Gown – For You, It’s Always Full
You can’t trust love songs, unless they’re sung by people who are either desperately in love, or desperate to fall in love. But those who have a reason to sing them aren’t wimps. They’re people who’ve fallen under a spell. And, just like Jeff Buckley told the world, it’s those people who have the keys to unlock something of immense power and depth.
But then who can you trust, really? The vast majority of major label-approved songs deal with love, and the vast majority of those sound like a xerox copy made with cynicism and bitterness. Love songs are written as to be placed in the soundtracks of dating shows and silly romantic comedies. I suppose, we’ll just have to listen real closely.
Gown’s “For You, It’s Always Full” is really a short meditation on being in love. Like Jeff Buckley, the songwriter works with a tender vocal tone, but also with the great power between each word. The song swells, builds up and falls back down. And because it does all these things in a brief two minutes, it feels honest. If you need love songs, scout out the real deal, like this one.
Le Concorde – Corpus Christi
We’re spoiled for choice as music listeners. And, frankly, this is greatly and terribly impacting the way we actually listen to and understand music. You can’t just benefit from a free buffet every day of your life before you start confusing your boiled potatoes for your Piedmont white truffles. If all things were equal, French bistros would just all serve cheese sandwiches and nothing else.
The other problem is that when everything is free, available and advertised, there doesn’t seem much of a point in creating a collection. It’s hard to justify to your family a sending spree of thousands of dollars on rare vinyl when the sounds contained on those records are readily available at the push of a button. Clearly, new strategies are needed to make it all special once again.
Le Concorde’s “Corpus Christi” is a nice anomaly in a world where, at times, it seems that any kind of playlist that, theoretically, could have been made, has already been created. Le Concorde specialises in a retro rock sound that was so popular for a while in the 1980s, but disappeared so swiftly, that playing it in 2025 has something of the surreal about it. This style brings to mind the prog-rock and pop symbiosis that helped bands like Genesis and Yes score unexpected charting hits during that fateful decade. It’s excellently played, put together, and quite artificial-sounding. But it’s a very, very specific taste, a dish you’ll need to know about and order specifically.
