Heather Maloney’s new ep Just Enough Sun roused me out of my torpor on first listen. It wasn’t just that it’s good, which it is, but also that it reaches out and grabs you — with a lyrical twist or a strange saga or some unexpected instrumentation that makes you pay attention. The stand-out track is “Albert 1-5,” a song as unsettling as it is hummable, and destined to see some college / NPR radio play, I feel sure…
We’re still listening to music and doing radio shows. One of these days, I’ll get around to posting a show list. I’d like those names to get on the Internet, because otherwise, be you not a big buzzy artist that media likes, no one outside your immediate circle will ever hear of you. It blows […]
Bubble Wrap continues with the letter H and introduces more new music from around the country including a few songs we really like. Cutting to the chase, the hands down favorite of the evening was “Gold Purple Orange” by Jean Grae and Quelle Chris, which has one of the more compelling lyrics we’ve heard lately […]
Sometimes you realize that it’s just you against the world, struggling for air, for breathing room, for peace of mind, and for a fighting chance to have a “nice” day. But then you remember that it’s always been like that and move on. This week on Bubble Wrap we played music to soothe and distract, with here and there a nod to the sad fact the struggle is universal.
Every once in a while you take a look around and ask “what’s it all about, anyway?” and the answer that comes back is – nothing. And that’s the thing. It’s about nothing and everything all at the same time. Music this week revealed itself to be about the usual things – love, the Internet, […]
Around and around and around we go, and where stop: the letter F, for one. This week on Bubble Wrap, we continued down the list of songs from the old laptop whose names begin with F. And of course, newer music from around the indie world. Probably the hit of the show was Ferde Grofe’s […]
The clear winner of this week’s Bubble Wrap round-up was “I’m Not A Loser” by Amyl and the Sniffers. I’m not sure what to say about that except that punk rock rules and girls who talk back even more so. Otherwise, it was late 2017 all over again, because that’s what you get in January. […]
With 2017 safely behind us, Bubble Wrap Radio moved on with the first crop of 2018 releases (and a bunch of late 2017 as well). It is way too early to have any idea what 2018 is going to be about, and a selection of tunes is always selected by a biased someone, so I’ll go ahead and say that darkness and dread will continue, but leavened with a bit of gallows humor and the occasional burst of inspirational optimism.
It’s impossible to think about 2017 without some trepidation — there were so many low points. Would we be nuked? outlawed? or just poked with pointy sticks? These were trying times. Musically, however, the trend was largely positive. Musicians seemed to be waking up out of their Taxi-induced malaise (“shiny happy marketing music”) into a […]
It was a week of tragedy and violence, on the heels of earlier tragedy and violence, not to mention the destruction of various natural disasters. In between, there was Hallowe’en, and to get in the spirit, so to speak, we’ve been watching cheery Netflix shows like Stranger Things and House of Cards… We don’t know what to think anymore, so we play music, trying to make sense of it all, one song at a time…. And then, in the midst of our happy escapist dream set, what should pop into our consciousness but — Poppy.
We haven’t run across a musical act this weird since The KLF mystified audiences back in the early 90s. Thanks to FluxBlog for introducing us. Usually Flux is my source for mainstream, but Poppy is not mainstream, and while the Poppy persona seems to imply that fame and fortune are already hers, it’s hard to […]
On the show before Hallowe’en, we always like to play some seasonal music, which in our case consists mostly of songs with scary words in their titles or band names. But even on that flimsy basis, I was able to ascertain a theme to this year’s selection, which was, in a word, fear, and its permutations, bravery and paranoia. So before I go on, I want to say, boldly and with all good cheer, “Don’t be frightened, boys and girls!” The future may look sucky but we won’t know until we get there, so why waste time worrying now? That is our Hallowe’en message to you…
In the context of a two hour radio show with two programmers competing for time, it becomes hard to allow for the expansive requirements of a song over 5 minutes. This is too bad because longer tracks are every bit as valid as radio-friendly 3:00 ditties. Artists have railed about this for years, although not so much lately now that radio is (for the most part) relatively free of new music, and certainly of new music that takes any chances. It was with this in mind — not to mention a swelling backlog of songs over 5 minutes — that caused the show of long songs to happen.