Raffaella feels like a bit of an interesting oddity in my list of “artists I like to listen to”. For the most part, to be frank, she feels like kind of a nobody level musician, though not for not trying pretty hard to get somewhere. Though Wikipedia says she was dating Justice Smith for a while and she got a set on Vevo Discover, which is pretty sweet. I’m not really here to gossip though. My first exposure was when she opened for Sigrid in 2019. Before the show I started listening to this album just fro the sake of having some idea of who she was.
I’ve been a fan since then though. I actually listen to more Raffaella these days than Sigrid, which is also amusing. It actually feels like a bit of a shame that she doesn’t seem to be making a ton of traction in her career, because she has a really interesting and varied sound and a lot of clever lyrics going on in her tracks.
The opening track of her first EP, Ballerina, is Sororicide, an airy jazzy track that follows a little story about a girl who seems to both wants to reject and embrace the whole concept of being part of the popular crowd, and how ultimately it’s all kind of a big fake sham. This is a bit of a running theme throughout this album’s tracks. A desire to be part of the cool crowd while trying to reject it for individuality. I really like the use of vocalizations as part of the backing track to the lyrics, with the oooohh and the little do do do that pop up.
It’s followed by Bruce Willis. On a side note, I really like how this is one of those rare songs where the title isn’t just the chorus line. It has a lot of the same feel and themes of Sorocicide, though it has a much fuller sound to it. I like how the hook breaks out the way it does each time from the calmer lyrical sections.
The third track on this EP, NASA’s Fake, has a more upbeat and poppy sound to it, which a much more prominent drum line to it and a bit more synth effects to it. It also has a lot more interesting variety to it’s melodies then the first two tracks with it’s bopping chorus and it’s little break out quiet interlude near the end. It’s one of my favorite tracks on the album.
The album takes a low key turn for a bit with Hell Yeah (yeah yeah yeah yeah). The airy and light feel returns for this track as well. The title track, Ballerina, picks up the pace a bit and has a nice little inspiration, autobiographical feel to it, but keeps the more light feel up with it’s pleasant piano melodies. There are actually quite a few nice little underlying piano melodies all throughout this album. It gives it a nice light Jazzy feel overall. In the case of Ballerina, it certainly evokes the feel of a ballerina dance. Based on when I saw her on stage, and some of the videos I’ve watched, Raffaella also seems to do a lot of her performance on her barefoot tip toes.
The last track is probably my favorite track, with Balaclava (like the ski mask). It really feels like a nice culmination for the album as it takes a lot of the elements of the previous tracks and stacks them all up for one last hurrah. It also tells a little story about breaking and entering into rich people’s homes, which I find amusing.
I’ll probably do future posts on her second album, but in general, I really enjoy Raffaella’s music, and I really hope she can get somewhere bigger in the future.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
I don’t know exactly when my first exposure with Aurora was, but I can say my exposure of actually becoming a fan, was through Sigrid. Which is kind of funny because I feel like it more often would go the other way. I don’t know that Sigrid and Aurora are “friends” exactly, but they have, I dunno, been in the same room together, and re both originally from Norway. Though Sigrid seems a bit more based in England, Aurora is decidedly Norwegian.
I’m sure overtime my music tastes will evolve again, but for the time being, Aurora is definitely my top pick for favorite artist. I can’t really articulate exactly why, but there is just something, quote magical and wonderful about every track she has done. Like, seriously, solidly, every track. Her musical style reminds me a lot of Björk or Enya.
I’m not here now to write about every track, though in time, probably, I will. I am here to talk about her first album, All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend, or, for my own sanity, simply All My Demons. Similar to the case with CHVRCHES, Aurora is an artist that I am sure I heard before becoming a fan, I just didn’t really put much into it. Her first album, is also my top most listened to album, at least, according to last.fm. I’ll be running through the Deluxe version of this album.
There is a lot of variety to have here, but all of them share a sort of, primal energy. Aurora incorporates a lot of traditional Norwegian sound and vocalizations along with modern electronic music and methods. It creates an incredibly powerful vehicle which Aurora uses to push her message. Oddly enough, while her message have a clear, “love everything and everyone” sort of motif, she has mentioned before that a lot of her songs are left to “personal interpretation” by the listener.
The album itself is up and down on it’s emotion and tones as well. Almost all of the tracks are underpinned by a sort of lingering sorrow, but other push it to the forefront. Some tracks like Runaway, Winter Bird, and Lucky, which are hopeful but sad. Others are much more sorrow and sadness, like Under the Water, I Went to Far, and of course, Murder Song. Murder Song is particularly interesting in it’s two versions, the less often heard album version has a much larger and forceful push to it, while the more commonly heard acoustic version bonus track is much much more low key.
But there is also plenty of emotion from the upbeat tracks, which are some of my favorites on the album. Warrior is the commonly known classic. Running with the Wolves is very full of primal energy and builds to a fantastic climax. Conqueror has a great beat and tune, though Aurora has mentions she dislikes the track. I don’t know, but I suspect because it has a bit of a, subservient theme, which feels like it pushes against her otherwise fully independent spirit personality.
Probably my favorite song on All My Demons… is Black Water Lilies. It feels a bit less complex than a lot of the other tracks on the album but I really like the running melodies and overall sort of, happy lyrics with a sad-ish sound it has throughout, though it’s mostly positive energy. It wasn’t a song that was initially my favorite, but its one that grew to be so after digging deeper into Aurora’s overall sound.
I can’t really say I can give an unbiased overall opinion here, but i can say it’s my favorite Aurora Album and it’s also one of my favorite, overall albums.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
I am not real sure why Dodie put out another EP, Hot Mess, as a follow up to her first album Build a Problem. Following her online suggests that she writes well, a lot of music, feels like there would be plenty for a while album. I mean, yeah, there is some of it that’s kind of weird and a bit banal, but that didn’t seem like it held back her album. But here we are, with a fresh, 4 track EP.
I also want to take a moment to talk about this particular release, as I’ve picked this album up from the Record Store Day exclusive release version. I don’t believe it’s available on Vinyl otherwise, nor do I know if there are plans to release it later, but this release is a special translucent vinyl disk, and man it’s so very neat looking. I know this isn’t the first translucent disk ever released, but it’s the first one I have. This is the sort of thing I hope to, somewhat, limit my vinyl collection to, these neat special releases.
The album itself had 4 tracks total, 2 on each side of the record. I very much greatly prefer the tracks on side A, versus side B and it’s currently the album I have sitting on my turn table to just “push play” on occasionally.
Side A has Dodie’s last two singles on it, and similar to my complaints with Build a Problem, both of these tracks feel a bit more “complete” than the Side B tracks. The opening track is the title track, Hot Mess, it hits most of the “Dodie high points” with some wonderful harmonies and a subtle build up of some string based backing tracks. It’s quite nice and despite being a pretty short track, it feels about right on length.
The second track, Got Weird is the catchiest track on this EP. The hook is really nice and the lyrics on the whole are super catchy and clever. If Hot Mess is “Dodie doing music,” then Got Weird is “Dodie doing lyrics.” Though it does have this really incredible temp and time change shift near the end. Plus this, really weird video.
Side B starts out with Lonely Bones, a simple number that doesn’t push anything too ambitious but has a nice happy tone going to it. It wraps up with No Big Deal (I Love You) which is a super low key dreamy and quite beautiful song. Neither of these tracks are necessarily bad, which kind of feels like what I was implying above, I just, generally prefer more upbeat tracks in general. If I am going for this sort of mood, I’m more likely to go with something purely instrumental.
The EP itself is pretty good. Unless you really want the vinyl, I’d say it’s perfectly fine to experience it all through more, modern means as well. I will add that while Dodie isn’t necessarily my favorite artist, I really like how she structures her songs and incorporates the mixing in of a lot of less common instruments in this style of modern music. It gives her tracks a pretty unique sound. She also pushes a lot of emotion through her lyrics which makes it all very interesting to listen to and deconstruct.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Today was Record Store Day. It’s moistly just, a “promotional” sort of deal for local record shops, and not really like, a “real holiday”. I decided I would go ahead and give it a go. There were a couple of pretty inexpensive albums that I was interested in and I’ve recently (finally) picked up a record player after many years of “I should get a record player”.
Man, now I’m just getting layers and layers of things to bring up here. Maybe it’s best to just start at, “Why vinyl?”
I guess it’s almost, “Why not?” Ok, there are plenty of reasons why not. It takes up a lot of space, it’s not portable, it’s not particularly cheap, it’s not skip-able, etc etc. Some of these are advantages though. I listen to mostly albums anyway, why not buy a format that lends itself to album listening? Space and cost are less of an issue as well, I don’t intend to go nuts on buying records. There is nothing that I just HAVE to have. If I could get an ok deal, on some things, I might buy it, but there is nothing I am desperate for on vinyl. I’ve already had a few records for a while, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and Dark Side of the Moon, A promo single from Mortal Kombat Annihilation, and slightly more recently, the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I also recently bought a player for these albums. I found one that fit what I was looking for at a garage sale and got it pretty cheap, it’s a nice little entry level Audio-Technica AT-LP60. The main thing I wanted was a stand alone unit like this. It takes up less space, and I already have speakers that are much nicer than most of the self contained units I come across. It operates perfectly for my basic needs.
I had looked over the list online, and the price list I had found, and basically only wanted 2 albums. Dodie’s Hot Mess EP, and the Arooj Aftab – Live in London EP. I am going to skip the boring details behind these choices for now because I may do some album write ups in the future but these two were both affordable at under $20 each and both were artists I enjoy. I had a few others lined up as alternative options or maybe if I felt spendy, but I ended up either not finding them or passing on them. I also decided that I would go ahead and get the Taylor Swift Folklore album, if it was there, despite it being a bit more than I wanted to spend. The price didn’t matter, it was sold out. People camped out overnight for that thing. CRAAAZY People…..
I was a bit worried during the lead up. The store had been posting photos online as they unboxed everything and I had seen neither of these albums shown. This was especially annoying because Dodie’s album was listed as “Regional Focus” and she was doing a live show off in London FOR Record Store Day. Which sort of suggested, “Hot Mess” may be “Regionally focused to England.” Friday night though, both albums showed up as being available. So I was set to go.
The store opened at 8AM. But it was also a 45 minute drive away in the next city over, and I didn’t have anything on my list that I needed to be there super early for anyway. I arrived around 8:30, and there was still a line down the block, which was a little discouraging. I had driven all this way though, how long could it take? It didn’t help that it was also very cold, and I had not brought a jacked, though I was wearing a flannel shirt, in classic “I’m a 90s teen” fashion.
The line took, a very looooong time. It was something like 2 hours before I got in the store. Thankfully, I got to chat up some nice strangers while waiting. We made jokes, and talked music and concerts and records and talked other things. Funny enough,, I never got any of their names. There was one lady who had been at the hospital nearby and her husband had asked her to come down here and see if she could get a KISS related album. I get the impression she did not manage to, I never saw her in the store and she had been trying to recruit me or the other dude to buy her a second copy since it was limit one. Then there was “The other dude”, whom I really enjoyed talking with. Talking with him was like looking at a mental and verbal mirror, though we looked nothing alike. He was disappointed that people would leave the store and not look happy and not show off their hauls. He ended up checking behind me and as I was leaving, I reminded him to do his fist pump as he left for the crowd outside. There was also a younger girl who reminded me a bit of my daughter, with her slightly eccentric dress and mannerisms. The notable store for her, she was wearing these flowered pants. As we got closer to the store entrance, she mentioned being friends with the worker managing the store entrance. The employee finally noticed her in line and they exchanged some pleasantries, and the employee mentioned “I like your pants”. The young girl said thanks, then opened the front of her jacked and exclaimed, “They aren’t just pants, they are overalls!” And everyone got a kick out of that, and the reaction of the employee.
It’s really kind of funny that we never got anyone’s names, because the other dude said something that really stuck with me. He talked about writing some books as a hobby, and not really wanting to be a famous writer because he liked the anonymity of just, not being known. He mentioned enjoying just sort of the basic human interaction, he had a better phrasing that I’ve forgotten. And here we are, a small group of strangers, bonding over a shared event, passing ships on the ocean, with no real clue who we all really are.
Anyway, my turn finally came up, I went in. The RSD Exclusives were in bins sorted alphabetically, and the front of the alphabet was open. I quickly thumbed through the A-B bin and found my Arooj Aftab record. The only one in there, I have no idea if there had been more earlier. I picked it up and slid down to C-D looking for Dodie, and like the Arooj Aftab album, there was one copy of Hot Mess. This meant mission accomplished for the day, anything else was a bonus. The end of the alphabet was open so I slid on down there and started working my way back towards “A-B”. No Taylor Swifts. There was a NENA – 99 Luftbaloons I seriously considered but decided to skip. I almost got the Garbage EP, I do like Garbage. In the end, I decided on no more exclusives, and went over the the main part of the store. I checked for any CHVRCHES or Aurora albums they might have and came up empty there.I checked through the “recent arrivals” and there were a few interesting ones but I decided I would wait for now. There was a line outside, only 20 people allowed in at a time due to the store size, and I didn’t really need to linger. I headed to the checkout table.
The Other Dude ended up behind me in line, he had a couple of albums picked out. The real oddity here was the person in front of me. So the store WAS having 10% off everything not RSD related. So if you’re a collector, that would be a good time to pick up some other stuff. The guy in front of me was buying, cassettes. ONLY cassettes. They seemed to be like, $1 each, and he spent a whole $8 and some change. Like dude….. dude….. dude…. I am sure your cassette choices are great…. but did you just stand in line for possibly 2 hours, to spend $8 on used cassette tapes? That 10% didn’t even save a dollar and there are a LOT of people here waiting to spend hundreds of dollars.
It seemed, very odd.
After finishing up, I went back to my car and drove around the block to…. The OTHER record store in town, Recycled Records. This store was not participating in Record Store Day, because it’s closing in like a week. It’s been around in town for a very long time. I thought I had read they were doing 50% off, there was no indication that this was the case at all, anywhere. I didn’t end up buying anything. Not for trying, but I just didn’t find anything that jumped out at me. There was a Radio Head vinyl I would have bought at half price, but it seemed new Vinyl was only 10% off. They didn’t have any of the other artists I looked for unfortunately.
Afterwards I headed out to spend a few hours at my parent’s house just hanging out before heading home in the late afternoon.
Just one last bit, I’ll talk about the albums themselves later, but they are both very cool disks, and I can understand why people buy these special versions like this.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Though Wolf Alice doesn’t really sound a lot like CHVRCHES, I had enough people in the CHVRCHES fandom channels suggest them as a good group, so I opted to go ahead and give this group a try with their (as of this time), latest album, Blue Weekend. Released in 2021, this is the group’s third full album. They have a sound that reminds me quite a bit of groups like Metric and Garbage.
As mentioned before, the sound isn’t really the same as CHVRCHES, but it’s sort of similar, so I can definitely see the cross appeal. There is some electronic sound to Wolf Alice, but overall its a lot more, Alternative Rock sounds, with a really interesting sprinkling of more mellow folksy-ness to it. In face, despite it’s few points of more aggressiveness, and one single extremely aggressive track, the whole album is a very nice mellow rock album.
Overall, I find Wolf Alice and Blue Weekend to be a pretty good overall album. It has a slick sound all round, though the previously mentioned “extremely aggressive track” feels almost out of place. The whole album has this really interesting fill/reverb going on for a lot of parts with the groups’ vocalist Ellie Rowsell. It sounds like there are several people all singing at once but it’s just the one, for the most part. Which I particularly enjoy.
I’ll touch on some of my personal thoughts on individual tracks going forward.
The album opens with The Beach, which is a really nice big build up track, which starts out quietly subtle but is nice and full and busy by the end with a really great sort of ethereal sound going by the end. It’s a nice fit for the opening track.
The second track Delicious Things follows up along with a much more even and regular flow and pace from a lot of the other tracks on the album. Though a lot of the nice guitar work that exists in this entire album starts to show it’s head here with it’s layered sounds running throughout. It rolls almost continuously directly into Lipstick on the Glass, something I don’t believe really happens elsewhere on the album. I particularly like how this song switches between it’s flowing low key moments then bounces off into the fuller chorus moments. It’s one of my favorite tracks on the album.
It’s followed up by the fourth track, Smile, which is definitely my favorite track of the album. It’s a lot heavier in sound than most of the rest of the album, but not overwhelmingly so. It also features a lot of excellent guitar work throughout, but a lot at the climax. There is a really nice bass guitar bit near the end. It comes in fast and hard and doesn’t stop and I love it.
The follow up though takes quite a bit different direction, and sets the tone for the rest of the album where things are a bit more low key with Safe From Heartbreak. Which is a lot more even toned throughout and features a nice low key picking guitar line throughout. This is part of where the “folksy-ness” starts to show a lot more as well in these back end more low key tracks. A lot of the vocals also feature a nice almost a ‘Capella sounding harmony to them. The low key sound continues in the next track How Can I Make It Ok?, though there is also a bit more build up in this one as the track goes along. The sound layering in the peak end of this track is nice, it’s a bit on the album that I enjoyed a bit extra.
Then there is our “excessively aggressive” track, with Play the Greatest Hits. Don’t get me wrong, I actually really like this track. It just feels, weirdly places in the middle of all of these much more mellow tracks. It has a much more fast paced screamo punk sound to it, which also feels a lot different than the rest of the album.
The rest of the album rounds out with Feeling Myself, The Last Man on Earth, No Hard Feelings, and a reprise version of the opener with The Beach II. The second version of The Beach is quite a different song though, it’s not just, a slightly different version of the same song. Most of these last few tracks are some more much more low key smaller sound, though often with lots of interesting layering of guitars and electronic bits, which is a running theme of the album. No Hard Feelings is particularly good, just before the end of the album.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Ramen Junkie 
