"He's On Your Doorstep, He's Laden With Flowers"

Last week, a dear friend of mine pointed out that I seem to have a hilariously visceral reaction whenever any music that sounds even vaguely jangly and folky plays within hearing distance (The Tallest Man On Earth's 1904 happened to be croaking out of the speakers at the time). And she would be very right. With notable exceptions (like glacial-pixie-dust-volcano-ash-Icelandic post-rock) very few other genres of music hit me as deep and as immediately -and stay with me longer- the way a good folk album can. Seriously ; just toss a bearded white guy singing poetically bittersweet lyrics tinged with rustic nature imagery and playing guitar (bonus points if it's a banjo or mandolin. I will gladly bear his children if he chooses to wield a BANJOLIN) somewhere in there and I am sold. Hard. 

Which is why I officially want to marry everyone in this video.




London-based folk band To Kill A King roped together a group of musician friends - including my current musical obsession, Bastille - for a joyous rendition of their single Choices. And it is gorgeous. Because what could be more perfect than a glorious folky sing-along session with all your friends (and all their violins and all their all their horns) in a gorgeous leafy backyard somewhere in London on a morning so beautiful that the sun beams down on you like gold and bliss and the laughter of children. Nothing, dammit. Nothing could be more perfect.

And I did have a hilariously visceral reaction to this song. It made me so happy I wanted to cry and then go outside and HUG THE SHIT out of someone. In fact I defy you to not start smiling as wide and as dorky as Bastille's Dan Smith (he of the jean jacket, striped shirt, beautiful voice and the gloriously PHWOOOOOSH-y hair) while watching this. It remains to be seen whether or not Bastille's and To Kill A King's respective albums will stick with me long enough and meaningfully enough to merit spots on the inevitable best-of lists at the end of the year. But for now this 6-minute slice of unadulterated, simple joy is my favourite thing in the universe.

Even if this kind of music isn't typically your thing, I urge you to give it a try. This song. So. Much, Happy. Don't you like being happy? Are you a killer of joy? DO YOU DROWN PUPPIES IN YOUR FREE TIME? I mean seriously.

What do you want to be when you grow up? is a question that becomes increasingly difficult to answer as I get older. It's especially challenging now that I'm in my second to last semester EVER of university , and relatives/acquaintances/random people I have just been introduced to insist on asking me this question. I understand that what do you plan to do in the future? functions as an icebreaker, and perhaps makes people feel like they're being considerate and interested in your life and where it's going.  But it makes me feel that I am being put on the spot in the most vulnerable way possible. It makes me want to pull  my hair out and wish for a void in the earth to swallow me up whole, rather than endure the pure torture of having to stand there in my gut-twisting, cringing awkwardness, trying to come up with an answer that makes me sound at least semi-articulate and In Control Of My Life.

What do you want to be when you grow up? I don't know. Where do you see yourself in five years?  I don't know. What career are you most passionate about?  I don't know. What is the blueprint for your future? I don't know. What do you plan to do with that degree of yours? I don't know. Maybe I'll get it framed and hang it up in my parents' house and sit on the couch in my pyjamas and cry at it every morning. What do you want to be when you grow up? A fucking unicorn.

I don't know if I'm doing anything phenomenally wrong here, but I quite frankly do not have a clue. Not one. Not even a sliver of a clue. I look around at the other also 20-something people on the brink of graduation and wonder if they have all their shit together. They certainly look like they do. Are they as confused as I am? As afraid? As painfully, desperately insecure? Do they also sometimes feel like breaking out into hysterical laughter when faced with the very thought of having to make up their minds about what on earth we're all going to do with the pieces of paper that will be granted to us at the end of 3.5 years? Are they also fighting the urge to drop everything, crawl under the blankets, and put their favourite album on repeat at full volume until the world decides to stop expecting things from us?

Or perhaps we're being asked the wrong question? I certainly don't know what I want to do for a living, but I have a pretty clear idea of some other things. I want to be happy. I want to be able to go to the movies, and to plays, and to concerts, and bookshops and restaurants. I want to travel. I want to read. I want to be surrounded by old friends and new friends and wonderful conversation and warm human affection and all the Oreo milkshakes I could possibly want. I want to be able to take my mom out on fancy dinner dates, because she deserves it. I want a giant framed poster of the TARDIS-ified Starry Night on the wall of the apartment (which I will own). I want to keep learning things. A five year projection, you say? In five years' time I want to be able to wear my own skin with the kind of confidence and security and contentment that I can only dream about at this point.

Maybe I'm not aiming high enough, or dreaming big enough, or planning concretely enough. Perhaps I'm too complacent, or too willing to fly by the seat of my pants. I don't know. And I don't know is something I seem to be saying and thinking a lot lately, like a ridiculous litany constantly looping somewhere in the periphery of my consciousness. I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know. It doesn't help that things at home with the family haven't been entirely rosy in close to two years and counting now (ongoing financial issues, four funerals in roughly 18 months and mental illness issues aren't too fun to deal with). And it frightens me ; the idea that things simply won't "be okay" for myself and for my family, and I won't simply know all the answers, and that one day just "hanging in there" is not going to be nearly enough, and healthy escapism through songs and books and TV (something I have perfected to an art form, I'll have you know) simply won't be enough, and trying to claw our way through surviving another week, and then the next week, and the next week, won't be enough.

But I digress. What do I want to be when I grow up? I don't know. If  "happy" is too much to ask for right now, I'll settle for being "okay". "Be okay" seems like the closest thing to an attainable goal I can work towards at this point. Or perhaps we should all aspire to be more like Frank Turner, and adopt this song as our anthem of young adult angst (which isn't nearly as dramatic or exciting as adolescent angst, but it'll do) and do our own growing up, on our own terms, regardless of whether or not we ever learn to know what the fuck it is we're doing.

"And The Walls Kept Tumbling Down In The City That We Loved".

It's Sunday, and I'm posting three four different versions of the same song (Pompeii by Bastille), because I can and because I am thoroughly in love with all incarnations of this track.



(this is my personal favourite, because I am a sucker for house concerts, crowd participation, happy band members, and adorable sweaters).








And just to be fair, here's the official album version as well.




I suppose it would be a lazy comparison to call Bastille the more-English-but-less-guitar-centric baby of Fun. and Foster The People. Their debut album Bad Blood is insanely accessible and high-energy electronic-based pop with MASSIVE hooks and irresistably catchy melodies. The band's only failings at this point are their sonic predictability (you can just about the see the hooks coming from the intro verse-bridge combo alone) and a tendency to come up with pseudo-deep but ultimately generic lyrics : "there's a hole in my soul/can you fill it?" is not exactly the essence of poetic profundity. But there's something about frontman Dan Smith's frankly phenomenal boy-voice that exudes so much well-meaning sincerity and conviction, so that what could have been hollow and by-the-numbers songwriting is given a certain measure of depth and emotional resonance.



You also don't need me to tell you that these guys aren't exactly the second coming of Radiohead. This is solid but ultimately lightweight stuff. All the hipster music blogs I follow will presumably not be devoting much pixel space to Bastille. But you know what, it doesn't matter. I don't care. I am a strong, independent woman and grown-ass adult consumer of popular culture, and I don't need a godforsaken Pitchfork approval rating to justify what I do or don't enjoy listening to. I don't need that shit. I will jam to whatever the hell I feel like jamming out to. So there. You hear me Pitchfork? You hear me?! I defy your elitist standards of artistic and cultural merit. I defy the hell out of it.

What really and truly intrigues me about Bastille, however, is the plethora of consistently excellent acoustic performances of their album tracks available on the youtube (see the Mahogany Sessions video above). It says a lot about the quality of your work when you can strip your music of all its polished beats and processed vocals, right down to the barest structure of harmonies, handclaps and acoustic guitar. And everything still sounds just as good, if not actually better. This gorgeous, nearly bare-as-bones rendition of Flaws does more for me than the album version ever will, and also provides video evidence that Dan Smith (he of the impossibly skinny jeans and fantastic hair) has impeccable taste in dorky sweaters.

With tonnes of radio airplay and chart success in the UK already, these guys look primed to be hitting The Big Time very very soon. I'll be just over here fiercely looking up every obscure backyard acoustic session anyone has ever uploaded on the internet so I can talk about how I totally knew them before they were (too) famous. Consider me firmly settled in the bandwagon, guys.

p.s: it would be a gigantic travesty if I ended this post without sharing this fantastic remix/mashup/cover hybrid of TLC's No Scrubs laid over The XX's Angels, interspersed with soundclips from Psycho. What could have been overambitious and pretentious horseshit turned out to be one of the BEST things to have graced my ears so far in 2013. Do yourselves a favour (especially if you're not a fan of mashups - I wasn't, and this won me over so hard, I still haven't recovered nearly a month later) and press play on this shiny little gem of audio goodness.





p.p.s: A full day of stewing in Bad Blood's  12 tracks has led me to conclude that the album as a whole tends to drown in its own unremarkability (is that a word? well it's a word now). Too many of the songs sound too similar in terms of beats and production, and seem to regress into anonymity with attempts to appeal to as many genres and markets as possible, Without Dan Smith's strong vocals to pull shit together, some of these songs run the risk of sounding faceless, like any other 4-white-guys-with-guitars indie-pop band could have stepped in and done the job just as well. Attempts to include literary and mythological references comes across as just a tad too try-hard, and the writing - as I've pointed out earlier - tends to be patchy at best. But it's worth mentioning that the strongest tracks offered here are the ones with the more offbeat melodies and reined-in synthesized beats ; Weight Of Llving Pt.II and Weight Of Living Pt.I, the latter being tucked away as a hidden track towards the end (you fucknuts, Bastille, why isn't this a potential single?). The grandiose bombast is great, but simplicity - or at the very least, some restraint and variety - seems to work best. Stop trying to be Arcade Fire. Just...be kinda sorta maybe The XX. With the volume turned up. And more ingredients.

Flaws aside, there's something about these guys that just appeals to me on a  "I don't know why I like it I just do, okay?" level (*cough* Dan Smith has nice hair *cough*). Perhaps it's simply a craving for fresh, solid pop music.  Dan Smith's solo work with his covers mixtapes proves that he is a an absolutely fantastic interpreter of other artists' songs - all that remains is for him to transfer that brand of intricate originality to his own stuff. And I believe that with a few more years' worth of firm grounding in playing together as a band, improvements in songwriting, and a stronger focus on exactly what they want to sound like, we could be in store for some special things from this band. I'm rooting for these guys. You go, Bastille, four for you Bastille. I'll be right behind you with the pom-poms.