i used to do a four song “EP” every couple of weeks or so. stuff i’d be listening to. favourite songs, themed tracks etc. called it “month’s mind”. going to do it again. a diary of sorts. going to try for once a week.
Youtube playlist here:
Prince Far-I – Badda Card
You know it from the voice: Prince Far-I is fate, he is melancholy, unbending compassion, he is social conscience, he is judgment, he is what is, and what is right. Hero.
Peter Hammill – Sitting Targets
I guess this might have been A Motorbike in Afrika off The Future Now. But it’s not on streaming afaict. This was the first song that really got me into Pete Hammill. I remember my then gf saying angrily why are you listening to Phil Collins.
It’s not Phil Collins ofc. There’s anger to go with the compositional skill. It’s intellectual, sure it is. That’s appealing. It’s intellectual and emotional Keep your eyes on the road up ahead, I don’t seem to be able to use mine. That’s good too. Angry, intellectual, emotionally intense. Melodramatic definitely. Give it to me King Ludwig, as MES once sang.
A positional state of affairs
An obsessional interest in moving
Just to prove that we’re there
Angry.
Japanese Breakfast – Be Sweet
Just… (‘just’!)… one of those pop songs that catches your mind, always a delightful process, and which like a boiled sweet you can suck on for a while, bringing some crunch, crackle and a certain sugar and stickiness to your daily round. helps that like the rest of the album it’s very well put together. in fact i think i first listened to it when it came out, but it’s found its time now.
Lonnie Holley & Moor Mother – Earth Will Be There
Album that’s new! and good! To my shame I had not heard of or listened to Lonnie Holley before. Threatening and inexorable in a different way to Prince Far-I. A delphic oracle of Gaia, roots deep in place, absorbing the intelligence of the earth, of the Earth. As in the rest of the album, Earth Will Be There combines the old and personal and lived with a lowering sense of the future. it doesn’t sound like ‘earth being there’ is any sort of assurance of our future security, laden with the heritage of that earth and the inheritance of toil and subjugation for black africans.
I haven’t really picked up on Moor Mother since their early stuff, which I thought was excellent and abrasive. Recent albums have been smoother and to me less appealing, and ofc this particular track is not abrasive, and i’m never sure how well the ’spoken word poetry’ style works in isolation, but here the contrast in performances works well, detaching the track from its moorings and bringing something of the abstract and the city to it.
