Why pay too much attention to detail?

I've been having something near to a week off from blogging - to listen to music instead - although to do that properly a week off work would be far better but that is simply not going to happen right now.

I'm fascinated by what people are looking for when they end up visiting this meagre blog and in particularly how often it now seems to concern lyrics. I'd love to add my best efforts for the albums I own and that people have looked for but for which lyrics are not readily available on-line. The only real problem is simply the time it takes to do it.
I'd like to do this for both Ilya (Bristol, UK and San Ilya in the US) They Died For Beauty and the all-American Ilya (Poise Is The Greater Architect and Leaving Sans-Souci) plus many other albums too numerous to mention.
If you can do some of them, even a single song, then you can easily set up a blog of your own. If you don't want to do that you could even post them here if you wanted - a blog can have more than one author.

I have an admission to make:
Today I received an album I didn't order, or at least that is what I thought, but truth to tell when I looked at my order had I accidentally ordered the wrong album (Beach House rather than Devotion) by the by the correct band (Beach House). It was a stunning lack of attention to detail but I have done this this sort of thing before and, as one of my work colleagues might well say in such circumstances, "it is all part of the tapestry of life". It is also how I discovered that there are two bands called Ilya!

Beach House - Beach House, 2006 (US) and 2007 (UK)

It is not really a problem except in that it makes me now want to buy the one, Devotion, that I intended to buy in the first instance even more.

On a quite different tack entirely it seems that Amy Studt now has a release date (28 April 2008) for her second album My Paper Made Man and that the lead single will be Chasing The Light. [See source.] It does seem, however, that Blogger did not archive and index this earlier post correctly so here it is again and I'm sorry if you have seen it all before.

Saturday, February 09, 2008

Whatever happened to Amy Studt?

The album False Smiles (2003): do you remember it?

Probably not, and I'll forgive you if you don't, so we need an update on another artist who, much like Fefe Dobson, was apparently ditched in the mania that accompanied the realisation that downloading was for real.

Well, although the above is an image from her 2003 incarnation, the one at the top of this post is not. She will be back in 2008 with a new album - My Paper Made Man - and Guy Sigsworth (sometime Madonna-producer and, with Imogen Heap, one half of Frou Frou) seems to be involved with it too, which is no bad thing in my mind.

Posted by Richard G at 12:12 AM

Reality Check - Part 1.

When you feel inclined to despair here are some possible delights for those that like wandering away from the national radio music machine.
Should you be tired of Duffy et al (at least in the UK and, as it just sometimes
happens, I am not) then here are a few things that you probably won't have heard on whatever radio station(s) you usually listen to:

Beach House - Devotion

This is their second album and a paean to 21st century lo-fi: the main issue is that Baltimore duo Victoria Legrand (vocals and synths) and Alex Scally (guitars, including slide-guitar no less) also make it all sound like 1980s music never put a beat wrong! No wonder they are now signed to Bella Union [BELLACD160X] in the UK and it is available on vinyl too, but currently only on import from mainland Europe or the US.

If you don't fancy that just now, but are willing to indulge my liking for new French music, you could probably do worse than listening to The Teenagers.

Reality Check: they do what teenagers do.

They just happen to do it much better than most!

I nearly forgot to mention that, while they are a French three-piece and slightly older than they might perhaps seem to be (they are all in their early twenties), they can do foul-mouthed lo-fi pop better than anyone. The album Reality Check is due for release in the UK on Merok on 17th March and a vinyl release is also on the cards.

This post has threatened to become much longer than I expected. Part 2 will follow very shortly.