April 2019 MAME Playlist: Mellow ATL, DIY England and Troubled Toronto

So simple, so good.

Welcome to the April 2019 MAME Playlist post, which, in a better world, will be the last whale I produce. (Here’s to hoping future plans come together). I posted a 50-song playlist for the month (there’s more where that came from; username snackyd), and all the songs on that playlist are linked to somewhere down below. I highlight three artists (chosen more or less at random) down below - Faye Webster, Martha (the band, not a person), and Shad – by sharing some stuff about who they are, where they come from and what they do. The rest of the playlist is mostly random. Mostly.

I posted some other write-ups on some other artists earlier this month, and some of the songs by those bands stuck to this month’s playlist. You can read about them in those posts, which I’ve linked to under the names of each band, and I’ll list/link to the songs by each that I held onto for this playlist. Those include: Weyes Blood (mellow, airy indie with gorgeous vocals, “A Lot’s Gonna Change,” “Andromeda,” and “Mirror Forever”); Orange Goblin (metal from the hard rock school mostly, “The Astral Project,” “Magic Carpet,” and “Aquatic Fanatic”); and The Who (you know them, but the story behind Lifehouse is a doozy, “Whiskey Man,” “Pictures of Lily,” “A Quick One (While He’s Away),” “Relay,” “5:15,” and “Slip Kid”).

All right, time to look at this month’s playlist’s featured artists…in which I accidentally go from oldest to youngest.

Faye Webster, [Eponymous]
I think it was last month when Discover Weekly pitched Faye Webster’s “Room Temperature” my way. It’s probably part of the promotional push for Webster’s upcoming album, Atlanta Millionaires Club, and, between that and the still-better, “Kingston,” I have high hopes for that new release. But it’s not out yet (think it said late May, like, May 26), so I’m stuck with her 2017 eponymous album. The one with the understatedly freaking awesome album cover (see above).

Webster comes from Atlanta, Georgia, and a creative family (something I see a lot when researching musicians). Musically, she grew up on old country, but branched out into Atlanta-area local hip hop – specifically, material put out by Awful Records. That branching out eventually lead her to membership in a “rap collective” called PSA, and you hear both influences in her sound. Her choice of instruments that makes her earliest influences stand out more: “No matter what music I end up making I will always use pedal steel... It's in my roots. I love pedal steel.”

New to Me, No. 2: Orange Goblin, Regular Blokes with Bills, Just Like You

In the best possible world, and more....

“So, we're in a really fortunate position where we basically get to go on holiday with our mates, get free booze, get paid for it, and see the world; and every night you're expected to get up on stage and play the music that you enjoy for an hour and 20 minutes or so."

"Ha, it's a hard life, hey?!"

BW: Yeah! I just wish that we were making a living by doing it...”

That last thoughtm the one about making a living as a heavy metal band came up in every interview (video or otherwise*) I read in a frantic attempt to catch up on Orange Goblin. The two words that consistently show up in the next sentence or two are “mortgages” and “families.” The same words came to mind each time I closed a browser page, or logged off for the night: “they’re regular blokes,” I’d say. (* Not totally regular: both lead singer, Ben Ward, and (I think) bassist, Martyn Millard, were apprentices for Queens Park Rangers at age 16.)

To drive home the point about Orange Goblin’s fixation with keeping ahead of finances, that quote up top came out of a 2010 interview on The Quietus (worth reading for the lede alone…but stay for the quick note on touring through Bozeman, Montana). The band swung at an honest stab of living off music too, when Ward, Millard, Chris Turner (drummer), and Joe Hoare (guitar) set off on a world tour to support the album Ward still rates as their best, 2012’s A Eulogy for the Damned. They traveled the world, “[went] on holiday with [their] mates,” (probably) got their fill of free booze…but after a year or two of touring and struggling to pull together the next album, the financials never came together. In spite of international fame – defined here as being able to fill a large-ish room with highly-interested people (this part is necessary) – the logistics and costs of touring simply don’t pencil out for a band like Orange Goblin. For what it’s worth, I do think they all miss their families too. These are very nice, responsible men, I can't stress that enough.

Noisey put out a solid retrospective about that spirited attempt around the time of the release of 2018’s The Wolf Bites Back; if you want a pretty solid one-stop snapshot of what they’re about, that feels like a good source. While circumstances forced them to downgrade Orange Goblin to a really kick-ass (hopefully lucrative) hobby, every member holds down a day job to keep home, family, and hobby together. All the same, they don’t sound anything like giving up. When TotalRock interviewed Ward at the 2017 Download Festival (link above under “video”), the way he describes the beginnings of The Wolf Bites Back – e.g., band members swapping of riffs and ideas, getting the ideas bubbling – and the fact that they got together as recently as 2017-18 to write and compose together, organically, and that everyone still keeps bringing ideas to the table, that reads like a fair sign this won't be their last album. Their last tour...well, that's another story.