Summer slowdown is already underway. This week’s playlist had to make room for summer songs, war songs, death songs, and even a handful of love songs.
Now that Max Blansjaar’s new album is out, we were finally able to play our favorite track, “Pieces of the Sun.” We fell easily into the low key slackdom of Max’s world, a world that will come crashing down one day as flowers turn to dust, our hero now expendable, nervously “waiting for someone.”
No, it’s just a playlist. Nothing to see here but the tunes. Happy Juneteenth!Happy Heat Wave, too. Lots of oldies from Chuck Brown to George Clinton, saluting freedom, the weather, and the good old summertime. New this week — Hungrytown’s highly evocative “Circus for Sale,” M Vaughan’s optimistic “All Good,” and Las Nubes rock-heavy guitars.
Plus the usual, “more”…
June brings crickets and heat waves.A wren is nesting in the gourd house! People are starting to drift away to vacate themselves to distant shores.Indie bands go on tour, hot grubby exhilarating tours across the country in cars and vans! Not a whole lot of new music this week so we filled in with oldies from groups that once upon a time also toured the land in cars and vans.
It’s hard to say what we were on about this week. There was a sense of doing the Charleston on the deck of the Titanic, and also one of “Look, how beautiful, it’s June!”
A certain nostalgia prompted us to revive the Lemonheads, Uncle Tupelo, and Unrest, not to mention the still very active Mountain Goats, currently on tour everywhere. We played “Jaipur” from The Coroner’s Gambit — classic Mountain Goats with all the trimmings including Darnielle’s trademarked* pissed-off vocals.
Baffling number of the week was “Good Luck, Babe” by Chappell Roan.
La Souterraine is one of our favorite labels, originating (we think) in an area of France known also as La Souterraine. This newish compilation released by them is called Traboule and is dedicated to the city of Lyons from whence all the artists included are based. A traboule is a uniquely Lyonnaise thing referring to the covered passageways found throughout the city.
Everyone has their AI moment. This week was mine. Coincidentally, and with regard to technology, I got the complete Switched On series (boxed, of course) by Stereolab for my birthday, and fans of the show benefited. So much great stuff! We had new tunes from Hungrytown, M. Vaughan, and Max Blansjaar — thanks, AA! New […]
Lots of new music this week after our last show was prematurely wiped out by the solar storms that rolled in the next day. But hey, at least we got to see the Northern Lights, finally. Rather than replay last week, we just rolled on with new music, starting with “The Neu! Testament” by Hidoux, a speculative number that imagines what Jesus would say if he ever got fed up with us. We finally got a copy of Mountain Goats Jenny from Thebes album and played tracks from that — much smoother than we remembered but still the John Darnielle we know and love.
It’s almost embarrassing how much we loved the power pop anthem “One For The Ages” by The Future Unwritten, but we forgive ourselves. Speaking of guilty pleasures, CG finally played some Atarashii Gakko!
This week on Bubble Wrap, we were grateful to bands, pr companies, and labels who sent us new music to check out. Without them, ‘twould have been a thin show indeed. As it was, we heard new tunes from Rinjin (Norwegian indie), Las Nubes (heavy Miami rock), and M. Vaughan (chill-hoppy with studio production), among others.
Another new release that we really enjoyed was Flowers and Overcoats by The Stakes Are Us. They really took us back to the cooler bands of the mid 80s, and indeed, we spent a lot of time saying things like “now where does that guitar sound come from.” This is especially true of “A Little A Lot.”
So-called Mud Season winds to a close, not that there was much mud this year due to dearth of snow. And now a dearth of tunes, causing us to have to dig into back catalog for music to play for y’all. In the process, we discovered that some artists have disappeared while others are still lurking about.
For instance, fine. — a duo associated with Kid Chameleon, who we also like — continue to put out a song a year, as if to say, yes, we’re still here but barely. G Flip had a great tune called “About You” a few years back, and they had a new record as recently as last year. Alvvays, a Toronto group we really liked, gave us “After the Earthquake” in 2022, but nothing since.
We’re rooting for the sun these days, figuratively and literally, but somehow, it keeps evading us. What day is it? Will you please tell me? Oh, that’s right, it’s Wednesday and Bubble Wrap just did their show. This is where we tell you what we played. Among this week’s discoveries: CZ, Will Butler, Mode, As The Flowers Fall, and Simon Groß.
Kicking off the first official month of Spring here in the northeast, nature gave us snow! Back to back snowstorms no less. And the beauty of it all? Our power stayed on, so we were able to do Bubble Wrap on Wednesday night as we do every week (join us at wvew.org).
New music from too many artists to list unless you want to skip down to the playlist which is just a scroll down the page. We liked the latest track from Amerigo Gazaway (“We Ain’t Playin'”), The Drop Nineteens (“Nest”), and Les Amazones d’Afrique (“Flaws”) — and many more
Since no one heard last week’s show, we decided to play parts of it again. But the tide of hits never stops and we couldn’t resist throwing in a few new tracks. We were won over by Hungrytown’s new single, “Feel Like Falling,” and not just because they’re from Vermont. The Sonitus Function’s mathematical number […]
This year’s provocatively titled Propaganda album by China’s Shijing Stereosystem really does make you appreciate the sounds of Chinese music and the flavor of Chinese culture, albeit through the lens of contemporary pop music — it’s everything you could want in an indie rock album, if that album was made in an alternate universe.
Due to storms in the Brattleboro area which knocked out power, broadcast service, and possibly streaming service (we don’t really know), it’s quite possible that no one at all heard this week’s Bubble Wrap radio show. C’est la vie! If you’re one of the many who missed it, here’s what you missed…