Listening Club - 8th July 2012

Greetings to you all,

Another week, another intro in which I have a grumble about the English weather. Yes, I know it's expected, and more than a bit of a cliche, but floods? three months rainfall in a week? An early July lunchtime and I'm sitting in a room with the lights on because it's so black outside? Jeepers in my creepers, people, if this is not the end of days, it's a pretty good dress rehearsal. I'm certainly glad I'm spending significantly less time under canvas than usual this year.

And so along comes Listening Club, forever playing the fiddling Nero to our atmospheric calamities, and providing us all with a reason to stay in for an hour on a Sunday night. But even the beloved LC continuum has suffered, as @Holette was picked to make last week's selection, but had to cut and run, quickly frisbeeing me the stomping Drum'n'Bass of Black Sun Empire's "Driving Insane" before keeping her appointment with a bicycle and 250km of Welsh countryside... Thanks to her for a fine pick, especially under duress, although it did have to compete with the Euro2012 final. Still we didn't do too bad.

However in the follow up, the treasured LC baton sadly fell in the mud. I thought @Holette was going to pick a successor, I think she thought I would take care of it... yadda, yadda, yadda. So we all should be thankful that @tibieryo has emerged from the other side of the timezones, picked up the LC baton, and given himself a reason to get out of bed a little earlier on a Sunday. Over to him...

"We all know how most albums in our lives have stories, or ways we listen to them or general stuff like that. For my first week here, when I'd actually won, I told the story of a romance that I was never quite sure did or didn't happen with the older sister of a friend of mine. 

Except, not a lot of albums in my life have stories. That was one of the rare ones, and when it comes to the 50-odd albums on my shortlist, very few of them have stories as modestly spectacular as that behind them. This is one such album with pretty much no preamble or context. 

I can tell you that in my first year of university (also my last), I met a guy named Dan who has gone on to be pretty much my best friend through thick and thin. Some time last year, he turned me onto something that absolutely thrilled me--rocked me to my core as it were. And for the past year, I've been watching that entire scene like a hawk for something that moved me as deeply or in a comparable way. 

As it happens, the scene I've been watching has blown up like Chappie's bubblegum, eliciting more controversy in a year than any other act I've seen in the last ten. Maybe I'm watching the wrong acts. Maybe watching for controversy is the wrong thing to do. But it seems like everything this camp does, everybody's got an opinion and it's frequently negative. 

Best part is, he actually got this from his older brother's sister, who isn't even into this genre of music.

Like I said, finding love, wondering if you have love and losing love is a lot much more of a story than the real life ways we just follow artists and find albums. That said, this album is one of my faves this year and I still expect almost entirely negative reactions. 

I wonder if that's just me." 

Download here (via Mediafire), or stream it here (via Mixcloud) 

Start time, as always, is 8pm BST (GMT+1), providing the world hasn't ended before then. Search #listeningclub to see what's going on, and follow @listeningclub for the admin. 

See you then!