Welcome to Music Monday – a weekly meme created by The Tattooed Book Geek – where we share the songs we love, the bands we like and the music we just can’t get out of our heads.
This week’s Music Monday is ‘In My Heart’ by Moby, an upbeat electronic track featuring The Shining Light Gospel Choir.
In My Heart is taken from Moby’s sixth studio album, ’18’, which reached critical acclaim upon its release in 2002 following the success of ‘Play’. ’18’, which uses more guest vocalists and less samples than its predecesor, remains one of my favourite Moby albums to date and has featured as a backdrop to innumerable sci-fi reads. Favourite tracks include. ‘In This World’, ‘In My Heart’, ‘One of These Mornings’, and the incredibly popular ‘Extreme Ways’ (thanks to The Bourne Identity).
Welcome to Music Monday – a weekly meme created by The Tattooed Book Geek – where we share the songs we love, the bands we like and the music we just can’t get out of our heads.
This week’s Music Monday is ‘Hell Is Round the Corner’, the incredible trip-hop track from Tricky. Sampling Isaac Hayes’ ‘Ike’s Rap II’, which also featured in Portishead’s ‘Glory Box’, Tricky’s trademark sound features elements of rock, hip hop, soul, ambient electro and reggae with additional vocals from Martina Topley-Bird.
And if the chill-out vibes weren’t already enough, Tricky, along with Massive Attack and Portishead, has also featured as the backdrop to my entire read through of the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch, making it the perfect backdrop to a thrilling urban fantasy.
Welcome to The Monthly Round-Up. Join me as I look back on the past month to see which books I’ve read, the reviews I’ve posted, the goals I’ve completed and my all important Book of the Month!
| Books Read |
February has flown by in a torrent of amazingly bloody, beautiful and brilliant books. I only managed a respectable eight but every single one of them was fantastic – I expect that there won’t be less than a four star review amongst them! I may have completely ignored my goals of the month but never mind! February was a blast. It also featured a book so good it required its own rating!
Here’s the run down of the books I devoured last month:
Music, much like literature, has the power to drive your imagination; it can lift the soul and create real emotion.This is Bookish Beats, a feature which will showcase some of the soundtracks which have enriched the worlds I’ve found between the pages.
Massive Attack returns in this week’s Bookish Beats with their phenomenal album Mezzanine. This modern masterpiece is, without a doubt, one of my favourite albums of all time and after a countless number listens has become one of my go-to albums whilst reading. If you’re looking for a soundtrack to a beautiful gritty fantasy, whether its urban or epic or something in between, then you can’t go far wrong with Mezzanine. This album really is a beauty.
Mezzanine is a throbbing, beautifully strange and artistic album which brought a surge of electronica to Massive Attack’s trip hop sound. Released in 1998 to wide critical acclaim, Mezzanine became Massive Attack’s most commercially successful album and, almost twenty years later, it’s not hard to see why. This is an atmospheric and addictive musical masterpiece whose lazy, rolling and electronica suffused beats, and surfeit of wonderful vocalists, have you reaching for the repeat button time after time.
Mezzanine opens with Angel, an almost hypnotic track whose slow beat and drawn out vocals take you to another world entirely. Featuring the reggae singer Horace Andy, whose vocals also appear in every one of Massive Attack’s other albums (his contribution to Heligoland on the track Girl I Love You is one of my all time favourites), this is one artist who doesn’t fail to make his presence felt with this pulsating, rhythmic and incredibly haunting track. Man Next Door, a track which features Andy’s reverberating and beat led vocals, becomes increasingly addictive as it reaches its pitch and is one of my favourite tracks on this entire album.
But there is another outstanding vocal contributor to Mezzanine who is more than worthy of a mention. Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins, whose wonderful vocals also feature on The Lord of the Rings soundtrack on both Lothlorien and Isengard Unleashed, is a singer whose haunting and eerily addictive vocals contribute to some of the most stunning tracks on this album. Teardrop is arguably the most well known track on Mezzanine and for good reason; an emotive and incredibly beautiful piece, this is a track which ensnares you in Fraser’s vocals and refuses to let you go. But her genius doesn’t end there. Black Milk, another highlight from this album of highlights, and Group Four, one of my favourite tracks, both carry you above a steady underlying beat on a tide of Fraser’s haunting and brilliant vocals; vocals which truly make for a unique album.
Mezzanine is a phenomenal album which deserves its well recognised status. Horace Andy and Elizabeth Fraser make a stunning contribution and, for those of you who have yet to sample the Cocteau Twins or Andy’s other work, I urge you to check them out. Massive Attack never fail to impress and with Mezzanine have provided a wonderful backdrop to countless literary delights. This is one album which can’t be missed.
Welcome to The Monthly Round-Up. Join me as I look back on the past month to see which books I’ve read, the reviews I’ve posted, the goals I’ve completed and my all important Book of the Month!
| Books Read |
Well hasn’t January flown by! It feels like only yesterday I was putting together the end of 2015 post and here we are a month later. January has been a month of some fantastic reads, I only wish there had been time to write and post more reviews and continue with some of my more neglected features. Here’s hoping my scheduling will be a little better in February! (A wish that will no doubt be expressed at the close of next month!)
A definite highlight of this month was the exceptional crime thriller The American by Nadia Dalbuono, which had me on the edge of my seat and almost desperate for her next novel, along with Daniel Polansky’s brilliant The Straight Razor Cure. And of course there was the wonderful Read Along for Rosemary and Rue, the first book in the October Daye series by Seanan McGuire. This is a book which surpassed all my expectations and has more than peaked my interest in this urban fantasy series. A review will be forthcoming and a Read Along for book two, A Local Habitation, is planned for March.
Unfortunately I became far too distracted by other books to complete my personal goal of finishing all my ‘currently reading’ novels. I did however manage to cross two of them off my list! That means, yes! I finally finished The Daylight War! And it was certainly worth the wait. Whilst the first half had me a little nervous, the second half more than made up for it. The two preceding novels may have been incomparably stunning but The Daylight War certainly has its place as an (incredibly huge) intermediary novel. I just can’t wait to get stuck into The Skull Throne… and hopefully it won’t take me a year to read this one!
So let’s have a look at what literary delights consumed in January:
Music, much like literature, has the power to drive your imagination; it can lift the soul and create real emotion.This is Bookish Beats, a feature which will showcase some of the soundtracks which have enriched the worlds I’ve found between the pages.
We’re back this week with Moby’s stunning album from 1999, Play. This is a defining album of my childhood – one of those which stops you in your tracks and changes your entire perspective on music – and the first which drew my attention to Moby.
Play is a catchy, fun, soaring and lyrical electronica mash-up which captures emotion and heartbreak in its folk and blues laden tracks whilst contrasting the incredibly chilled out with the extremely upbeat. This is another of my go-to albums when reading, one which never tires and one which remains relevant all these years later.
This is an album of parts, and one where favourites are incredibly difficult to narrow down. The tracks range from the beautiful and heart-wrenching, to the downbeat and chilled out, to the fun and uplifting. It’s not impossible to go through a full rollercoaster of emotions when listening to Play, and it isn’t difficult for it to truly enhance whatever it is you’re reading.
Much of the success of this album comes from the careful sampling of other artists, using their music to create an atmosphere and elicit a reaction. Play does this incredibly successfully with tracks such as Natural Blues, which samples Vera Hall, and Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?, which samples Banks Brothers. These are two of the most emotive tracks on the album; incredibly beautiful, exceptionally heartfelt and highly addictive.
This same tone is picked up in tracks such as Find My Baby, which retains an element of the emotive whilst conjuring up an uplifting atmosphere, and Honey, an incredibly catchy track with repetitive vocals and folk guitars which is very hard not to listen to whilst reading fight scenes. For some reason, It just works.
Play is also incredibly successful in creating those chill-out tracks which create a subtle atmosphere, those which you can just listen to and watch the world pass you by. Porcelain is a perfect example of this, along with Rushing, Inside and My Weakness. Whether they come with vocals or not, these tracks instantly stick in your mind and give your world, or that between your pages, a slower pace.
This is contrasted with some of the more upbeat and fast-paced tracks on the album, such as Machete and Bodyrock which build up tempo by leaning heavily on the electro. Run On and Honey, however, use folk music samples to create fast-paced tracks which are instantly uplifting and retain an element of fun through their catchy melodies. This same uplifting vibe is echoed in some of the instrumental tracks, such as Everloving.
Play is a masterpiece which stands for repeated listens and, in fact, only seems to get better the more you’re exposed to it. This is an album which in reality could be listened to with anything; whether a post-apocalyptic sci-fi adventure, or a tense thriller. Give it a try and see what you think.
Welcome to The Monthly Round-Up. Join me as I look back on the past month to see which books I’ve read, the reviews I’ve posted, the goals I’ve completed and my all important Book of the Month!
| Books Read |
December has come to an end and we’ve crossed the threshold into 2016 – and what a year it has been! I’m currently compiling my year in review but December alone was a great month of phenomenal fiction. With a hefty pile of novellas bulking up the number, I’ve discovered some fantastic authors, read some thrilling tales and been taken to some truly amazing worlds.
And in the process of devouring – my Goodreads 2015 Reading Challenge was well and truly surpassed, I fell just short of the mark on my Dragons and Jetpacks 2015 Reading Challenge and I well and truly flopped on my personal goals for December… But nevermind! This has been a fantastic month and here are the books to prove it:
December brings with it a new feature – The Friday Face-Off – where I pit cover against cover to discover the best cover art from across both sides of the pond.
Music, much like literature, has the power to drive your imagination; it can lift the soul and create real emotion.This is Bookish Beats, a feature which will showcase some of the soundtracks which have enriched the worlds I’ve found between the pages.
This week we’re taking a break from my love of film and game soundtracks to listen to a band which have topped my list of favourites for an inordinately long time. Massive Attack have repeatedly produced incredible album after incredible album, and their perfect fusion of wildly differing beats and melodies have made them industry leaders in the rise of trip hop.
Heligoland, released in 2010, is Massive Attack’s fifth studio album and, with its seriously chilled out, downbeat vibes and lazy electro undertones, is the perfect backdrop to reading – and to urban fantasy in particular. This is an album which is soulful and atmospheric, and only gets better with each successive listen.
The opening track Pray For Rain, with its gentle vocals and rolling, lazy beat, sets the tone for the rest of the album, and fans of the brilliant crime drama Luther will instantly recognise its theme tune in the deceptively haunting Paradise Circus. Heligoland, which with Girl I Love You has produced one of my favourite Massive Attack tracks of all time, is a triumph of downbeat, rhythmic tracks which only become more addictive the more they are listened to.
This is an album of halves, an album which celebrates the fusion of different sounds and tones for maximum effect, and an album which makes one brilliant and mesmerising whole. Babel, a long-time favourite, succeeds in combining a fast-paced and tuneful melody with an understated and relaxed vibe made apparent throughout the entire album. Splitting the Atom contrasts a deep male vocal with an insistent, repeating melody which has a similar effect to Rush Minute, a track which combines a fast paced backing track with a soft and creeping vocal.
If you’re looking for an album which instantly gives off a city vibe and provides an effortless backdrop to any urban fantasy, then give Heligoland a listen. I can’t imagine reading Rivers of London without it.
Welcome to The Monthly Round-Up. Join me as I look back on the past month to see which books I’ve read, the reviews I’ve posted, the goals I’ve completed and my all important Book of the Month!
| Books Read |
Ahh November, the craziest month of the year! Not only was this Sci-Fi Month, hosted by Rinn Reads and Over the Effing Rainbow, but I started a new job! This meant I was unable to post as much as I had wanted to as I hadn’t prepared in advance (tut tut!). I’m only just getting used to my schedule – or in other words: If I want to post anything at all I need to prepare in advance! – so hopefully December’s posts will be a little more organised.
Onto the overview. I read five books in November, none of which featured on my Sci-Fi Month Introductory Post! But they were all excellent reads and reviews for the unreviewed will be cropping up in the next few weeks. I managed to jump on the Sci-Fi Month Read Along of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (hello Book of the Month!) and I also reached my Goodreads Reading Challenge of 100 books in 2015 after finishing Superposition. Hurrah!
So without further ramblings, here are the books I slowly devoured in November:
Welcome to Music Monday – a weekly meme created by The Tattooed Book Geek – where we share the songs we love, the bands we like and the music we just can’t get out of our heads.
Music, much like literature, has the power to drive your imagination; it can lift the soul and create real emotion.This is 
Welcome to 
Music, much like literature, has the power to drive your imagination; it can lift the soul and create real emotion.This is 
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