Rambling Fox

March 2026 Music Round-Up

Art by Sancoon

March. The year in new music felt like it kicked properly in motion, and I once again broke my promise of calming down with buying new music. What else is new there, right?

New Music Immediate Impressions

Joff Bush & The Bluey Music Team - Bluey: Up Here

Going to be brutally honest: at this stage I am following up with the Bluey soundtracks (and buying them for the collection) primarily out of habit, rather than out of genuine excitement. That isn't to say that the heeler mines are going dry - Joff Bush continues to be a really exciting and diverse composer, the score sounds like a genuine labour of love which follows the show's general trend of not underestimating its audience, and I've enjoyed how after the first soundtrack release they've taken the option to release these based on general themes, rather than just simple season 1, 2, 3 approach. But I also think I am at this point just chasing the high of that first soundtrack release, which was a genuine small Moment of its own upon release, as this surprisingly wonderful show produced an album that was not only wall-to-wall bangers akin to a parallel universe Go! Team album, but which came to symbolise a particular period of our lives. We're now at release #4 and, well, let's just say that if I want to listen to Blueycore I practically always end up reaching for the first album.

But Up Here is good. The gimmick here is that it pulls together many of the more orchestral suites that have appeared in the series, most famously (and at the very forefront) the Sleepytime score from the fan-favourite episode of the same name. And I admit, that does get me a little teary-eyed (to be fair, I think any song where you have a voice clip of a mother saying "I'll always be there with you" is going to break the dams open for me at this stage, dead parent syndrome and all). The rest is... not quite as poignant or thrilling as it would initially make out to be but it's solidly consistent work from Bush. I just keep chasing that impossible high.

Conelrad - Party's Over

Conelrad has spent most of the past several years creating long-form ambient and drone tracks, but after three years of work has returned with their first "proper" album in a small lifetime - and it's gorgeous. Melancholy and weary, yet cathartic and defiant - bedroom maximalism with ethereal soundscapes, soaring choruses and emotional resonance, flitting between anthemic walls of sound and contemplative atmospheric floating and cut by heavily vocodered vocals which add to the album's tone. "Party's Over", the title track, in particular is a stunner: growing from a inwards-turned sigh into a colossal, defiant reach for the sky, I haven't been able to stop playing it.

A bit of a special bias caveat, but this happened to be released at the tail-end of the trip I took back home this month, where I spent some time all alone in our family house, sorting things out as my siblings and I are starting with the insurmountable task of clearing it out for sale. The emotional beats of this album struck particularly resonantly during those last few days, and that has no doubt affected why I've clung onto this release so much throughout the month. A fantastic album, and certainly a highlight for the year as a whole, I would imagine - my play amounts of this in March definitely speak for themselves.

Robyn - Sexistential

The original independent electro pop chanteuse returns after several years with... a 29 minute album? Hate this trend.

It's a dang solid 29 minutes and "Dopamine" is already forming into a small Robyn classic for me (I'm a sucker for that synthesized "dope dope dope" backing harmony beat, stupid at first yet now essential), but I am awash with the feeling that there's potential for more here. I'm not one to say that we deserve a 18-song album after years of absence because I'm a quality > quantity guy, but many of the 9 tracks on Sexistential feel like they're a few drafts away from being final, that there's still something more Robyn and her collaborators could have pushed out of them instead of leaving them hanging in the three minute marker. It's a sign of the times of course - this TikTok pop era is a dark period - but out of anyone, Robyn feels like the one artist who would've had the right and the guts to avoid it. So I can't help but feel that Sexistential is a little lackluster, despite its consistently good energy - but perhaps one to revisit later.

Alexis Taylor - Paris in the Spring

Besides, we had the Hot Chip frontman's latest to occupy by the suave and smart dance pop slot last month.

Taylor's solo discography has been a little hit and miss, but Paris in the Spring is shaping up to be one of the hits - which is perhaps a little cheeky to say when you consider that this is one that would take least effort to convert into a Hot Chip record. Taylor and the crew he's gathered around him have produced a sleek synth pop record with a great balance of out-and-out dance floor smashes (among them "Out of Phase" embedded below, one of the year's highlight singles so far), emotive and subtle slow jams and nuanced, lush mid-tempo moods. Taylor's voice is in the front and centre of it all - positively fragile and full of resonance in its permanent wistfulness, which the production and the writing take full advantage out of. A really good album, one of the key releases of the year so far.

Hoard Updates

Oh crikey. I try to add a little photo of my new collection additions each month as a bit of visual flair, but sheesh. Look at that amount. I didn't plan it this way, but it happened. Trying to fit everything in a photo - even multiple photos - is going to be such a faff, especially as I have to pull all these out of the shelf again. I'm too lazy for this right now.

So let's look at these a bit more in detail.

CD

So this veritable mountain of discs can be split in three categories. One is simply music I ordered or which arrived during the month. There's the new albums of the month, the CD issue of Alien Boy's album from last year which arrived after a couple of month's wait, some discography gap filling (the Bowies, Loose Fur), and impulse buying a bunch of R.E.M. fanclub singles because someone was selling them for a decent price.

But also, when I did the aforementioned Finland trip during March, I did do some personal shopping during my time there too. Flea markets are a big thing in Finland and my mom picked up wandering around them as a hobby in her later years, and I enjoyed doing it with her; so I did a little trawl myself and picked up a couple of cheap used CDs. The most exciting of these is that Greatest Hits of the 80's 8-CD box set - I remember this being advertised in TV back in the late 1990s and I really wanted it at the time, but ordering things from TV shopping networks just felt like a strange and scary concept to me. Three decades later and it's finally with me - a little scuffed, but perfectly working. It's far from a definitive 80s hit box set, but does a great job in gathering up some of the essentials of the decade and then some random esoteric stuff that the label had the rights to print.

The final third is my impromptu peek at my old home town's small record shop. The selection pales in comparison to the shops in The Big World, but I usually leave with a couple of random Finnish albums and some back catalogue additions for big mainstream acts. Except this time, it feels like someone who had been head-first into the Finnish indie scene had decided to do away with their physical collection - there was an absolutely insane amount "Finndie" albums in the second hand section and I hoovered a lot of them up as I'd been after them for a while - and there was still more I left there! So that accidentally blew up the totals. Oh, and they also had Silver by Frozen: a J-rock album which I know absolutely nothing about but which I bought simply because bumping into a random Japanese album, with its yen price tag still on the cover and all, in a small Finnish record shop was just too curious not to buy. It sounds... fine? Haven't listened to it much.

Digital

The digital purchases are mainly just me using Bandcamp Friday as an excuse to clear my wishlist. Buying the entire Hadd discography wasn't in the plans but it was on a pretty good discount and I thought, why not - let's see what's there. Supporting the community.

But then there's also these CDs...

So that aforementioned house clearance project includes my parents' music collection as well, which I have already been grabbing things from across the years (at my dad's insistence). So, this is just more "inherited" music I happened to pick up this time around. The budget comp by the Spanish disco duo Baccara was something I remember my dad playing in his car when I was a kid, though he only really liked the first song ("Yes Sir, I Can Boogie" naturally - one of the best disco songs of all time), and The Monkees comp is his as well and though I'm not a big Monkees fan, I figured I may as well. Katri Helena meanwhile is a true cross-generational icon in Finland and, more importantly, she was my mother's favourite singer. So, I grabbed both the 2-CD greatest hits album that tries to sum up her at the time four decades in music, and then the 2006 album which I gave to my mom as a Christmas present all the way back when. Now I get to hold it. So, sentimental stuff.

Music reviews

I mainly focused on Chumbawamba reviews throughout March, as I'm nearing the end of their discography - I'll make a separate post about it as I do. Besides them, it's been a bit of a amouse bouche style gap fill with a couple of Sonic soundtracks, to refresh the sonic palate before the final Chumba run begun.

Most played song of the month according to Last.FM

Easily soaring over every other candidate and as already mentioned before, it's the title track from the aforementioned Conelrad album.

#music