The Friday Refrain: A bit of what's new in music...

Sometimes it's hard to go about life and know how to approach it. I sometimes speak out here, mostly about my own life, not so much on the world around me. But my goodness is that getting hard not to do. I also think many others have written words beautiful and appropriate, and don't feel I have the ability to do any better. But I will say this. There are sucky people out there that do terrible things. Unjustifiable things. And it seems it happens enough now that it is easy to give into the sucky people and start to live lives of fear. But we can't. Fear doesn't bring us to good places. Fear doesn't resolve our issues. Which we know, because Yoda told us so. And many others. But today I'm thinking about Yoda. It's easy to find the bad, it's easy to focus on the scary, but we need to find the love and the commonalities among us. We need to talk about our issues and we need to talk about the good that happens too, to remind us and to bring us together. Let's stop living in this world like we're in a school cafeteria. Do you remember lunchtime? I didn't like the politics of where to sit at lunch, so I just played piano in the choir room. Anyway, my point is let's find the good, and you know what? Music can help us do that. It's cathartic, it's unifying, it can make you feel all the feels and help you through. Which is why I'm going to do the thing I do on Fridays and talk about new music.

This week is a light release week again. Record companies must be on summer vacation. However, amazing awesome Heart is out with Beautiful Broken. Big EDM releases this week: Aphex Twin with Cheetah EP and AraabMuzik has Dream World. The Pixies are getting some new material out later this year and released the single "Um Chagga Lagga." And then there is an interesting piece of music new this week regarding Sufjan Steven, a guy who dug in his dumpster and a possibly unreleased album he has in his possession. Check it out here if you want to know the story.

And then check out this List from last week!

It's Another Week of Aquatic References

Message To Bears, Carved From Tides - It's kinda just neat. It's a dude making ambient? Electronica with purpose/story? Something like that.

Curren$y, Stoned on Ocean - A rapper of New Orleans origins

High Water, Crush - Playground of Rock territory for sure.

Mark Barrott, Sketches From an Island 2

blink-182, California - if you don't know who blink-182 is, then you're probably not in my generation. So google it.

(Okay those last two were stretches but I started to get a little word associative, and I didn't include Snoop's Cool Aid even though I wanted to. But now I kinda got to. WIN.)

Other Things I liked After Sampling the Album

The Bongolian, Moog Maximus - well Moog is in the title so that gives you some idea. Instrumental from what I've listened to so far. Dancey, good for hangout music

Jacob Collier, In My Room - I do not know what to think or say about this one. There are so many musical ideas and styles mashed up together in this that I can't even give it a category. He uses a cappella harmonies but combines it with an early Bon Iver sound, jazz, latin idioms, and such. Which is why I need to listen again.

Gøggs, Gøggs - I just don't have the chance to listen to all the harder music that I want to and so I found a few tracks interesting musically, but don't know when I'll have the chance to give it a chance.

Above Top Secret, Above Top Secret - Rap/electro stuff. Something about it intrigues me.

Beyond the Wizards Sleeve, The Soft Bounce - Jammy electronica

Chelsea Grin, Self Inflicted - intense metal hardcore type of music.

Grace, FMA - I kinda like her cover of "You Don't Own Me" with G-Eazy

Rocío Dúrcal, Duetos - A little Latin music to round out my sounds of the week

Okay, still getting the hang of things and can't figure out how to rearrange the order of a playlist on Spotify, but below you'll find a Spotify Playlist of stuff! All right, good nap means long post. Time to go hang out with my family. Happy Listening!