Oh my goodness. I'm completely in love with this - one of my favourite tracks
and videos of the year so far. So good! We all love The Big Moon,
right? They're back!!!!! New album Here Is Everything is due October
14th and the first single from it is as dreamy as the band themselves. The
Louis Bhose directed video will give you all of the friendship
feels. I could ramble about how brill it all is (the Pooneh Ghana album cover too...!) but I wanted to share this from Jules, sharing to Instagram recently.
Hello its jules here. I wanted to try and explain a bit where ‘Wide Eyes’ came from. Its a short song and there aren’t loads of lyrics but in that magical way that songs can mean so much and be made of so little, its tied up in a giant tangle of emotions and experiences for me and my family and our band.
It was 2021. And I was desperate to write a really big, happy song. I was 5 months into motherhood and my soul was overflowing with something but I was too physically and mentally exhausted to actually string words together and define it and make music with it. Later that year I met @jessicawinter666 who came into my life like an angel and helped me turn those jumbled feelings into a song and I think its just a mad snapshot of a time when life just felt huge and holy and raw and incredible. I was still breastfeeding, I was barely sleeping, I was losing my hair, I was pumping and sweating and crying and lonely and only just about coping but amongst all that, I felt a burning love and a new kind of happiness. I guess the world felt innocent again. For a while anyway.
For me this song feels so personal but when Soph, Celia and Fern stepped in it turned into something bigger, and it feels like friendship and promise - we have loved every minute of being back together and doing what we do. The way they have supported me not just musically but personally through the last year has been just huge and when I listen to the songs on this album I hear all of it and feel all of it again. I love them they are the best godmothers and queens of my life
So yes its hard to explain how much this song means to me, I’ve probably touched on about 0.00002% of it, but basically, after doing the whole rollercoaster of pregnancy and birth and becoming a mum and that whoooolllle mess, this song marked the time when i started to feel like myself again. And that’s SUCH an important time for a new parent. Its a place of pure relief and its so full of love and joy and Im so glad it exists.
Hope you've all had a lovely few days celebrating (or not) Christmas! Before resuming *proper* posting for the new year, I'm back at it with some follow-ups to my albums of the year feature last week (read that here) where, in addition to a top five, I shared 35 records I've loved this year. I'm planning to share 7 records a day across the next few days, all in release order - each one of them is brill and I hope you enjoy!
Way back in January this year, this was the first record to be released that I'd been looking forward to, so it's been a favourite for a while, and listening recently I was reminded how brilliant it is! Your Light is one of the best pop songs of the year in my opinion... so good!! Barcelona and Why are also faves. Love their harmonies, and the fried chicken lyric in Dog Eat Dog ("round here they say it's dog eat dog but / it's more like pigeon eat fried chicken on the street") is GENIUS. They also deserve an AOTY mention for the fact their album release coincided with the moon being reaaaaal big. Clever.
Bombay Bicycle Club - Everything Else Has Gone Wrong (buy/stream)
Probably the coolest advance stream that I've ever had and absolutely HAS to be on this list! Listening to this on my commute before it was released made me feel very cool. Following their previous record in 2014 this was long awaited and it could so easily have fallen a little flat, but it is completely glorious - there isn't a note or lyric out of place. Favourite tracks include Is It Real, Racing Stripes and the title track Everything Else Has Gone Wrong. Seeing them live last year was a treat. Huge soft spot for Eat, Sleep, Wake (Nothing But You) below - the tongue-in-cheek video touching on their return. Also - I love their recent Live at Brixton album! Read my write-up of Everything Else... here.
I think this might be the only album that I've bought in a physical record store this year... since our HMV closed we don't have stores locally, and while I've bought a bunch of LPs from Banquet and Resident online through the year, I bought this one on a day out back in Feb. So I guess it holds a special place for being the only things that I've dug out in the vinyl racks this year - with quite a lot of glee at finding it! It's a quality follow up to Where Wildness Grows which I adore. So many favourite tracks - Heavenly Maybe, Atlas Please and Icarus are certainly up there.
This is Brooke's debut album and it's superb. One of those artists whose tracks I get sent to review, realise that I've enjoyed all of the singles, give the record a try and... woah. Love it. I struggled to pick between this and Sunday Self, the acoustic version of the record that Brooke brought out a few months later. Fave tracks include Control and All My Friends Are Drunk. This is for the Fenne Lily, Phoebe Bridgers, Marika Hackman etc fans (which you all should be...)
The award for the funkiest record on the AOTY list goes to.... damn. SO funky. I loved seeing themopen for Friendly Fires a couple of years back, loved the EP they brought out at the time and was eagerly awaiting their debut record. I listened back to this recently on a bus journey but would advise listening somewhere where you're able to dance like nobody is watching. Get me to a live Franc Moody set soon, please, world. Favourite tracks include Skin on Skin, She's Too Good For Me, and the title track, Dream In Colour. So much to love here.
Halloweens -Morning Kiss at the Acropolis (Bandcamp)
A side project of The Vaccines' frontman Justin Young and keys player Timothy Lanham (that's T Truman, to you and I) Halloweens have been the gift that just keeps on giving in 2020. Right from the first single, Hannah You're Amazing, in late 2019, I was hooked. Things have just got better and better ever since, and their debut record is a dream. They also released the Maserati Anxiety Designed EP recently, somehow finding time amidst making the new Vaccines record (!!!) and Timothy working on his solo project. A lot of love for the productivity when they keeps releasing such cracking tunes as these. Favourite tunes include My Baby Looks Good With Another, Lady and Ur Kinda Man.
I was first put onto this record by this year's AOTY... winner (?! is that a thing) White Tail Falls, when he recommended a few records that were circulating his earphones in our interview earlier in the year - on NNAMDÏ's BRAT he shared that it was blowing my mind. I wanted in on the action and took myself for a listen... which I think turned into two or three consecutive listens. Written, recorded and performed by Nnamdï himself, the record belies genre categorisation. There's a bit of everything going on. Styles which on paper, probably shouldn't work together, and that I might not usually choose to listen to, but I love this. It's OK, Really Don't and Perfect In My Mind are highlights for me - but it is best appreciated as the full piece of work.
Thanks if you've made it this far - I'll be back to share the next seven records tomorrow!! Happy listening...
Absolutely loving The Big Moon at the moment. Their album Walking Like We Do, released just days into 2020 (those simpler times) remains one of my stand-out releases of the year so far. When they've not been busy podcasting track by track and giving music lessons via Zoom, raising funds for Girls Rock London, they've (you guessed it) made a music video in lockdown.
Talking about the new video for Why, directed by Jonjo Lowe, the band explains that "we managed to make a video in lockdown even though we haven't been together for four months! Hope our fantasy seaside trip takes you somewhere else for a few mins and gives you that break so you can keep doing what you need to do. We certainly enjoyed covering ourselves with green paint. We miss and love you very much. Big thanks to the wizardry of Jonjo Lowe and his team."
The band's headline tour (originally scheduled for October) has been moved to March - tickets and info for that here.
This one is sounding glorious on the blog playlist this week, nestled between new tracks from Friendly Fires and Love Fame Tragedy. Taken from upcoming album Walking Like We Do (due 10th January via Fiction Records), The Big Moon are paying homage to some rather legendary 1990s boybands with the video for their current single, Take A Piece. Worth a watch for the overwhelming nostalgia alone.
Talking about the track, vocalist Juliette Jackson explains that "I initially wrote this song for someone else [...] I'd written an album's worth of songs but a lot of them felt similar to our first album and I wanted to try something different." "I'd just watched a documentary about this pop star and seen how insane their life was and their intense relationship with their fans, and was blown away by how much of themselves they'd had to give up to have the life they had [...] This mega pop star's life was literally nothing like mine but I could really identify with the vulnerability of being a performer and standing on stage every night and feeling the eyes of an audience, which can feel either grounding and unifying or - occasionally - scary and isolating."
If you'd like to catch the band playing live soon, you're in luck as they're heading out on tour with Bombay Bicycle Club across the UK in January and February - and they've just announced a run of their own shows for Feb/March. Full listings here.
27th Feb: The Fleece, Bristol
28th: O2 Academy 2, Liverpool
29th: Summerhall Arts Centre, Edinburgh
2nd March: Contemporary, Nottingham
3rd: O2 Academy 2, Oxford
With two big support tours coming up The Big Moon have just announced news of their debut album's follow-up Walking Like We Do, which is due for release 10th January via Fiction Records. Following recent single It's Easy Then, new single Your Light is, in short, a bit of a bop. It was premiered as Annie Mac's Hottest Record on BBC Radio 1, and is becoming a bit of an earworm for me, cementing its spot at the top of the blog's playlist for the week alongside the likes of Cosmo Sheldrake, Ghost and Annabel Allum. The track also has a cracking video with the band cycling through the Essex countryside, with some unexpected furry friends (honestly: have a look for yourself!)
The band's vocalist and songwriter Juliette Jackson explains the track - "I was thinking about how hard it is to tell if things are worse now or if they have always been this way and I just grew up and started paying attention. To me, it feels like we are at this tipping point that is unprecedented, but then it occurred to me that every generation before us probably had a moment when they thought they were going to be the last generation on earth. This song is about freeing yourself from all of it, just for a moment. It's a thanks to the one person or thing in your life that knows how to come in and open your curtains and light up the darkness and restore your strength so that when you clatter back down into the real world you have the strength to fight your battles, whatever they are."
The Big Moon just kicked off a UK tour with Pixies, and support Bombay Bicycle Club on their tour at the start of next year. Take a look at dates and pre-order the album from their site here.
