#thatdifficultsecondalbum

Well, there you go, I haven’t listened to any Ladyhawke for a long time – not since I was reunited with my full record collection on returning to the UK in March 2017 – and as if to compensate for this omission the randometer has picked out two in quick succession. This is her second album (I reviewed her debut on Christmas Day) released in 2012. It’s in much the same vein as the first one, with perfectly-formed tight little pop songs that have bark and bite. There’s less of a retro ’80s feel to it, and to me it sounds more like indie pop of the mid-90s. Whether that’s intentional or not I don’t know, but Sleeper, Elastica and Garbage come to mind. Black, White and Blue is one of the highlights and her first single release from the album. Blue Eyes is another banger, and arguably the best ‘indie dance track’ of the album. But it doesn’t quite have the sheer exuberant bounce of her debut. This is a common feature for many ‘difficult second albums’ when artists, usually exhausted from touring and incessant promotion for their first album, are ushered quickly back into the studio by the record company keen to capitalise on the public’s limited attention span and get another record out there quickly. This isn’t to downplay this album, it’s a great indie pop album, but I can imagine she’s benefitted from being able to take her own sweet time about it in subsequent music-making. Shout out here to the fantastic cover art, which has a Klaus Voormann/Revolver vibe to it. I particularly like the blue eyes, the sole colour amongst both front and inner artwork – in reference to her song of the same name. Second shout out to Pip Brown (Miss Ladyhawke herself) for naming her second album “anxiety” and singing about it in an authentic way – even before post-millennial/pandemic anxiety wasn’t even trendy or de rigueur. @ladyhawkeforyou #ladyhawke #anxiety #thatdifficultsecondalbum #indiepop #queerpop #nowlistening #nowplaying #recordcollection #randomrecordreview https://www.instagram.com/p/CKdqpr8s33z/?igshid=1lod7bli3fhot

“The creative leap from Radiohead’s debut Pablo Honey to this, their second album, is such that you would assume they had sold their souls to the devil, Robert Johnson-style. And perhaps they did. . This album was the soundtrack to my final year at university. Like that year, it is full of hope, aspiration, despair, destruction, anguish, abandon, too many late nights, and an excess of alcoholically induced melancholia. . I have two very strong memories associated with songs from this album. The first, hearing High and Dry playing on the sound system of the Duke of Wellington pub on a rainy night in Soho sometime in early 1995. The pub was packed and I was with my girlfriend at the time. And it was at the precise moment the chorus kicked in with “Don’t leave me high, don’t leave me dry” that I realised she was seeing someone else and about to leave me high and dry. . The second, is a little more oblique. It consists solely of me pedalling hard uphill from Highfields Library in Leicester where I worked part-time, past the local mosque and towards Vicky Park and the concrete slabs of the Uni buildings. I wasn’t even at Uni that year, I had taken a ‘year out’ and technically was no longer a student. I was barely-employed trying to make rent, reading my course books and friend’s lecture notes but without access to tutorials, attempting to catch up and not drop out (for the second time!) I was listening to Fake Plastic Trees on my Sony Walkman over and over and over again. . Even now, 25 years later, hearing Thom Yorke singing “If I could be who you wanted / All the time” gets me somewhere deep in the gut. And it takes me back to that bike and that long road ahead and that uphill struggle.” . #radiohead @radiohead #thebends #thatdifficultsecondalbum #highanddry #fakeplastictrees #myironlung #streetspiritfadeout #nowplaying #nowlistening #recordcollection #randomrecordreview https://www.instagram.com/p/CBYB6WDpMDD/?igshid=ipgsdydl3k1p