly with Sahara Pt. I, the first track. Luckily on Soundcloud they've released it as a single track, which makes much more sense to me. So you get both parts simply as Sahara.



And now after a few months of nothing, they just put out a new single, Elysium, a couple of weeks ago. It's a good song, not as great as some of my favorite tracks by them, but still pretty solid. And hopefully it means they're going to be releasing more singles soon, followed by an album instead of another EP. No news on that yet, so we can just wait and see.


That's it from me for now. Next blog post will be from Asia!

RY X, or The Acid

I actually have quite a few songs to share today, two of which aren't even the artist/band that I intended to talk about. In fact, the artist I'm going to talk about isn't even the artist I originally intended to talk about. Anyway, what this all means is that today you get lots of music. I'll break it up, though, starting with Jamilah Barry, and interspersed with stories. All I know about Ms. Barry is that she's from Leeds and has a beautiful voice. This song was posted on Facebook last week by Kwabs, another artist who I learned about in much the same way when a video of him performing for the Queen was making the rounds of the internet a couple years ago. Since then he's released a few singles, and should be releasing an album soon. Hopefully it takes less time to hear more from Jamilah Barry, because Brother is a great song, and it doesn't hurt that she's mixed in a bit of Lauren Hill.




So there's song number one for the day. And now story number one.

As you may know, I'm currently living in a tiny German village. Luckily I won't be here much longer, just 2 weeks, then it's back to Asia. I guess the bad part is that I won't be traveling around as much anymore, and far fewer friends end up visiting Asia than Europe, but I'm really looking forward to being back in Asia and hopefully getting somewhat settled for the next few years.

Anyway, Germany is extremely safe. Schrobenhausen is probably even safer than average. I feel like this is the type of place where crime actually can't happen, because everyone knows everyone else, and if you commit a crime, everybody's gonna know about it. So I was very surprised to learn that just a few weeks ago, a store was robbed downtown at 10am on a weekday.

Let me go into a bit more detail about what "downtown" means in Schrobenhausen, because it's anything but what you're thinking. It basically means one long street, maybe about 500m long, with old buildings on either side, where the ground floor is filled with shops and people live above. See Exhibit A below.

Exhibit A: Downtown Schrobenhausen

Considering the layout and size of this place, I was pretty surprised to hear that someone had the balls to break into a tobacco shop at 10am on a Tuesday morning and rob them. Of course, this is still Germany/Europe, which means no guns were involved so it probably wasn't all that exciting. They also made sure to only take €3000, which is apparently too little for them to receive any real punishment if they're caught. Apparently one of my colleagues has also had their car broken into in town. So I guess I'm living more on the edge than I thought out here in the village.

I was going to share another song here, then tell another story, then talk about Ry Cuming, but I think that'll be getting a bit long. So I'll just move on from here and talk about music, and save the rest for next time.

Ry Cuming is an Australian singer/songwriter who seems to have come very far in the last couple of years. I first heard about him late last year when he released the song Berlin, the title track off of his Berlin EP, under the stage name RY X. Great song, great EP, and at the time that was all I knew about him. I didn't even know RY X was Ry Cuming.. But with a sound somewhere in between Bon Iver and James Vincent McMorrow, he'd caught my attention with just the one song.




It was just a couple of weeks ago that I was listening to his EP again and did a little searching, and found a bit more information. This was the first time I found out that RY X is Ry Cuming, and then I also learned that Ry Cuming had released an album back in 2010. So I went to listen to it, and it's horrible. Absolutely nothing like the music he's making now, luckily. My only recommendation with regards to Ry Cuming's old work is to avoid it.

I then figured this was the last I'd hear of RY X until he started gearing up for an album or new EP release, but luckily I was wrong. He has another side project with a group called The Acid, who just released their first album, Liminal. When I first heard them, I had no idea he was involved, and it was only when I knew the vocal sounded familiar and I did some googling that I figured out it was RY X doing the vocals, which made me like The Acid even more than I did before.

The album may not be anything groundbreaking, but it's a great album. It's basically the same vocal style you heard with Berlin, but it sounds like it was produced by James Blake or Thom Yorke instead. Plus they have a somewhat creepy album cover that I really like.




So I guess I went from not having enough to say last time to having too much this time. So maybe I'll write another blog this weekend. I don't have any big plans, I feel like just relaxing. So we'll see if I can peel myself away from movies and write a bit.

Jinja Safari

First thought of the day is to let you all know how excited I am that My Brightest Diamond has just announced a new album, This Is My Hand. And with that comes the first single off the album, Pressure. And just in case you can't wait until September for the new album, there's also an EP, None More Than You, being released next week. Very exciting times. I've written about her before, but in short, she is magic and I'm in love with her and everything she does.





I actually found out last Friday and wanted to write a blog post about it, but I had just written one on Thursday and decided not too. So I've been waiting a week to talk about this song. It's probably the most exciting thing I have to share today. It's hard to top My Brightest Diamond. And even though I've only heard one song, I'm quite confident her album will be towards the top of my top 10 this year.

In other news there really isn't much. I applied for my China visa yesterday so that I can finally move there in August. I've also got an exciting couple of weeks coming up for music. I saw Tame Impala last night, which was much better than I expected, and much better than listening to their albums. Then I've got Phantogram and Meshell Ndegeocello next week, followed by Bonobo (again!) the week after. There is also some personal stuff going on, but I don't like sharing private things in public forums. But feel free to ask me about it if you're curious.

After last night's excellent Australian concert, I might as well share some more excellent Australian music. Actually, I've been wanting to write about Jinja Safari for months now and then never did. Mostly because I wasn't able to get anything new by them. I read about how they released an album and whatnot, but never found it. Probably because it was only released in Australia or something along those lines. But now I will write about them. Not because I heard anything new by them, but actually because I heard a solo single from one of the members, Pepa Knight. He's put out two solo singles in the last few months, I guess in preparation of a solo album or something. No word on that yet, but I do hope that whatever he does, he keeps putting out tracks like Rahh!, the song which inspired this blog. It reminds me of Lord Huron, which is a wonderful thing to remind me of. It also reminds me of the song Wood by Rostam Batmanglij, one of the members of Vampire Weekend (a band I'm not super crazy about) who's done a bit of his own stuff, and also needs to do more.





After hearing Rahh! I decided to go look this guy up, which is how I found out he's half of Jinja Safari, which led me to once again try to find music by Jinja Safari, and this time I found a bunch of tracks on SoundCloud. Apparently they've been there for years and I somehow missed them. But I haven't now.

Before this I'd heard their Toothless Grin single, which is all I've got on Spotify and only has 2 songs plus 3 remixes. I don't actually remember what the first song I heard by them was, and what made me want to find more in the first place, but all I had for the longest time was Toothless Grin. It's a great song, though, so hopefully you'll see why I want more by them.





A bit of googling tells me that this is apparently off of their eponymous 2nd album, which came out last year. I must have heard this or something off of that album last year when I first heard them. But now, thanks to SoundCloud and the magic of the internet in general, I know that they have another album as well, Locked by Land, that came out in 2011. And that has what is so far my favorite song by them, Mermaids.




Now I just need to go on iTunes and hope I can buy these. If so, then all my problems are solved.

Sharon Van Etten

I have a new obsession for wasting time at work: GeoGuessr. I've spent an embarrassing amount of time on it at the office every day since I found out about it. Which also does nothing towards making you believe that I ever actually work, which I promise I do, but as little as possible.

La Sagrada Familia, Gaudi's
cathedral which is already 125
years in the making.

I was with friends this last weekend and we were joking about people who take 5 minutes for themselves every hour. I'd say my schedule is the same, but reversed. I try to do an average of 5 minutes work an hour. And somehow they still find me productive. But in my personal 55, GeoGuessr has brought me much joy. You're basically dropped anywhere in the world on a Google Streetview, then you have to guess where you are. I move around and try to sleuth it out by using signs and landmarks and stuff. It's pretty fantastic. I love it. Although I hate when it drops me in Russia. That shit is hard.

But that's not nearly as important as this last weekend. My friend Dannan, who I mentioned in my previous blog post, made her way from Ireland down to mainland Europe, where she visited my German village for a couple of days. I don't know how she kept herself busy for a day and a half here, but then it was off to Barcelona to meet up with a close friend from South Africa and her friend. This was my second time in Spain in the last month, and while I actually think that Madrid is a prettier city, Barcelona's just got a great vibe to it. We stayed in an amazing Airbnb place right on Paseig del Born, which seems like it may be one of the hipster hearts of the city, with amazing views (though they did come with 5 flights of stairs).

We hit up a couple of the big sites in the city (Picasso Museum, Sagrada Familia), but mostly we just wandered and hung out. But wandering in Barcelona is great, because in our short time there we stumbled across all kinds of exciting activities. One morning we woke up to the smells of paella wafting up into our apartment, coming from a right below our window where some random group of old people had set up to cook massive skillets of it on the street, and had set up tables for like 200 people. Another day we found a break dancing competition. There was also traditional dancing downstairs one morning. And you can't forget the Pride Parade. My favorite was probably the flamenco, though. Normally I don't get dance at all, but I think flamenco is great. This one was not free, though it was stumbled upon, but it was amazing. And came with free drinks.


Our neighborhood wine tap

But otherwise it was mostly just hanging out and eating and drinking. Lots and lots of eating and drinking. We fell into a Spanish schedule pretty early on, so breakfast at 11, lunch at 3, dinner at 10. We even went to a club one night and stayed out later than the little baby study abroad students who told us about it did. In fact at 3:30 we made a pact to go until sunrise, but about 20 minutes later we found ourselves in a cab on the way home. We had the best of intentions, though.

This being Spain, there was also a lot of wine and sangria. The little supermarket across the street even had this amazing "cask" built into the wall with spigots coming out where you could bring your own bottle and fill up super cheap. We got 1 liter one day for under 3 Euro. And it was good! But in case that wasn't enough, you could buy full casks of wine. It was tempting.

It was also the most I've laughed in a very long time. Dannan is hilarious, but combine her with Zanele and Dikelede, and it was non-stop. We were getting started at a few times, but I know it's just because we were clearly the most entertained/entertaining people around. And we were loud, but whatever. Takeaway lesson for the weekend is that there are 2 things you can't trust white people about: the first is that you'll be safe in the water, and the second is that their dogs won't bite you. I'm not sure I agree with that second one, but I've been told it's fact.

All in all a fantastic last traveling weekend in Europe. I'm here for one more month, and staying in Germany for pretty much all of it. And the weekend had a fantastic soundtrack, too. I picked up a couple of new albums last week, HEAL from Strand of Oaks, and Are We There from Sharon Van Etten. HEAL is another of these Midwest/Philly rock groups, in the vein of Kurt Vile and The War on Drugs. All in all, that's not my favorite type of rock, but there's always these amazing standout tracks. In this case it's JM, which may be vying with The War on Drugs's Red Eyes for best song of the year.





Really depressing song, but those guitars are ridiculous. And he likes those guitars. And so do I. A lot. Overall it's a strong album, definitely on the long list for best of the year.

Even more exciting though is Sharon Van Etten's new album, Are We There, which is likely to end up on the final list for best of the year. I actually wasn't very excited about it before I heard it. This is like her 4th or 5th, and I'd heard the last one a couple years ago and have absolutely no recollection of it. Which tells me I must not have been that impressed. And even when I started hearing songs here and there from the new album a couple months ago, it wasn't enough to make me excited.  But then when the album came out, I figured I might as well give it a try. And I'm glad I did, because it is extremely impressive. It's also a depressing album, devastatingly so. You can hear how much heartbreak went into every song. This is evident from even just the title of my favorite track, Your Love Is Killing Me.





It's a beautiful song. And the entire album is that good. Especially the first three tracks. It's a great opening run. The second track, Taking Chances, is actually a bit weird. It's one of those tracks that I do not like even a little bit when it first starts. It's got some weird, fake drum machiney sound to it which at first I hate, and every time I listen I'm like "what is this shit." But then the real drums come in, then the vocals, and finally everything together at the chorus, and I'm in love.




I can't get enough of this album right now. Like I said, I'd be surprised if it's not in my top 10 for the year. It's in a lot of these lists of the best of the year so far, even though most of the lists I've looked at are kind of bullshit. There's some stuff I agree with in them, but a lot missing. Maybe I'll make my own. Maybe that'll be my next blog post. We'll see. I make no promises.

Wildcat! Wildcat!

It's been a very long time since I've written a blog. Almost two months actually. But it's been a busy couple of months with lots of traveling and a lot going on. First I was home, and when I'm home I tend to not spend as much time online. That also means I spend less time paying attention to new music, so I'm a bit behind and was having trouble figuring out what music to share. The music is always what I think of first when I'm deciding to write a blog, then I figure out the story part, which means I didn't even have the first element to writing a new blog post. But now I do, even though it's only kind of new.

As for the story part, even though I was only home for a couple of weeks in mid-May, I got up to quite a lot and wasn't sure what to write about. That was followed by a lot more traveling once I got back to Europe, which gave me even more possible things to write about, thus making my decision on what to write about even more difficult.

I still haven't made up my mind about what story to tell, actually, so instead you just get a rundown of the highlights. You can ask me personally via email/facebook/skype/whatsapp/etc for more details if you want them. Or maybe I'll write about some of them later, if I feel like it. But here's a rough idea, in chronological order, of how my last two months went:

She did it!

1.  Go home, fly to Montana for my sister's college graduation. Very proud, etc. Saw a bit of nature, did a lot of packing. Met my sister's boyfriend. I wasn't as mean as I probably should have been. My sister will tell you I like him, but all I said is "he's ok." When it comes to being my sister's boyfriend, though, I am very hard to please.

 

2.  Spend 3 days driving from Missoula to Orange County so my sister could have her car, with stops in Portland, Eugene, the Redwoods, and In n Out.

 

3.  Stay home for a week. 30th birthday, Chinese food, family, friends, visitors, shopping, musical, alcohol, extortion (victim of, not perpetrator of), Ethiopian food, concert.

 

4.  Return to Europe at the start of a 4 day weekend, and stuck with an unchangeable ticket from LA to Munich. Go to Madrid. See more friends, drink more drinks, eat churros, kiss a cougar, get sexually molested (not by the cougar).

 

5.  Go to Dubai for work. Kind of boring as I'm staying in a horrible location, plus the Ramadan sales haven't started yet. Not so exciting, but happy I can eat Nando's. Spend 3 day weekend in Egypt. Amazing. One of the best countries I've been to. Need to go back. If you go (GO!) I can give you a great tour guide. Luckily, I do not get robbed, maimed, kidnapped or killed. It is very safe.

 

There are so many pyramids in Egypt

6.  Supposed to go to England for work, instead go for vacation (this is also a story. Not a long one, but no point in recounting it now). See friends in London, eat too much food, still want to move there.

7.  Spend a week in Ireland with two dear friends (and the parents of one of these friends). Weather is perfect every day, barely a cloud in the sky. Irish are very friendly, they love to talk. Guinness is very good. See many green things, lots of rocks and old buildings, and climb on some of them

Kells Priory, my favorite stop in Ireland

There was also some work mixed in there, too, but that's nothing exciting. And a concert from St. Vincent and The National, which was amazing.

And now I'm back in Germany. Only one more trip planned out of Germany (to Barcelona this weekend, along with Dannan, who was in Ireland with me and who will be coming to my village on Wednesday, as well as Zanele, one of my closest friends from South Africa) before I leave on August 4 to head back to Asia. Other than that, I'm in Germany until I go. So as you can see, it's been an eventful couple of months. I could write for days. But I don't feel like it, so we're on to the music instead.

Like I said before, when I'm traveling a lot (and particularly when I'm home), I don't keep up with music as much as normal. So I don't actually have any new artists to share with you, but I do have some new music from not quite so new artists.

Considering how pretty much every single one of my favorite artists is putting out new music this year, I'm very excited about 2014. And even though most of them have already put out the music I've been excited about, there's always a new release announced which makes me giddy all over again. This time it's Alt-J. I've written about Alt-J before, and I still maintain that they're one of the best bands I've heard in years. They're ridiculously good, musical perfectionists. And they'll be releasing their second album, This Is All Yours, in September. They released their first single off the album, Hunger of the Pine, last week, and it does not disappoint at all. Their debut album, An Awesome Wave, was the obvious choice to top my list of best music in 2012, so my hopes are once again high.





I was a bit surprised by the whole Miley Cyrus vocal loop in there, but it works. I had read about it before listening to the single and was surprised that they had any connection to her whatsoever, but I like it. And I never would have even known it's Miley Cyrus if I hadn't read about it.

But anyway, musically they've still got it. The attention to detail is as close as ever, the vocals are spot on, and I like the depth that the horns add. Based on this song, I am very excited about the new album. If only they would add Asia to their tour dates. Or my house. That would be good too.

But the new Alt-J song was just an added bonus for today. I actually wanted to write about Wildcat! Wildcat! Once again, not a new band, per se. I saw them opening for Lord Huron about a year and a half ago and really liked them, but they've only released one eponymous EP back in 2013. All of the songs are pretty good, but nothing amazing. At least, nothing to make me as excited as their name would have me assume I would be, what with the dangerous animals, repetition and exclamation points. But, good music nonetheless. Case in point, Mr. Quiche.





I'm not gonna lie, part of the reason that I chose that song instead of any of the others from the EP is because it's called Mr. Quiche. And I love quiche. Who doesn't? It is also very good, though. Especially once it builds fully towards the end.

So why share 2 year old music from a band that I wasn't overly enthusiastic about? Two reasons: because I really liked them live and have been waiting for them to do more which will excite me more, and because they just released the first single from their upcoming full length album and it does excite me much more. They'll be releasing the album, No Moon At All, in August, and the first single, Hero, is exactly what I've been waiting for from them.

 

So now you have 2 albums to go and pre-order (as I will be doing as soon as I get off work), and you may or may not have reason to email me for stories. I promise I will not go two more months before writing another blog. Now that I'm back in Germany for most of the next 6 weeks, I should be able to get back to my 1-2 post a week frequency.

 

Chet Faker

I had what was definitely my best Air BnB experience to date over the weekend in Tallinn. I've been using it a lot lately as I travel around Europe because you can often get a nice place to stay for a lot less than a hotel. In case you're unfamiliar with Air BnB, it's a website where you rent a place to stay directly from another person. Sometimes you get a private room in an apartment, sometimes you can get an entire apartment, it all depends on what you want and what your budget is. If you have not yet experienced the magic that is Air BnB, definitely check it out on your next trip. It's the best.

For the most part I've been just booking rooms in people's apartments, and only a couple times have I booked something that was an entire apartment. I always prefer to have a place to myself, since it's nice to have the privacy and not get stuck with strangers. But when I'm traveling alone, which is what I'm generally doing, it can also be really nice to stay with other human beings and have some sort of social interaction. Also, it's usually much cheaper to just rent a private room in someone's apartment than to rent an entire apartment.

Tallinn Old Town

I've used it in a few places now, and normally when I take a room in someone's place I end up with a nice enough host. The rooms and locations have always been good, too. But I've never really spent too much time with the people that I stay with. I guess the most interaction I've had until now was the first time I used it in Zurich. I stayed with a family who didn't really speak English so well, but the wife was from Peru so we'd normally just chat in Spanish over breakfast. But other than that not too much interaction. And other times I've used it there's been the normal chit-chat, but nothing extensive.

The country is covered in woods

This weekend in Estonia was great, though. I stayed with two guys about my age who are both entrepreneurs, and we really just hit it off. They've only had one other experience with hosting before, which they said was alright. But basically from the time I got there we just got along really well. When I was in Tallinn, they'd take me around and show me the city, at night we'd go out for dinner and drinks, and the apartment itself was great, too. The hosts definitely made my weekend much, much better. And as much as I loved Air BnB before this, it made me love it even more. I've seen pretty much all I wanted to in Tallinn, and while there's other stuff to see around the country, I kind of want to go back to Estonia now just to hang out.
 

Favorite picture at the photography museum

Estonia was nice enough. Tallinn is not a large city, and there isn't very much to do, so I was able to accomplish pretty much everything I wanted with a day and a half. There are still a couple more museums I could have gone to, and would have had time to, if not for the fact that May 1, the day I arrived, is International Labour Day and a public holiday, so everything was closed.

My favorite thing in Tallinn was probably the Photography Museum. Much like the city, it's a tiny place with like 4 rooms built in what used to be the medieval city jail. You'd never know it was a jail if not for the brochures telling you so. They have an amazing collection of 19th and early 20th century photography from around Estonia, and an awesome collection of old cameras. Some of the old photographs were amazing quality, and it was especially cool to see the different techniques they used and the variety in the people from around the country.

There was plenty of rural photography, and while the countryside actually looks quite similar nowadays, the people do not. When there are people, which is more the exception than the rule in Estonia. I spent a couple days driving around one of the western island, Saaremaa, and while it's beautiful and covered in forests, there is very little population. I couldn't even eat lunch on Saturday because every "village" I got to was actually like 3 houses and nowhere for me to eat.

Beaches of Saaremaa

But it was still a great drive, full of beaches and woods and abandoned buildings. Lots of abandoned buildings in this country, too. I'm not sure if they're all old Soviet buildings that were abandoned after independence, or if people just leave the countryside to move to Tallinn. But anyway, they're everywhere. It's actually kind of hard to tell at times which buildings are abandoned and which are actually still inhabited, because Estonian country folk live in some buildings that I'm sure violate more than a few safety codes.

I spent a lot of time in the car, which also gave me a chance to go back and listen to a few albums I've bought in the last few months, but had maybe only listened to once or twice. And it also helped me decide what to blog about this week, which is Chet Faker. You may already know Chet Faker, thanks to his awesome first single that went viral when he released it back in 2011.





How can you not love a guy who makes such an awesome cover of such a classic song? And don't tell me No Diggity is not a modern classic, because you would be wrong. I definitely bought Blackstreet's album back in junior high. I probably still even have it on my iPod now. And the fact that he looks like Sam Beam from Iron & Wine, but sounds nothing like him, makes it that much better.

He just put out his second album, Built on Glass, a couple of weeks ago, which I kind of consider to be his first real album since the last one only had like 7 tracks. And Wikipedia seems to agree. I actually ended up liking his first album/EP a lot more than I expected when he released it, so after a bit of indecision I pre-ordered this album, despite the first single, Talk is Cheap, not being anything special. The weak first single also led me to put off listening to it when I finally got it, something which was exacerbated by the fact that Daughter put out a new EP the same week, where they reworked some of their songs with an orchestra. If you haven't heard Daughter, go buy everything they have ever made and tickets to the closest concert. I'm not kidding. Go now. You'll thank me later.

Anyway so it took me a while to give the album a listen, since I pretty much just had Live @ Air on repeat. And once I did I wasn't paying as much attention as I should have been. Not until about two-thirds of the way through the album, when there's a run of really great tracks. Starting from Blush, the album really picks up. Then 1998 is a great, upbeat track that perfectly blends modern elements with 90s R&B. Or maybe the name just makes me think of 90s R&B. Either way it sounds right. But my favorite track on the album is Cigarettes & Loneliness (not to be confused with Cigarettes and Chocolate from his first EP), which also happens to be the longest track on the album. And I do love long tracks.





I love everything about this song. There's a great juxtaposition between the somewhat happy, danceable music and the sadness of the lyrics, which I think definitely comes through if you pay attention the lyrics and give it a few listens. And it has an awesome vocal breakdown at about 2:45 and again at like 6:15. Despite being almost 8 minutes, I could listen to this song on repeat. And have.

When I first listened to the album I started really paying attention when I heard Blush. But while driving it was Gold, that comes a few tracks earlier, that grabbed my attention. I really have no idea how I missed this one the first time around, but I'm glad I've noticed it now. It's much dirtier, with a great bass line and beat. And it has handclaps. I'm a sucker for handclaps.




So lots of good driving, good scenery and good music this weekend. All in all, I'd call it a success. And I've now had my time in Europe extended until early August, which means I need to start making weekend plans for July...

Eliza Shaddad

This is not a real blog post. I'm just putting this here so I don't forget about it. I like it, but there's not enough of it available to purchase and there's only one song on Spotify, so here it is, if you find it.

 

 

 

Her January-March EP can't be embedded. That's rather annoying. But it is on SoundCloud, anyway.

And I'm not sure her connection to this band, but these two songs are on her SoundCloud and I like them as well.
 

 

Ok, now I hopefully won't forget about either of these...

SZA

May is shaping up to be a good month, both for life and for music. All the fun stuff actually started this week I guess, but will all become official in May. So I'm counting it for May.

I'm headed home for a couple of weeks which I'm really looking forward to. I'll actually only be home in California for a week, from May 21 - 28. Before that I'm spending a week in Montana for my sister's graduation, which should be great. It's supposed to be beautiful up there. I've had a quick look at what there is to do, and so far I've got a ghost town and a Lord of the Rings themed hotel. I hear there's also good pizza and a lot of meth labs in Missoula.

The schedule for my week home is pretty packed already, but then it usually is. When I only get a week or two home a year, I try not to spend too much time just sitting around. The graduation timing worked out perfectly because it's right before my 30th birthday, so I'm working on planning something that involves way too much champagne. I think that's pretty much the theme of the night, in fact. And I share my birthday with a couple of my very close friends from high school, so it'll be great to all celebrate together. The planning is going pretty slow, but something will be happening on May 24, even if it's just going to a bar somewhere. So if you're reading this and will be (or want to be) in LA that weekend, come play! The party is taking up pretty much the whole weekend that I'm home, since I also have a couple of friends who are flying in for the weekend, so I'll be spending time with them in OC and LA. My sister and I are also seeing SOHN my last night in town, which should be a great show. And then there are plays, family time, Mexican food and so much more to fit in. But I do like company (hint hint).

Then there's the big news of this raise/promotion this week. It's not exactly a promotion, actually. It's more that I'm finally going to start a permanent job with the company, the job that they've wanted me to do since I started with them almost a year ago, instead of just focusing on this project I've been working on. But it did come with negotiation of a new package, which is exciting. It should all be finalized in the next couple of weeks, which means I can finally move back to China in August and maybe start a slightly less nomadic life, something I'm very much looking forward to. I'm getting that itch to settle down, and while I don't really want China to be my long term home, Shanghai is a great city and has the highest concentration of attractive Jewish women I've seen in Asia. And it will make starting a business in China, something that a friend and I have taken concrete steps towards recently, much easier.

As usual, there's also the random travels and whatnot planned, which will be great, but that's the big news for May. Good month. And great month for music. In fact, 2014 is shaping up to be a great year for music. I just found out that Fink is also releasing a new album in July, and the first single, Hard Believer, is quite good. More bluesy than some of his older stuff, but definitely a single to get me excited for the new album. Although, if I'm being honest, I'd be excited anyway. I pre-ordered the album before hearing the single because Fink. I don't need to know anything else.





This release is in addition to the new Tune-Yards, Little Dragon, Ray LaMontagne, Wye Oak, Sylvan Esso and Lykke Li albums that are coming out in (and around) May. Not to mention exciting releases for the rest of the year. We've already had new music from Warpaint, James Vincent McMorrow, Wild Beasts, Tycho, St. Vincent, SOHN and Fanfarlo, and are still waiting on Banks, First Aid Kit and (maybe the most exciting) Meshell Ndegeocello. Meshell is one of my favorite artists, and she randomly put out a new single a few weeks ago called Conviction. While not her best song, it's a perfect extension of the sound she's cultivated in her last couple of albums, a sound I love, so I can't wait for her to release Comet Come to Me in June.





Luckily I found SZA a few weeks ago when she released her debut album, Z. Her sound reminds me of Meshell on Comfort Woman, which is one of my favorite albums by her. SZA has that same kind of spacey sound, and she has a really interesting voice. Actually at one point I thought she might be Szjerdene, one of the featured vocalists on Bonobo's last album, since their voices are quite similar and the whole name thing. But she's not. Anyway, there's also a lot of this dark, electronic R&B sound, similar to Drake or The Weeknd. The album starts out a bit slow, but it's intriguing, and really caught my attention once I got to Julia, where the retro 80s sound really kicks in.





The track changes up at around 3:30, which is actually where the album track ends, but this Soundcloud version also lets you hear a bit of what some of her slower tracks sound like. I found myself listening to her album like 4 times trying to decide if I liked it, before realizing I'd listened to it like 4 times so I obviously liked it. Same thing happened at the same time with Saintseneca, and I've now gone on to buy the new albums from both of them, and Saintseneca's first album as well.

Another favorite track is Green Mile, which is not as upbeat as Julia, but more reflective of the overall album sound. But overall, it's a really good album, though it does take some time to realize it.




So in summary, good month and good year. May might actually be the best month this year, what with all the celebrations and concentration of great new music. But in general, 2014 is shaping up to be a year for the books.

Morning Theft

For some reason I always find myself writing my blogs on Thursdays. Maybe it just takes me a few days after the weekend to formulate my thoughts. Which hasn't really worked this week, because I have come up with nothing to write about and no new music to share.

Instead you get the following facts:

• I had a lovely 4-day weekend in Copenhagen with good people and lots of good conversation
• Passover is over! Hooray!
• The weather in Germany is not as bipolar as it has been recently. It is nice and warm now. But maybe not tomorrow.

And you also get one of my favorite songs of all time, which is not very new.

 

SOHN

We're right in the middle of Passover, which I both love and hate. I always like these holidays that involve lots of food and a big, family meal. Pesach is that type of Holiday. It's like Jewish Thanksgiving, and I guess in a sense we're also supposed to be thankful we're not slaves anymore. Just like the big family meal at Thanksgiving, we have a couple of Seders during Passover. These are huge family meals, where you use a book called a Haggadah to follow a whole procession of prayers and traditions for the holiday. The main difference with Thanksgiving is that for like 8 days I can't eat anything. That's the part I hate. Not "can't eat anything" as in Ramdan-style-literally-can't-eat, there's just a lot of restrictions. And since I actually keep the rules when it comes to what you can and can't eat on Passover, I figure that during Passover I should also keep the rules about what I can and can't eat normally.

I'm pretty limited this week, and Germany is not a good place for Passover. German food isn't very inspiring to begin with. You generally have some sort of meat (typically pork) cooked and topped with a sauce, then either spätzle or some sort of potato on the side. Which means I've been eating a lot of potatoes this week. And I have to avoid all the bread that Germans love so much. I'm also avoiding pork for the week, which cuts out about 2/3 of the dishes in any restaurant, leaving me with very limited options. Asia was actually always easier. People always assume because of all the rice that it would be impossible. But really the rice is just a side, and it's much easier to find dishes that are not made from non-kosher animals. Korea was probably the best. Lots of Korean BBQ, which is really just beef and vegetables wrapped in lettuce, and soju, which is made from sweet potato, not grain. It was perfect. I should spend every Passover in Korea.

Now before you say it, I know I could be cooking. Generally speaking, I don't do that. I'm not a big fan of cooking. But Passover is really the one week out of the year that I will normally cook. Just not this year because I actually only have two nights of Passover at home, then I'm heading out of town for the long Easter weekend. So cooking isn't really a great option this year. And I'm in such a small place that I can't even get matzah to make matzah pizza! What's passover without a matzah pizza!?

Luckily I did get matzah balls this year. Until this week I knew zero Jews in Germany. There's not so many, but bigger cities do have populations. Berlin's got about 12,000 and even has kosher restaurants. I know Munich has a Jewish shop where you can get Jewy things, but I'm not sure how many Jews live there. But my friend Yasmin introduced me to an Israeli friend of hers who's married to a German and living in Munich. They invited me over for their Seder on the first night, and it was really nice. And, of equal importance, included matzah ball soup.

Going into it I actually didn't really know what to expect. I had been messaging back and forth with my host, and she was telling me that her husband isn't Jewish and that they've never had a seder in Germany before. All this got me thinking that it might just be a little dinner party with them, not a proper Seder. My family isn't all that traditional when it comes to Seders, but we do go through the motions and read through the main parts of the Haggadah, so I was hoping to at least do that bit. In the end, that's exactly what it was like. Lemor's Seder was really similar to what we would have done in my own house, and her husband and kids were great, so I really enjoyed myself. Obviously I wish I could have been at home for my parents' Seder, but this was a great alternative. And her older son, who's 5, goes to a Jewish school and knows all the songs for Passover. He probably sang with more gusto than anyone at my family Seders does, with the exception of my grandpa who always loved Dayenu and made us all sing the entire thing every year.

Luckily for me there have been a lot of good music releases in the last couple of weeks, which help distract from my constant hunger and desire to gorge myself on pizza. SOHN finally put out his debut album, Tremors, last week. I wrote about him last December in my blog about things I was looking forward to this year. Back then, he and Banks were my most anticipated artists of the year, so I was pretty excited about this release, and it did not let me down. From the first note it's a great album. I love the way he opens up with Tempest. Sadly Germany is crazy about distribution rights and sometimes it's very difficult/impossible for me to find songs on SoundCloud or YouTube to share. Luckily I really like this album and a lot of the tracks on it, so I have a lot of options. Another one of which, Fool, I could find.




Even songs I'd heard as singles before just sounded better in the context of the album. My favorite song, Bloodlines, is still just as awesome. I would share it here, but I shared it in the earlier blog about him, so just click that link above and you can go listen to it. But it's not the only one. In fact, even more worth mentioning in this context is The Wheel since I liked it before, but like it even more now.




SOHN is actually based in Vienna, so hopefully I'll get to see him here in Europe at some point. He actually played in Berlin last Sunday night, and I was in Berlin last Sunday, but it would have been miserable for me to stay up there for the show then have to drive the 4 hours back afterwards, only to arrive at like 3am and be at work at 8. Luckily I have tickets to see him in LA in May with my sister (May 27, to be exact, if anyone wants to join us. My last night in town, and Ethiopian food will be consumed beforehand!). But considering how close he is, hopefully I'll get to see him again soon.

In the meantime, I am still very much anticipating Banks's debut album. And I have now replaced my anticipation for SOHN with anticipation for Sylvan Esso. At least they have a release date for their album. Banks is still keeping us all in the dark. She really needs to work on that. And in the meantime, SOHN has a ton of really great remixes and other production work he's doing, so there's always that, too. Go to SoundCloud for lots more.

Milagres

I spent last week in the UK. What started out as a weekend trip to London to celebrate a friend's birthday was extended to include the week spent in the North for work. Our office there is near Sheffield, in a little town called Wath-upon-Dearne. Ridiculous name. I love the UK, but they really need to work on some of their town names. Anyway, I'd been told that the area is basically one big shithole, but I was looking forward to seeing a proper British shithole and going further north than I thought I'd ever been. But then I looked at a map and realized I'd already been further north than the Sheffield area, so really all I had to look forward to was a shithole.

As it turns out, it's not a complete shithole. It's not an exciting place by any means, but at least there's a cute little town center with really old buildings. So that was nice. And I have to say, I was pretty disappointed by the lack of Chavs. I was specifically told it's full of Chavs, and I wanted to see one outside of my television set.

The whole week was really spent looking forward to the weekend, though. I can't say London is one of my favorite cities, but I do love it. It's a great city, but there's nothing about the city itself that's makes me fall in love with it, not like Tokyo (best city in the world) or Paris (I fall in love every time I go) or Cape Town (most beautiful city in the world) or LA (home). For me, London is about the people I see when I'm there, and it's always amazing. And every time I'm there I leave with a stronger desire to live there. I guess the same thing happens with New York or Tokyo, cities I'd also love to live in where I have a lot of friends, but I guess I just go to London more often than the other two. There's plenty of places I'd love to live, but London is probably the only place outside of the US that I could see myself settling down.

But as wonderful as my time in London always is, it always sucks when I leave. Especially when I'm headed back to a tiny little village in Germany where there's nothing to do and I have no friends. It gets pretty boring and lonely out here. Which is why I put so much effort into traveling and leaving every weekend, and trying to see people whenever possible. Even just getting out and doing something on my own is better than staying here. And I've been very good about it, this month in particular. There's a couple long weekends coming up, which will make for great travel opportunities and get me two new countries, but it's also a good month for music for me. This week in particular.

I went down to Munich last night to see Wild Beasts. Generally I go to these concerts on my own, which I'm pretty used to now, but the period when I'm waiting for the show to start and just playing on my phone is always pretty shitty. It's times like that when I just want to quit my job and leave the village and move to London or Beijing or wherever and just be with my friends. But once the show actually begins, I am genuinely happy again. Especially when it's a band as amazing as Wild Beasts. And it definitely helped that it was a tiny venue (which was quite surprising to me, I expected them to be in a much larger venue), I was right in front of the stage, and they played a lot of my favorites. Including Devil's Crayon, which may be one of their oldest songs, but it's my new obsession. I only got into them with their second album, Two Dancers, so it took me a while to go back and listen to Limbo, Panto, the first album. But I'm glad I did, mostly because of Devil's Crayon.





I've got two Lucius shows to go to tonight and tomorrow night, which will also be fantastic. They're a great live band. And it's like the perfect combination for me, since I get to see an old friend at the same time. And even if I didn't like the music so much, Lucius concerts would make me happier than normal because it's great to see a friend being successful while doing what they love. If I'm lucky and there are some tickets available at the door, I'll even get to see Band of Skulls on Sunday, which would be 4 shows in 5 days. Not bad, if I do say so myself.

As much as I loved the Wild Beasts show, I was very happy that they played a lot of older songs. They just released their fourth album, Present Tense, and I like it a lot and listen to it a lot, but it doesn't grab me like the previous two albums did. The last two were obvious entries into my top ten for the year - this one is not. It could make it, we'll see in 8 months, but it's not an obvious entry.

Luckily I also found Milagres this year. They put out their third album, Violent Light, earlier this year, but it's the first I've heard of them. I have already gone back and listened to their first two albums as well, and really liked the first, not so much the second, which kind of follows the trend for a lot of bands.

I would say the closest thing I can think of when I listen to them is Wild Beasts. But there's a lot more as well. Especially on the first half of the album, there are songs where I hear influences of bands like The Killers, Muse or Broken Bells. But Wild Beasts is still the strongest influence. As is evident on Column of Streetlight, one of my favorite tracks.





My favorite track on the album is Sunburn, though. It wasn't at first. IDNYL was my favorite at first. When I first heard Sunburn I liked it, but it sounded like there was something missing. But then I listened to it at much louder volumes while driving, and I realized nothing was missing. The song is amazing. The only problem is it's too short. And I feel like everything I love about Wild Beasts that I didn't get in the new Wild Beasts album is in this album, and in this song in particular. I would love to hear Wild Beasts cover this song.




So there you have it. I finally wrote about Milagres. I actually considered not writing about Milagres at all since I've mentioned them in my past 3 blogs without actually writing about them. I was worried once I actually did write about it, it would be a let down. But they're great, and deserve to be written about, and if you find them to be a let down, then you are wrong.