Wednesday, July 3, 2024

It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2024 # 176 Another Sky

 


I enjoy writing on here. It's a challenge I've set for myself on an almost daily basis now. The way that some people do crosswords or sudoku or wordle. To offset the threat of impending old  age and dementia. To try and say something that others might enjoy reading.

So I try to find new records that have got something going for them. Usually things I like because that's more motivating than something I don't care for. It's not an impossible task. There are no end of interesting new records and the Internet means they're all fairly readily available. It's just a question of browsing.

In 2024 I find that not all the records I like are engagements in the new by any means. Ty Segall pretending he's a close contemporary of Bowie, Eno and Bolan in 1972. The Umbrellas that they're a C-86 band from Glasgow in 1986.

I like both of these artists and enjoy their records. But they're exercises in flight essentially. Flights into the past, partly driven I suspect by a fear or reluctance to live entirely in the presentt. In a world that's getting more frightening by the day frankly.

Today is something different from the usual. This is a modern Rock record which addresses the modern condition and all its contradictions full on and unapolagetically. Even aggressively on occasion. That doesn't make it any less bracing and invigorating,

Beach Day is London quartet's Another Day's second album and I find it fascinating. It's an austere record. Minimal and spare. Almost classical in its mien,

Every song offers a new take on living in the here and now. It's not afraid to say 'Fuck Off'' when it thinks it needs to. But it doesn't choose the same means as Johnny Rotten, Ian Curtis, Bobby Gillespie or Ian McKaye did to achieve this basic end. It has its own trappings. Excellent stuff.

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