"Romance 126" - Snow Mantled Love

Perry Hamoud, Jonathan Zarola and Danielle Fricke are a trio from Ontario, Canada, and make the most gentle, unstructured and ungeneric pop music. Their EP "Romance 126", is homemade, and was released in 2012.

It opens with "If You Want To", whirring layers of sound that blend together, dark and light at the same time. "A Clear Mind" sounds like cogs turning in a machine, surges of noise followed by quiet. Danielle Fricke's overlaying harmonies are the rays of light spilling through the window, the percussion used is soft and gentle.



"Leaves" sounds mystical and aerial and it's so dynamic. The whole song is the repetition of one line of lyrics, short and sweet with the instrumental and vocal harmonies wrapping the simple melody up in layers. It's followed with "Trying to be Found", minimalist and pretty with the softest, most haunting backing vocals and strings.

"In The End" sounds like morning dew and cold air, whispering into place, sounding so conclusional and like it captures a moment, a story, that I feel like it has to belong in a film. "Who Will Say Goodbye" is all fuzzy organ and odd click-clacks of percussion, centred around Fricke's beautiful voice.

This EP, as a whole, is cinematic, soft and soothing. You can hear the influence of Sigur Rós in them, and their music brings a faintness, an unorderly yet gorgeous arrangement and the same sense of murmured, blurry lyrics that you find in Bon Iver.

"Romance 126" is avaliable on bandcamp now, at "name your price".

"I can't see anyone else smiling here"

There’s been a lot of doom and gloom on my blog recently.

Here is "Common People" by Pulp, I'm sure you've heard it before. Sing along. Laugh at the dance moves in the video.

This song was written about a rich, Greek girl that he met at university. She told him she wanted to live like “common people”, to go to supermarkets and not have the money, to be treated like anyone else.

A classic pop/rock song, it has you dancing as much as it has you wanting to cry. It's just beautiful, because amongst all its layers, it's about someone trying to make everyday life an adventure.

I have always loved this song and the story behind it, but hadn't seen the music video until my dad came home and showed me the other day after we'd been talking about that album. It is hilarious.

I hope you’re having a good week, and that January and the post-Christmas-sads aren’t treating you too harshly. 

Lizzie xx

HMV - In Memoram

Just under two years ago, I was in Year 10 in high school, and taking the morning off to see a woman in a town near where I live to arrange my work experience placement. I was walking back to the bus stop, through the town. And I saw that HMV was all boarded up and closed. It had closed down.

I walked up to the entrance, peered inside. It just looked like a big, empty hall, dusty and dark. There were a few stepladders slung about. The shelves were all gone. I pressed my palm against the door, with some vague notion that it would still swing open. I think I had this image in my head of walking around in the empty room and just taking in what had happened but it was locked, of course.

That was the record store where I bought my copy of Imogen Heap's Ellipse, in late 2009. The girl at the desk there was telling me that they had it playing in the store all morning and she loved it. I bought some of my favourite albums there, some I'd set out to get intentionally and some because they were just on offer for 2 for £10, and I ended up loving them just the same.

I have always had this kind of love/hate relationship with HMV. I am forever complaining about the crap that they put on the Recommended shelf. Sometimes I obnoxiously reorganise it, and put up things I think deserve more attention in hope that someone will stumble past them. This always annoyed my friends.

An example, from Chester some time in 2011. Observe the top row.

Of course I support independent businesses, and would much prefer to go and buy vinyl in a little record store owned by a caring man and covered in dust, but I have to admit this was probably my favourite place to buy CDs. Partly because I had nowhere else to go. It was to HMV I ran, sprinting, at five minutes to closing time to pick up my copy of Babel on September 24th. It was also where I bought The Lizzie McGuire Movie with my pocket money when I was nine.

I just have so many little anecdotes about HMV, too many to fit in one blog post. Like just a few weeks ago I was in the store on Manchester's Market Street, carrying a stack of CDs under my arm and flicking through shelves looking for something. And a woman approached me and asked if I'd help her.

I said, "I don't work here, sorry."

"Oh." She frowned. "Can you help me anyway? You look like you know about music."

Kid you not.

I felt pretty on the spot but it was Christmas and the shop was really busy, so I sort of shrugged and offered to. And to my relief she asked which Elbow album she should buy, because she'd heard them on a stereo in a bar she was in. So I just talked her through them all, and told her which my favourite songs of theirs were, and helped her work out which the song she knew was by humming it ("One Day Like This", of course).

Then there was the time I asked if they had Amanda Palmer's Theatre is Evil and they said they didn't, only "Trout Heart Replica" was playing in the store at the time.

HMV went into administration today.

There's lots of opinions going around. "Oh, this will be great for independent record stores!" It won't, it means that downloads are drowning the industry, whether physical CD sales are led by a chain store or not. This will effect distributors, artists, and, of course, the 4,000 employed by HMV.

I am not excited about their closing sale, just really hoping for good news.

Alice's Bucket List

We'll be back to regularly scheduled programming soon, but I had to write about this today.

Alice Pyne is a girl my age, we would have been in the same school year. She was diagnosed with terminal cancer over five years ago and, in 2011, started writing her blog "Alice's Bucket List".

Alice made a list of things that she wanted to do before she died. And they weren't all the most cliché, selfless, acts of Kindness and Benevolence that the image of cancer patients, strengthened and given wisdom by their illness we get in the media would make us expect. She was just a normal teenage girl. She wanted to meet Take That. She wanted to go to Alton Towers. She wanted to have a photo shoot with her dog.

She wanted to go to prom.

When Alice started writing, in 2011, she celebrated Christmas in November, because she wasn't sure she would last another Christmas that year. Throughout last year, she started working on a goal to get everyone to sign up for bone marrow registration, involving fundraising, and a campaign for Hallmark to print messages on the back of eighteenth birthday cards. She started a charity called Alice's Escapes, facilitating free holidays to families with a seriously or terminally ill child.

Here is the British Bone Marrow Registry. Alice's sister, Milly, is climbing Kilimanjaro, this October to raise funds for Alice's Escapes, and you can sponsor her here.

The work she did, everything towards this cause, is amazing. Not from a sympathetic point of view, not because she had cancer, they're just amazing things for a human to do in general. She also made two Christmasses more than she thought that she would, back in 2011. She also went to prom.

If you read her blog, you'll see that she stayed incredibly positive until the very last minute.

"I'm not eating as much as I should so mum and dad keep making silly things with my food - yesterday, for lunch I got a bagel with Baybel eyes on top and french fries sticking out the sides of the bagel - that was their idea of a spider. I am beginning to think that we are like care in the community and that they need help too LOL."

She died yesterday. Her mum wrote this post.

Having never met her, and only having read her blog, it's strange to think about how weak she must have been towards the end, because she never seemed it when she wrote. She was always, always excited about something that was happening, things for her charity, seeing Robbie Williams, going to Center Parcs. On her blog, she never complained. She never talked about unfair it was that this was happening to her. I can't imagine how strong the temptation must have been.

My thoughts are with her family. They should be so proud.

"You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments you cannot even imagine yet."- "The Fault in Our Stars", John Green

Alaska

Playlist: "Alaska"

This is one day late, but yesterday was the 10th January, the anniversary of the death of a character in John Green's novel "Looking For Alaska".

If you haven't read it, you absolutely should, but this is very likely to contain spoilers.

Alaska Young is sort of one of my favourite and least favourite fictional characters simultaneously, partly because I identify with her so much which infinitely multiplies both the love and the hate. I wanted to compile songs that capture her and capture the story but honestly, I keep wanting to go back and change things because I don't feel like I did it that well - it's so easy to miss out all the good and focus only on the pain. It's easy to do the same but the other way around as well. I tried to find a balance with this.

"Stephanie Says" - The Velvet Underground (x)
"Hurricane Drunk" - Florence and the Machine (x)
"Black Ice" - Ohbijou (x)
"Wild Thing" - Noah and the Whale (x)
"Looking For Alaska" - Liane Graham (x)
"The Beast" - Laura Marling (x)
"Sylvia Plath" - Ryan Adams (x)
"Every Teardrop is a Waterfall" - Coldplay (x)
"The Moment I Said It" - Imogen Heap (x)
"I Speak Because I Can" - Laura Marling (x)

David Bowie - New Album and Single!

You will have heard this all over today already, but today, David Bowie's sixty-sixth birthday, he announced that the first album he has recorded in ten years will be released in March. Completely out of the blue.

David Bowie's new single - it feels so weird to say this - was released today.



"WHERE ARE WE NOW?" - David Bowie

About Bowie and I... honestly, his music was not really a massively acknowledged presence in my life until I was fourteen and my friend I met that year listened to him all the time. He was one of his most beloved musicians, and it was him who made me actually listen to all of his records and not just "Space Oddity", "Dancing in the Street", "Changes" etc. It is needless to say David Bowie is fantastic and "Heroes" particularly has been a part of my life.

"Where Are We Now?" shows a shift in his sound, though clearly the same elements as his old music running through, there are changes both audibly in his voice, and in the song and its style. The video is already iconic and its story an enigma, the song itself both warm and heartbreaking, its lyrics full of sorrow and conclusion. As well as being a talking point, it's just beautifully unexpected, an amazing song with lots like it to follow, I hope.

It's a really weird thought that this morning I woke up having no idea this would happen today.

"Where Are We Now?" is avaliable on iTunes, and the new album scheduled for March release.

"if you need to cry, then cry, cry, cry"

"HANDWRITING" - Emily and the Woods

Emily Wood grew up in London, amongst a family of musicians, and began writing music and learning guitar whilst she was at university in Exeter

The way "Handwriting" opens is fuzzy and blurred, like a crackling voice on the other end of the whole, and fades into your ears. Growing soft guitar chords and horns, she sings  Later, the drums kick in. I love how soft and vast it is at the same time, and the little crackles and tremouring noises that sandwich it either end.

It sounds like long bike rides over the summer. It sounds like brushing your hair and shutting your eyes and trying to concentrate on breathing.

It sounds like running out into the hills, or into the city, or just anywhere where nobody can find you.

This is from her gorgeous EP, "Eye To Eye", which was released in 2011.

"hold her head, two years, every night"

"THREE POINTS ON A COMPASS" - Martin Rossiter

Martin Rossiter was the frontman of Gene, 90s rock/Britpop group, known for "For The Dead" and "Olympian." After eight years of silence, he came back with his first solo release, The Defenestration of St Martin, in November 2012.

"Three Points on a Compass" is just a piano and Rossiter's vocals, perfectly rough and delicate and scratchy. It is minimalist, instrumentally so simple, nothing distracting from his voice and those words, lyrics that are thoughtful and full of regrets.

"The only thing,
I got from you,
was my name."

It ends with the most gorgeous piano solo, climbing up to the higher octaves, its melody reminiscent, almost, of jazz or lounge music.

"Three Points on a Compass", and the whole album, are available here.