The Last.fm scrobbles for April are a worse signal than the play-counts in my head. The records I actually thought about most this month:
- The long-running rotation: Vince Clarke — Songs of Silence (20 plays). The album equivalent of a chair I’ve been sitting in for two months and only just noticed I’m sitting in. I keep meaning to write about it and keep not writing about it.
- An unscheduled drift back to Mike Oldfield — The Songs of Distant Earth (35 plays, the most-played record of the month). An early-90s record rather than the 70s prog its reputation suggests — the kind of return that looks like nostalgia from the outside and feels like calibration from the inside.
- One new release that earned a second pass: Joshua Idehen — Mum Does The Washing EP (18 plays, plus the top three tracks of the month: Once in a lifetime, Mum Does the Washing, Could Be Forever). Most don’t. The standard for second pass is whether anything in the first pass made me want to find out what the artist was thinking; almost never the music itself, almost always a structural decision somewhere on the record.
The Last.fm dashboard at /music/ shows the raw counts; this note is the version that reflects what actually mattered, which is not the same thing.