Bag o' Choons

As usual, another Bandcamp Friday lands and I'm faced with an overwhelming number of singles, EPs and albums vying for my hard-earned moolah.

In no particular order, the following dozen will be dead certs for the checkout and dominating my playlists over the weekend*

1) Once Around The Block (Cover of Badly Drawn Boy): Ellen Beth Abdi (single)

2) North Sixteen: Jo Bartlett & Neil Haydock (album)

3) Easy EP: Smerz (EP)

4) End Of The Trail: 100 Poems (album)

5) A Drop In The Ocean: Peace & Dub Soundsystem (aka Dan Wainwright) (album)

6) Butt Sex: Mykki Blanco (single)

7) Spellbound (Yves Schopin Remixes): Rae & Christian ft. Veba (single)

8) AngieAngieAngie: spill tab (album)

9) Little to Lovers: HANN (single)

10) Unsteady: Jezebell (single)

11) Ghost Rider Remixes (Cover of Suicide): Blavatsky & Tolley (EP)

12) My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras In It: Victoryland (album)

* I may have said this about the some of these artists and releases in previous posts, but this time I really mean it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I Must Admit, It's Fun To Be A Villain

I was itching for some pop music and spill tab has randomly dropped in to scratch that itch.

Half an hour and a few internet trawls later and I know 100% more about spill tab now than I did earlier, which was litlle more than a name and a link in a marketing email from French label Because Music. 

Because Music has been home to great music by Amadou & Mariam, Blancmange, Daniel Avery, Orbital and Soulwax, so a recommendation from them is not treated with the same suspicion as others, so I clicked on the link with an open mind.

spill tab is the musical alias of Claire Chicha, born in Bangkok to Algerian and South Korean parents, moved from there to Paris to Los Angeles, her current home. Her debut single was Decompose in 2019, with her first album, Angie, emerging last year.

An expanded/deluxe edition, re-titled AngieAngieAngie, was released last week and I heard it - or at least, the five songs presented here - for the first time a short while ago, the rest of the album re-playing (in sequence) as I write this.

The music is not radical, there are lots of 90s and early 00s touch points and, perhaps no surprise given spill tab's California base, a real Fleetwood Mac vibe running through several of the songs. 

Yet for that all, there is something pleasingly now about it, the glitchy beats, the courage to switch and pitch and play with the vocals, a juxtaposition of real musicians playing to lo-fi bedroom sounds.

spill tab won't change my world, but I'm enjoying AngieAngieAngie enough to add it to my Bandcamp Friday shopping list. If you like what you hear, you can too.

1) Pink Lemonade (2024)

2) Roamer (2026)

3) Suckerrr (2026)

4) wet veneer (2025)

5) Hold Me (Live @ Because Beaubourg event, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 25th October 2025)