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.