bert

1) Lyrics start “see him, king of the club...“ chorus is like “and you can draw your own lines between anything and youuuu...“

2) Lyrics start “It’s a question that I never learned to ask...“ doesn’t really have a chorus but includes some memorable lines like “sometimes making love is the only time I ever feel loved...“

Heres some ones I enjoyed the most for Feb. Was a bit worried when crushing love didn’t release an album in Jan but she dropped two in Feb so all good. Good month.

1. crushinglove - Where'd You Go, Hugo BANDCAMP: https://crushinglove.bandcamp.com/album/whered-you-go-hugo

2. crushinglove - you BANDCAMP: https://crushinglove.bandcamp.com/album/you

3. Kilo Kish - Reflections in Real Time YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFAG8MbgHVk

4. Jawbreaker Reunion - haha and then what ;) BANDCAMP: https://jawbreakerreunion.bandcamp.com/album/haha-and-then-what

5. Sioux Falls - Rot Forever BANDCAMP: https://siouxfalls.bandcamp.com/album/rot-forever

6. Simona Castricum - #TriggerWarning40 BANDCAMP: https://simonacastricum.bandcamp.com/album/triggerwarning40

7. Kedr Livanskiy - January Sun YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUrnxdYQAIg

8. TV Girl - Who Really Cares BANDCAMP: https://tvgirl.bandcamp.com/album/who-really-cares

9. Nice Try - Nice Try BANDCAMP: https://nicetry.bandcamp.com/album/nice-try

Ride bike to work more often - success. Apart from skipping a couple rides due to weather I’ve rode every day I said I would and actually made up the skipped days on other days. I even take the ~scenic route~ a few times so prob have done more riding than I resolved to do. Guesstimate I’ve been doing about 75k a week this yr so far.

Read more than half a book - nope : (

Lets see how long me doing a top ten new music releases every month lasts.

1. Florist - The Birds Outside Sang BANDCAMP I’ve had Florist on a few lists before for split albums or ep’s but this is her first really proper full album and it’s AMAZING. First contender for AOTY.

2. Naia Izumi - Soft Spoken Woman [EP] BANDCAMP Finding something I love by browsing all “new arrivals“ on bandcamp is like finding a needle in a haystack but I’ve found a few of my absolute favourites this way that I never would have otherwise come across so I keep trying it. As far as I can tell this is the first release from Naia Izumi and it totally blew me away. Somehow she manages to sing and play guitar like that at the same time and make it look easy. Can’t wait to see more from her.

3. The Ocean Party - Mess & Noise Critics Poll 2015 BANDCAMP Good old reliable The Ocean Party release thier sixth album in five years that somehow sounds just like all thier other albums but also not stale at all but fresh and good. How do they do it.

4. Savages - Adore Life YOUTUBE Just watch the damn clip if you haven’t already. This album is so solid.

5. Rihanna - ANTI Her vocals here... she could just be singing the alphabet on this album and I’d still include.

6. Francis Plagne - Funeral Mutes BANDCAMP

7. Allan Kingdom - Northern Lights YOUTUBE

8. Best Available Technology - Running To You BANDCAMP

9. Eliza Hardy Jones - Because Become SOUNDCLOUD

Apart from Crushing Love’s albums all being at the top, every time I look at this list I could extremely change the order of it. Please freely disregard all my rambling about Crushing Love that I’m sure no one wants to read, I can’t help. Or of any of the other rambling. Bandcamp links where available, otherwise youtube links.

1. Crushing Love - Instruments I think this album is the most consistent and accessible CL release this year, and definitely the one I’ve listened to the most. It’s fairly short and the production stays comparatively clean and avoids the abrasiveness of some of her other albums. Nearly every song gives me goosebumps and my fave changes but atm it’s “To Be Honest”. 2. Crushing Love - Grow Up, Be A Good Girl This album was released in June and it kinda kicked off a few months of barely listening to any music not released by CL. It was about at this time that it started to become incomprehensible to me that the person making this music could be a real person. I mean, as a person who tries to make music myself, the volume and quality of CL’s releases does my head in. Obviously the “quality” is subjective (apparently exceptionally so, since I seem to be literally the only person even buying her music according to the bandcamp album pages, which gives me an eerie feeling of being the victim of an elaborate practical joke where someone has developed a way of creating music that is extremely to my exact tastes but no one else’s... but clearly that is absurd), but even if I considered her music mediocre, the volume/frequency of music being released is still difficult to wrap my head around. These are not particularly simple compositions. Taste in music aside, almost all the songs have fully fledged lyrics and seem to involve a bunch of normal music creating processes - thinking up musical and vocal melodies, song structure (verses, choruses, bridges etc.) dynamics and composition and production and so on. I’m getting way off track but I wanted to point to some of this stuff here cause I think this album exemplifies some of it. It contains more songs than any other CL release at 20 tracks and was released just over a month after her previous album. The level of song writing and production remains the same. I love it but I don’t understand it. Fave track: “Crime Spree”. 3. Crushing Love - Simple Pleasures This album contains some of the more abrasive (though no less brilliant, imo) kinda CL songs that I referred to above, and I think it’d appeal less to people who aren’t already fans. But it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The track “Howls” is a lot like some of the material from the album “Instruments” while tracks like “Blister” or the title track are... noisier. All three are favourites. 4. Crushing Love - Pray Tell The most recent CL release, I haven’t had much time to digest it in the two and half weeks it’s been out but first impressions are good. 5. Crushing Love - Nocturnal Emotions A pretty typical CL release, contains a mix of noisier and popier stuff. Lyrically and musically “Survive” is one of my fave CL songs. “Fear The Lonely” is beautiful and one the most unpolished tracks of recent releases and is more reminiscent of earlier CL releases - sounds like a single take on piano with very little overdubbing/panning or any other processing. 6. Crushing Love - Cinema This one’s a bit of an anomaly in CL’s catalogue in that it is the only album that contains any sort of description on the bandcamp page. It explains that the songs on this album were all inspired by Filipino films - the song titles taken directly from the film titles and the lyrics based on the plots. Musically pretty unforgiving, tracks like “Scorpio Nights” and “Batch ‘81” really pummel the ears. Favourite song is “Gold Silver Death”. 7. Crushing Love - Wallpaper Another curious thing about CL is despite the bandcamp, youtube channel, tumblr and soundcloud, there still feels like a relative lack of promotional willingness or online engagement from the artist (as far as I can tell her music/artist name appears nowhere outside of those “official” accounts that only share the music itself - not mentioned on any blogs, forums, other music cataloging sites or communities, fb, twitter etc, no apparent gig/event listings) and despite the seemingly very personal and biographical lyrics, a complete lack of information about who this person is. And the only apparent online “interaction” seems to be that the album Wallpaper is “recommended” by another bandcamp artist, Monkey Island who appears as a “feat.” on several CL songs, and in turn one of his albums is the recommendation on CL’s page. He says “crushinglove is a phenomenon! based in manila shes been cranking out 30 albums of sad, sexy, scary dreampop over the past 2 years. wallpaper is allegdly her farewell album and she never sounded better”. She released her next album one month after Wallpaper, but that is nevertheless a curious nugget of opinion about an artist of which there is very little info or opinion or anything available on. 8. Crushing Love - What We Lost We Can Never Get Back I’m gonna stop writing about CL albums now cause a) it’s getting out of hand and b) these last three albums are fairly typical CL albums that I don’t feel the need to expand on. And I’m sure no one needs me to. 9. Crushing Love - Diva Mood 10. Crushing Love - Blue Ocean 11. Sarah Mary Chadwick - 9 Classic Tracks 9 Classic Tracks alright!! Hah no but really this is amazing and devastatingly beautiful album. 12. Kathryn Joseph - Bones You Have Thrown Me And Blood I've Spilled I read some criticism of this album that was like “ugh I can hear the piano pedals and squeaks and creaks of the keys etc. and it ruins the album, and also it’s a bit boring after the first few songs” but ugh, the sense of atmosphere that the squeaks and creaks partly account for is partly what makes this album so captivating for me and I think it would only get boring if you weren’t super into her schtick anyway cause to me this album doesn’t dip below being completely engrossing from start to finish. 13. Emily Ulman - Wear It Well I think this is her best album yet and I think she is pretty under appreciated. Extremely top notch songwriting imo. Fave is “Light On”. 14. Zanders - Buried Men Their last album was my #1 for 2014 and maybe this one just needs more time (released December) but it hasn’t quite got under my skin in the same way yet. Still so great though. God I love Alex Saraceno’s voice. 15. Angel Haze - Back to the Woods So satisfying to listen to this after their disappointingly detached-sounding major label debut in 2013. Everything that I can think of that isn’t great about this album actually makes me love it even more. Angel Haze's weaknesses with lyrics/delivery just make me more emotionally invested in the subject matter. The mostly forgettable beats don't do anything to distract me. Devastating. Especially the last 3 tracks. And “Dark Places”. 16. Oneohtrix Point Never - Garden Of Delete As usual I’m got to a point where I’m sick of writing words now so yeh enjoy the rest of this list seeya. 17. Grimes - Art Angels 18. Heather Woods Broderick - Glider 19. Julia Holter - Have You In My Wilderness 20. Billy Woods - Today, I Wrote Nothing Yeh I’m sick of adding bold and links too now, look them up yourself if u want. Serious though all the albums below are still extremely good and any could be in the top 20 depending on my mood and I have thoughts about them too just not the enthusiasm for typing. 21. Jess Locke - Words That Seem To Slip Away 22. Waxahatchee - Ivy Tripp 23. Allie X - CollXtion I 24. Lubomyr Melnyk - Rivers and Streams 25. Sports - All Of Something 26. Recondite - Placid 27. Terrible Truths - Terrible Truths 28. Karin Park - Apocalypse Pop 29. I Am Just A Pupil - "12 Hours Full Relaxation" 30. Jess Ribeiro - Kill It Yourself 31. Purity Ring - Another Eternity 32. Shit And Shine - Everybody's A Fuckin Expert 33. Jessica Pratt - On Your Own Love Again 34. Any Other - Silently. Quietly. Going Away 35. Rafael Anton Irisarri - A Fragile Geography 36. Eskimeaux - O.K. 37. Nicole Dollanganger - Natural Born Losers 38. Carly Rae Jepson - Emotion 39. Panurge and Pantagruel - Yoruba Adire 40. Ibeyi - Ibeyi 41. The Ocean Party - Light Weight 42. Johanna Warren - numun 43. Akiko Kiyama - Ophelia 44. Long Beard - Sleep Walker 45. Carb On Carb - Carb On Carb 46. Lakker - Tundra 47. Natasha Mosley - Rose Hall 48. The Sidekicks - Runners In A Nerved World 49. Sui Zhen - Secretly Susan 50. Venetian Snares - Thank You For Your Consideration