What I was listening to last month: April 2013

Now we’re into May, with the sun shining bright and the barometer rising, I can look back on April through a rose-tinted lens.

What started out as a month fraught with uncertainty around Su’s job (and mine) ended with late evening bike rides on our new two-wheeled steeds, safe in the knowledge that Su will be employed in the newspaper industry for at least another year and that we have a long overdue trip to Scotland coming up in the very near future. In terms of music, it’s been a fruitful sort of month.

I completely fell for Charli XCX's debut LP and all of its android-pop glory, as well as Cayucas’s breezy Vampire Weekend-esque indie saunters. Steve Mason’s Monkey Minds in the Devil’s Time was a slowburner for me; it took time to love but once it clicked I return to it almost every other day.

It’s hard to talk about April without mentioning the return of Daft Punk. The Pharrell fronted Get Lucky is already the impossible to resist single of the summer and I fully expect to hear it blasted from the rafters at house parties over the coming months.

 I also had the opportunity to hear the new Savages record for, oh, one whole play – trying to write a review based on one listen is not as easy as it sounds – and my final words were something along the lines of “a buzz band out-buzzing the buzz”.

 Jon Hopkins’ new record Immunity is a feast of glichy effects and kinked beats that is arguably the most innovative eletronica-record of the year to date. And while Wiley’s latest effort was a fairly inconsistent beast, a few tracks stood out – particularly the striding My Heart, featuring omnipresent pop harlot Emeli Sande.

So that was April. May sees the full return of Daft Punk, which will no doubt polarise opinion. It will be no Homework, that’s for sure. Actually, I’d be rather disappointed if it was.