Every once in a while I receive what I suppose you could call a musical epiphany, in fact it’s happened twice over the past week. This is when an album, or a piece of music, that you may be hearing for the first time, or not, completely clicks in your head. There may possibly be a glowing light and choirs of angels singing as well but that’s a rare occurence usually after too many lemsips.
Anyway, I digress. The first occurence of this phenomena was brought to me by the band Low. A band I have been a fan of for a few years and have recently been thoroughly revisiting their works. The track that did it for me was Do You Know How To Waltz? A fourteen minute masterpiece that ends with around eight – nine minutes of drony feedback, which, at the right volume, sends the brain into a state of shock and invokes something I can only describe as an out of body experience. Leaving the mind blown and the fingers scrambling to replay the track over and over again. It clicked with me in such a way as to leave me a wreck of a human being in a perfect way. And subsequent listens now just enhance that feeling.
The second epiphany came while listening to new material from singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten, who is due to release her new album Are We There at the end of May. An artist with the rare gift of being able to make your heart swell and then break, overwhelming with such emotion that you feel you are there in the song, you are going through the heartbreak, and once the songs have ended you feel that you have taken some of the heartache away with you. And that feeling stays with you for a long time after the music has ended.
These are amazing feelings to have, and if that particluar artist, band, track, line of a song has hit you, then you’ll know what I mean. And this will keep me not only coming back to Low and Sharon Van Etten, but will keep me searching and listening for the next epiphany.
See you next week!
1. The Cure – Fascination Street (Disintegration – 1989)
2. Grateful Dead – Box Of Rain (American Beauty – 1970)
3. F***ed Up – Led By Hand (Glass Boys – 2014)
4. Lykke Li – No Rest For The Wicked (I Never Learn – 2014)
5. Sharon Van Etten – Give Up (Tramp – 2012)
6. Archers Of Loaf – Fabricoh (Vee Vee – 1995)
7. Follakzoid – Trees (II – 2013)
8. The Beatles – I Want You (She’s So Heavy) (Abbey Road – 1969)
9. Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks – Duplex Trip (Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks – 2014)
10. Low – Do You Know How To Waltz? (The Curtain Hits The Cast – 1996)
11. Geoff Barrow & Ben Salisbury – Inhale (Drokk: Music Inspired by Mega-City One – 2012)
12. Sharon Van Etten – Every Time The Sun Comes Up (Are We There – 2014)
13. Veruca Salt – Shutterbug (Eight Arms To Hold You – 1997)
14. A Winged Victory For The Sullen – Atmos VII (Atmos VII EP – 2014)
15. Joanna Newsom – Emily (Ys – 2006)
You can listen to this show and many others on the 33RPM Mixcloud page :
https://www.mixcloud.com/33rpmphoenix/