Blue Gowns

Simply doing our bit to promote the work of female and transgender artists on a regular basis!

[letskissandbreakup]

Empress Of - ‘Need Myself’ (Me)

It was a close call between this and the cat-errific ‘Kitty Kat’, but instead it’s ‘Need Myself’ that stands as an exemplary pick from the excellent Me, an album that draws as much from her Soundcloud/blog origins as from contemporary pop and RnB.  

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Kelela - ‘Rewind’

Remarkably chill cut from Kelela’s forthcoming Hallucinogen EP, which after hearing this, I’m looking forward to all the more.

[letskissandbreakup]

Chelsea Wolfe - ‘Iron Moon’ (Abyss, 2015)

Though not usually my sort of thing, there is a strength of personality in Wolfe’s work that keeps drawing me back to it. More than that, the music on her new album Abyss is a strong compliment to the bleakness of her lyrical vision. ‘Iron Moon’ is a particular favourite at the moment.

[letskissandbreakup]

Kacey Musgraves - ‘Follow Your Arrow’ (Same Trailer Different Park, 2013)

If the mainstream contemporary country is notoriously homogenous, that’s probably because it’s been a long time since outsiders have had a sustained interest in the genre, which itself may be due to the lack of stars with genuine crossover potential. Whether or not Musgraves has the potential to be that star is up for debate, but with her progressive politics and assertive lyrics it is obvious that she represents something altogether more distinct and compelling than other country stars. The Grammy winning Same Trailer Different Park is a delight to listen to from first to last, affirming in spite of the bleak outlook often faced by its protagonists. ‘Follow Your Arrow’ is perhaps its most important song; an anthem for dysfunctional misfits everywhere with a pro-weed, pro-queer message. It’s a great song, but the attraction of Same Trailer isn’t the medium or the message, it’s the undeniable personality and heart that shines through it all.

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Emilie Nicolas - ‘Nobody Knows’

The past month or so has been pretty slow on the new releases front - the current glacial rate of posting on this blog speaks for itself - but I have been meaning to catch up on a few things that have caught me by surprise. Emilie Nicolas’ album Like I’m a Warrior came out last year in Scandinvia but is only now being released in the rest of the world. The album joins the trend of recent quality pop music coming out of the region; check out the wonderfully chill ‘Nobody Knows’ above. 

[letskissandbreakup]

Carly Rae Jepsen - ‘Turn Me Up’ (Kiss, 2012)

I should maybe preface this post in the Summer Project by saying that I’m writing about Kiss now and not in two weeks time because I’m pretty sure there are going to be multiple posts about Jepsen’s new album EMOTION, which is already way out in front as my album of the year so far. 

Despite the success of ‘Call Me Maybe’ and the fame and attention that followed, I was interested to learn that Kiss only initially sold 300,000 copies in the US, which is a crying shame because it’s easily one of the best pop albums of the decade. What is surprising is the consistency; with the possible exceptions of the limp Owl City collab ‘It’s Always a Good Time’ and the bland ‘More Than a Memory’, everything hits a tremendously sugary sweet spot, from the irreverent sampling of Sam Cooke’s ‘Cupid’ in opener ‘Tiny Little Bows’ to the defiant bombast of ‘Tonight I’m Getting Over You’. 

There’s also a rare maturity in the lyrical content that is unusual for what you might take to be meaningless pop music. Whether she’s out-National-ing The National on ‘Call Me Maybe’s middle eight or rewriting love tropes on ‘Your Heart is a Muscle’, it is obvious that Jepsen puts just as much effort into her words as her hooks. 

While I am determined not to place my Summer Project picks in any sort of coherent order, Kiss would walk into any Top 5 album list I might be inclined to write for the period 2010-2014. If you have any interest whatsoever in Jepsen’s music, you owe it to yourself to listen to this album. You won’t regret it.

[letskissandbreakup]

Babeo Baggins - Posi+ive 

Babeo Baggins is at the forefront of the intriguing DIY rap collective Barf Troop, a group with an explicitly feminist identity that showcases work from an assortment of ‘Babes’, including non-gender binary artists, and Baggins’ work is similarly focused (Sample lyric:’Why do you tell me I’m pretty/ I wanna be handsome’). Her debut mixtape Posi+ive comes with two sides: Side A is a showcase of Baggins’ rapping talent, while B focuses on the more relaxed, RnB side of things. An exciting talent and new discovery for sure!

[letskissandbreakup]

Alice Glass - ‘Stillbirth’

Not exactly weekend fare I know, but I thought it would be worth the boost. For more info go here

[letskissandbreakup]

Niki & The Dove - ‘Love to the Test’, Instinct

If the popular music trends of the past half decade have taught us anything, it’s that our fascination with the past and our thirst for good pop music aren’t going anywhere, so it’s little surprise that one of the best pop albums of the last 5 years was a synth-pop record. But don’t let that put you off, because besides having tremendous deep cuts like ‘Love to the Test’, Instinct pulls off the tremendous task of being both catchy as hell and weird as f*ck. Add this to the fact that ‘Love to the Test’ might be one of the most euphoric ‘come hither’ songs this side of ‘Call me Maybe’ and you’ve got a recipe for a pretty stellar (if you’ll pardon the pun) album.

Summer Project 2015 continues later this week.

[letskissandbreakup]

Julia Holter - ‘Feel You’

Wasn’t sure if I was going to go all the way with Holter for the forthcoming Have You In My Wilderness (despite enjoying her last one immensely), but I’m glad I listened to ‘Feel You’ because it’s gotten me pretty excited about the album! It’s looking like a consolidation of the spaced out vibes of Ekstasis combined with the more ‘organic’/’live’ instrumentation of Loud City Song, with maybe some catchy pop vibes thrown in. Looking forward to it.

[letskissandbreakup]

Summer

I thought it was about time I changed the look of the blog, so being as we’re embarking on a summer project I thought I’d type ‘summer tumblr’ into the search bar and use the first thing that came up as our banner, so that’s what I did. 

[yvynyl]

Shiggy Jr. - サマータイムラブ

Summer time love! Ultra ultra 80′s pop, just for powering up your week vibes.

[letskissandbreakup]

Kathleen Edwards - Voyageur

Right about the moment before I decided to give Voyageur a shot, I read perhaps the best summation of the album I’ve heard to date -  that there are two great things about Voyaguer; the first note, and everything that comes after it. A more accurate and concise summary I couldn’t hope to come up with, but I will say that out of all the records released in 2012, this is probably the one I return to the most often, and with the most urgency. 

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Air Waves - ‘Milky Way’

Like a long, calming sigh at the end of the day.

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Danity Kane - ‘Tell Me’ DK3

I picked this one to start with because it is the most recent addition to my mental ‘albums from this half-decade that I love’ list, and it seems I’m not alone. Looking at the search results for their songs, there’s no shortage of dance choreographers delighting in the plentiful hooks and beats on display throughout DK3, a distinction normally reserved for K-Pop groups. With perhaps only one or two exceptions (more on that later) there’s no pop album I’d rather lend my ears to this decade either, be it slow jams like ‘Tell Me’ and ‘Secret Lover’ or the effortlessly catchy ‘Rhythm of Love’ and ‘Lemonade’. 

Probably my most listened to album of 2015, DK3 deserves acknowledgement in any self-respecting end-of-half-decade-summary list. 

[letskissandbreakup]

Summer Project 2015

Instead of getting involved with the usual ‘mid point of the year’ album ranking business that usually goes on when releases start to slow down this time of year, I thought that this summer I’d take a periodic look back at albums from the previous half decade (2010-2014 inclusive) instead (original I know), in an effort to recommend artists that produced stellar work before this blog began publishing and to maybe write some of the gender imbalanced wrongs or other, similar lists.

First I’ll be taking a look at DK3.

[letskissandbreakup]

Diane Cluck - ‘This is Our Love’ (Karen Dalton Cover)

I know I’ve already blogged about SVE’s ‘Remembering Mountains’, but I just had to post Diane Cluck’s contribution to the Remembering Mountains Karen Dalton tribute-cum-cover collection, and to recommend the collection more generally. There are some really poignant moments on this album, and the contributors all do a pretty stellar job with what I’ve heard is some pretty sparse material. 

Does anyone else find it interesting that the only recordings of Dalton’s singing we have are her covers, and the only recordings of her original work we have are themselves covers? What a fantastically contrary situation. How amazing it would have been to know her personally.