Another week, another playlist

Mumford & Sons-Sigh No More

First up in a rundown of my favorite recent album acquisitions: Mumford and Sons' debut, "Sigh No More".

The band's been around since 2007, but this is their first full-length album (they have 3 EPs that I'm aware of, and tour pretty regularly).  The group is from London and full of multi-instrumentalists--a great way to ensure I'll be interested.  The best way to describe their music would be folk with heavy bluegrass influences, which can be picked up from their instrumentation (banjo, upright bass, mandolin, guitar, drums).

Their most well known song is probably Little Lion Man, which I've actually heard on the radio in Philly (gasp!).  It was their debut single, and also a good place to start off.  From there, I'd head over to Winter Winds, The Cave, and of course the title track Sigh No More.  But seriously? Just listen to the whole thing.  It's pretty powerful. Like, catch me singing in the car powerful.

For a more in-depth listen, check out their live set from Bonnaroo-it goes through most of the best songs from the album. It's also great to hear a band that plays complex music be able to pull it off live.

Time to change it up

This one is definitely much different than previous playlists. It's not cooperating as much as they normally do in terms of letting me preview them, so hopefully it worked out ok...  I'll also have a real post about the latest albums I absolutely love soon.

Deluge

So, everyone's good friends over at NPR have been fighting the good fight to get new music to as wide an audience as possible, and are currently taking a poll on the best albums released so far this year.  This has resulted in a gigantic list of albums found here. I used it as a jumping point to start listening to everything I'd been meaning to check out, and as a result, have thrown together a huge full-album playlist of the ones I'm giving a first listen.  So, if you somehow find yourself locked at work for the next consecutive 5 days, you'll definitely have enough music to get through it with this:

Ready, set, summer!

Words cannot express how excited I am for it to be summer.  Even though I'm a working real person at this point, the summer is going to involve taking a step back and calming down in terms of scheduling for me--I'm going from 5 days of class a week down to 1 by July, and I plan to be in a different city almost every week (hooray business travel, races, and visiting friends!).  And as of 10 this morning, I've survived my wisdom teeth coming out AND the LSAT.  We'll see how the LSAT turns out, but it looks like even though I'm going to be incredibly sick of applesauce by the time my antibiotics and vicodin run out, I'm done the hard part of the wisdom teeth. 


Of course, summer also made me want to put together a new playlist full of happiness and songs to get you through the workday when you'd rather be outside lying by a pool (see previous post).  The two bands that I've been relying most heavily on for mood-bosting music (which it seems like several people could use lately) are Matt and Kim and Passion Pit. I challenge you to listen to Daylight or Little Secrets without smiling.  


When you're ready to expand off of those, here are a few to check out from each: 


Matt and Kim
Yea Yeah
Good Ol Fashioned Nightmare
Lessons Learned


Pasison Pit
Sleepyhead
Make Light
Swimming in the Flood


The best part? Both are on tour! Let's go!

Summer playlist, version 1

Love how music can make me feel better no matter what. 

New playlist, new widget

Not sure if this can live up to the last one, and it's still in progress, but worth posting for a change of pace.