December 31, 2017

Each year for the past few years I have shamelessly ripped-off an idea from a friend and posted my Festive Five music tracks here. It’s is always such a difficult choice narrowing songs down to just five but here goes…

Rican Beach by Hurray for The Riff Raff

This first song narrowly defeated my other choice from the album ‘Navigator’ by the band Hurray for The Riff Raff. I love the opening few bars of this song and the lyrics that accompany them.

Song in Stone by Iron and Wine

I include this song purely for its simplicity — just mellow, sweet, Americana.

U’Huh by Sinkane

I have listened to previous albums by Ahmed Gallab, AKA Sinkane, before and enjoyed them thoroughly. This year’s release was no exception. The joyful afro-funk sound blends world music, big bands and dance. A real treat!

In Cold Blood by Alt-J

I must confess I wrongly assumed Alt-J were a boy band and never listened to their music. When I first heard some tracks off the album RELAXER, I was struck by how this album mixed genres and was hard to pin down and the music is very different to the mainstream.

The Day Before You Came by Benny Andersson

Benny Andersson is here because ‘The Day Before You Came’ was always my favourite Abba song (have you noticed that even the most upbeat of their songs are actually sad) and this piano version beautifully captures the melancholy.

I was very tempted to include Try Not to Breathe by R.E.M as it was re-released in 2017. I listened to the Song Exploder podcast featuring Stipe telling the background to the song and the influence of his dying grandmother on the lyrics and that made the song even more powerful. I reckon a re-release isn’t quite in the spirit of the game though.

2018

Next year I plan to post more regularly about music so we’ll see how that starts in late January…

Music


Previous post We will remember them Today is remembrance day. The Third Battle of Ypres (31 July — 10 November 1917) concluded 100 years ago yesterday and has come Next post New Phone Day We operate a pretty strict food chain of phones here and my daughter’s iPhone had started to become old and unreliable so it was time for my old