February 2025 Music Roundup

02 Mar, 2025

📼 It's now March, phew! It doesn't feel that long since I wrote the January Album Roundup post. In the spirit of doing something similar, here is February's version! I've decided to switch the post name to Music Roundup instead, as I realized I didn't listen to much new albums the past month. Hence, to not restrict myself, and to also share things that aren't necessarily albums (e.g. live performances, EPs, and relistens etc.) this would be how I compile music-related stuff moving ahead.

• Flowers for Vases / Descansos by Hayley Williams 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

  • Genre: Indiefolk
  • I listened to this back when it first released in 2021, and I remembered thinking it was better than the 'sister' album, Petals for Armor. Petals for Armor is confident-sounding, poppy, and upbeat - Flowers for Vases consists of a mellow (but still singalong-able imo) filled tracklist. If you're interested in hearing something more close to Paramore, I would say go for PfA, but maybe something more Hayley-coded, stick with this one!

• 茹毛飲血 by 打倒三明治 🌟🌟🌟½

  • Genre: Indierock
  • I think I found this band when I was looking through Wendy Wander's label's website where they had listed all their other bands, and this was one of them! I have to relisten to it a bit more as I listened to this earlier in the month, but I thought they had great energy. However, I am reminded that these songs do not sound great coming out from my phone speaker by its own. Definitely recommended to listen to these using earbuds/headphones/better speakers.

• 婚禮之途 by Shallow Levée 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

  • Genre: Indiepop

  • I completely fell in love with Shallow Levée from the very start when I first listened to the second track of this album (the first is an instrumental intro). The frontwoman of this band reminds me a lot of Enno Cheng, another Taiwanese female singer, in which was the first Mandarin/non-English gig I've ever seen live. In some ways, I think my tastes aligns more with this band as they rely less on the electronic instruments/beats that Cheng's music tend to have (more of a preference for myself, the music is still awesome).

    The song that made me follow their profile on Spotify is 恬恬一下仔. It's a beautiful song sang in Hokkien, and, it radiates nostalgia for me. It reminds me of good memories with my grandmother who only speaks in Hokkien (and a small bit of Mandarin) - she's now experiencing memory loss due to old age and is not in her right mind, and the lyrics touched me in the right ways. So much so that I created a new blog to keep the translation and lyris somewhere.

• Stay with the Horses by Alexander Biggs 🌟🌟🌟🌟

  • Genre: Indie folk, singer-songwriter
  • I've been listening to Alexander since COVID, when he released his album, Hit or Miss on Bandcamp. His music shares similar qualities with Phoebe Bridgers' music, which I'm a fan off - the quiet style of singing paired with beautiful production carrying the tracks from front-to-end. It's understated but not in the literal 'guy/gal with their laptop and a guitar', which I've grown to learn is my preferred type of indie folk.

  This album follows a very similar style as the previous one, which I both like and also not like. I would've liked to see some new things from Alexander, but its also sticking to the type of music that I did enjoy from the older album, so no harm no foul. It's a nice cohesive album nonetheless, and I'm looking forward to seeing how he grows from here.

• Girl in Red Live on Tiny Desk 🌟🌟🌟🌟

  • Genre: Indie pop, live performance
  • Can't seem to get the embed to work this time around :/
  • I've listened to some of her music before, and thought that they were pretty nice-sounding bedroom pop. I was pleasantly surprised that Girl in Red sounds great (and I think better) when live! Would love to hear full acoustic renditions of her songs now that I've listened to her here.

[28/100] for #100DaysToOffload

Also - quick note that if you notice the skipping of a few posts for the 100DaystoOffload challenge tag, that's because I've decided to publish articles that are time-bound (week notes, monthly music roundups, etc.) on the same day or the next versus adding them to my post queue! I'm more of a "schedule and leave and forget" type of person hence the whole system that I've been operating on, but I think it makes more sense to post these directly.

#100DaysToOffload #music