Chorus.fm Record of the Week Club • Page 39

Well that was ride
the clown fights are still going, im continuing the ethereal vibe but adding a beat with Xxyyxx selftitled 2012 album

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Found this to be a perfect soundtrack for a 15-hour flight. Mesmerizing, calming, and almost spooky at times. Particularly loved the tracks Still Talking and Water Bodies, but absolutely will be returning to listen again. Some real ambient magic on this thing.

 

Pressing play now

 

30 seconds in and I can immediately tell this is going to be very much up my alley lol. Been listening to so much ambient lately.

 

OP is updated. This is awesome to just sit in. Would be a good wind-down record before bed.

 

this is such an awesome record. fits right into the Grouper, Julianna Barwick, Sea Oleena-type vibe. anything else by TALsounds I should be checking out?

another cool "ambient" album with vocals - a bit of a different vibe though

 

Been listening to a lot of Grouper lately, too.

 

Really liking the TALsounds album. Definitely ambient, but it feels like it shifts tones or adds and subtracts elements more often than other ambient stuff I've heard, so it feels a little more lively than I expected.

 

Unsurprisingly, Natalie has opened for Kaitlyn before!

As for other things to listen to, her other full lengths (Acquiesce and Love Sick) are great, but I'd also highly recommend Natal Host (something of a promo for the Moog Mother 32 but just like, really nice overall)

Also her collabs with Whitney Johnson and Brett Naucke (one with just Whitney and the other with both) are also very fun

Mirror Ensemble, by Brett Naucke

 

Oh I really enjoyed that Damiana album, didn’t know she was part of it! So sick. Thank you for sharing!

 

Ok going to catch up and post about some recent picks in the next few days.

@Aaron Mook already said this but the TALsounds record is lovely wind-down music (all those floating and expiring notes and vocals). There is a proliferation of functionalising ambient+adjacent music for specific purposes and environments; hence, for example, Nils Frahm's album Music For Animals, a subversion of the Music For... trope. But if you flip the premise and think of the setting/activity as the easiest pathway into appreciating the record, a supplement if you will, then it's not a problem. And winding down to bed is the perfect setting for appreciating this record.

Very much has the ultimate signifier of quality ambient, that being an almost tangible sense of place and life; life penetrating close or cushioning the whole mix, soothing, fizzing, ringing out and expiring, to be replaced by something new and equally serene and reverential. If I have a fault on first listen, it's that in some places I find the vocals a little wearying and distracting. But then there are places where they add perfect dissonance, like on Searching, or powerful supplementary beauty, like on The Ground or Eye Lines. I'll see how I feel after another couple of listens.

Lovely pick.

 

Probably the obvious pick from that album but About You never fails to do the trick for me.

 

Listened to the TALsounds album a couple days ago but forgot to comment. Thought it was gorgeous and really calming

 

@JM95 is up!

 

Hadn't realised it had already got round that far, but I'd already more or less decided what I was going to pick. I usually don't like to overhype a record before someone's listened but stuff it...Reuben's debut album, Racecar Is Racecar Backwards is the best British post-hardcore album ever made:



It was just after Reuben broke up, 15+ years ago, that I first heard the song Stuck In My Throat, in the early hours of the morning on an XFM radio show being co-hosted by Charlie Simpson of Busted and Fightstar fame. I was in high school at the time, knee-deep in the heavy-melodic rock music that made up the foundation of my musical tastes through my teenage years. On paper, Reuben were perfect for me, and had I delved deeper than I chose to at that time, I would have discovered so. Not long after that, I heard Blamethrower, one of the singles off their second record, an absolute ripper of a track but one that slightly threw me; I loved heavy music and serrated screaming but this song had a punky bluntness I didn't identify with and didn't entirely trust. An acquaintance whom I didn't like absolutely adored Reuben, and every band I liked at that age was a personal discovery of mine, not somebody else's.

Then 10 years ago, and 10 years after the album came out, I read an interview with the vocalist, Jamie Lenman, speaking about Racecar as part of a retrospective article. From curiosity, and from knowing it was highly rated, I threw it on. A minute and 39 seconds into the opening track there was a 1-2 drop, and, in a wash of chords and cymbals and sharp drum fills, he sang, "When I was younger, it seemed so ob-vi-ous to me..." -- and something about the way the melody and chord change came together on ob-vi-ous struck me dead between the eyes. The spell had been cast and I was in love from that moment. And the rest of the album was a blistering procession.

To this day I barely go two months without playing it. It has a youthful excess of ideas, which you sometimes hear on a debut full-length -- I believe the three of them were about 20 when they recorded this -- but it always satisfies me. Jamie Lenman is a unique and magnetic frontman, whether he's crooning, singing, or screaming, and if you like this then it's well worth tapping in not just to their other two albums but also his solo work.

 

There's a slight chance that this isn't up on the US streaming apps, as can be the case with small, cult-favourite British albums. Let me know if that's the case.

 

TALsounds was the perfect soundtrack while packing yesterday. As others said it was very calming, save for some dissonance here and there that would catch me off guard. Though those moments of discomfort helped the record stand out to me as more than just background packing noise.

 

Hell yeah, I’ll definitely be listening to this on a run. Never heard of this band before. I don’t gravitate back to post-hardcore often, but it still bangs for me when I do. Thanks for sharing about your relationship with it.

 

It’s available on US Spotify for me, just FYI.

 

Really enjoying this Rueben record so far. It reminds me so much of Say Hello To Sunshine era Finch, or maybe more like what they were always trying to do with all their releases post-SHTS. It features same the odd time signature, choppy metal riffs weaved in with post hardcore guitar tones, and this rapture-esque mood across the board. It feels a little more effortless from Rueben than it ever did with Finch though (not a knock at Finch, I love SHTS). Even the singer sounds remarkably similar to Nate Barcalow, with a tinge of the guy from The Menzingers.

I’m surprised I hadn’t heard of this band before, since this type of thing was very much my jam when it came out and I lived pretty near to where it was recorded.

The opening tracks, “Let’s Stop Hanging Out”, and “Dusk” are stand outs for me at the moment.

 

Listening to this now

 

Just hit play and the first couple chords were exactly what I needed this dreary morning

 

I enjoyed this! Like I said before, I don’t return to this genre often but sometimes do for nostalgia’s sake or when I’m just in the mood for that vibe, but this has solid enough musicianship to satisfy me at age 30. I almost wanted it to be heavier at times so I could really hear them throw down. My fav tracks were Oh the Shame, Freddy Kreuger, and Wrong and Sorry.

I def hear the Finch comparison! I’d also throw in Funeral for a Friend and even Glassjaw—or more specifically this one band that sounds like Glassjaw…

Highly recommend this if you need something highly aggressive while also melodic.

anyway, thanks for sharing the Reuben rec! Wouldn’t have heard of them otherwise.

 

I remember really liking that Secret Lives album

 

Ace

It's well worth checking their progression on the following two records. The cliché of pushing the heavier stuff heavier and the sweeter stuff sweeter really applies to them.

And as I mentioned, Jamie Lenman, the frontman and essentially sole songwriter, made a bunch of solo records before he decided to pull back from the music industry earlier this year.

His first solo record was a double album — one half heavy, one half acoustic/sweet. Like the Foo Fighters concept, but not shit. Spawned insane double a-sides like this