LIBRARY WITHOUT DUST
  • Home
  • About Me
  • Television
  • Music
  • Films
  • Books
  • Fandom

Music Retrospective: BEGINNERS, Who Knows (2014)

4/25/2020

 

​I didn’t know much about LA based electropop group BEGINNERS before I discovered ‘Who Knows.’ It passed me by when it was first released in 2014 on the group’s self-titled debut EP, but I stumbled upon it a couple of years later. Sometimes a song finds us at exactly the right moment and this became my summer anthem in a year when my partner and I made big changes in our lives. We left London, went on an American road trip and I curated playlists filled with upbeat, electronic pop that came to define a personal era of hope, freedom and change.

That summer I put on my headphones and soundtracked our last few months in London and the travels that followed with chart-topping hits from Sia, Calvin Harris and Rihanna, Sigala, Major Lazer, DJ Snake, Jonas Blue, MØ, Zara Larsson and countless others. Listening to those tunes will always immerse me in a city that still holds a piece of my heart, bringing back memories of London's East End and its buzzing markets, the quiet, residential streets of Chelsea and the energy and colour of the West End. I can feel the sun on my face and taste coffee from Square Mile cafés, chilled pints of cider from Soho pubs and crisp glasses of wine from bars tucked away in courtyards and on rooftops.

Read More

Music Retrospective: Pulp, Different Class (1995)

4/24/2020

 
Picture
In 1995 Britain was full of nationalistic hubris at the peak of the Britpop era, the musical antithesis to shoegazing and Seattle grunge that dominated the turn of the decade. Nobody cared yet about Y2K, the ‘Millennium Bug’ that threatened to cause a technological meltdown, much less Brexit. Thatcher was out, Major was in. Blair’s New Labour tapped into the sentiment of Cool Britannia, turning D:REAM’s “Things Can Only Get Better” into a campaign promise that led to a landslide election victory in 1997, ending eighteen years of Tory governance.
 
Pulp’s Different Class was released on the cusp of political change. The distinctively British album brimmed with sardonic wit, the mundane and the seedy, littered with tongue-in-cheek observations on everything from class in “Common People” to the rave scene in “Sorted For E’s & Wizz.” Frontman Jarvis Cocker’s bookish aesthetics and skinny blazers provided a counter to intolerant lad culture, captured in the album’s opening track “Mis-Shapes.”

Read More

    Categories

    All
    1990 - 1999
    2010 - 2020
    Music Retrospectives
    Radio

    Archives

    August 2021
    August 2020
    April 2020

Proudly powered by Weebly