Music I Liked – Void of Sleep, Childish Gambino, Frightened Rabbit

As usual, Bandcamp featured heavily in my listening last week. Less common: politics and death. But those are factors that led to the music I liked last week – Void of Sleep, Childish Gambino, and Frightened Rabbit.

Void of Sleep

It usually pisses me off when I get an alert from Bandcamp and it turns out that a band I follow has added a t-shirt or a new color vinyl to their store. I only want to know about new music. But last week I got an alert about Void of Sleep. It was for some random item their label had added to their store, but I couldn’t remember the band. They were Italian and only had two albums out. So I listened to their 2014 release Tales Between Reality and Madness, and I was hooked from the first crunchy riff. Clean vocals are often problematic, but they work for me here.

Childish Gambino

Well, me and everybody else, right? I’d heard the name Childish Gambino on KEXP, but never really paid attention. If I had realized it was Donald Glover, I would have sat up straight, though. I’ve loved Glover since his scene-stealing turn in the Martian, and if you haven’t watched Atlanta yet, stop what you’re doing and go stream that shit right now. I don’t know where he finds the time.

But even if I’d never heard of him before, his video for “This is America” broke the internet last week. I don’t usually write about individual songs, but this is just a preview because now I’ve got to listen to all his music. And I’m pretty sure I’ll be adding his whole albums to the Music I Liked.

Frightened Rabbit

Scott Hutchison’s death hit me harder than any in the Great Celebrity Die-Off of 2016. Lemmy, Prince, and David Bowie made music what it is today, but Frightened Rabbit is a bigger part of who I am today. Their lyrics reminded me how few words are necessary to tell a truly powerful story and buoyed me through some of my own dark nights of the soul, as if Hutchison did the hard feeling for me. I always wonder when we lose a tortured, creative soul whether the work the produced helped them stay alive as long as they did, or if feeling for the rest of us cost them too much. I’ll always treasure the music of Frightened Rabbit, but I’d gladly trade those songs to have the creative mind that birthed them rattling through life again.