Music For A Good Home 3: the Aladdin's cave of alternative music

Audioscope are back with yet another album straight out of a curiosity shop to raise money for Shelter.
It’s the stuff indie kids dream of: eclectic, obscure and diverse songs stringed together in a unique compilation of pretty unknown bands all for a good cause. WHAT MORE COULD YOU WANT. ‘Music for a Good Home’ is made by Audioscope who have been raising money through music for over a decade, raising over £26,500 for Shelter, a homelessness charity, since they started. 'Music For a Good Home 3' is their newest addition and costs just seven squid, of which all goes to the charity. It's the rare nature of this album, drawing unrelated artists from all over the world with all different sounds together into one album, that really encapsulates many genres in an honest way. It’s clear that some of the tracks stand out.
Weather (a Bracken remix) by Epic45 is utterly beautiful. It’s chilled house sprinkled with violin instrumentals, wind chimes and springtime sounds. It’s something that slots right into a chilled walk in the park in the summer. Then there’s a song by Oxford five piece, Spring Offensive, called
Synapse to Synapse which is a nice symbiotic relationship between Wild Beasts and The National, somehow churned up seamlessly with Explosions in the Sky and The XX. It’s filled with darker, melancholic lyrics that have somehow been uplifted into a strong, powerful track. Next in the cream o’ the crop of the album is a rock band called Wolf People with a song called Kitchen. They’ve got this whole dark, husky vocal thing going on alongside a deep, chugging bass-line. 7 Hours (a Lost Bass demo mix) by The Fauns kind of reminds me of the upcoming Swedish band Say Lou Lou with all the airy-fairy vocals but the no-nonsense instrumental backing it all. This is a powerful, gripping yet shimmery, pretty song. To be honest, I could carry on picking out more and more strong tracks because there’s such a wide variety at such a high standard. It’s easy to assume that a charity album of songs that have been donated won’t be any good. And truthfully, a few of the songs you’ll want to skip over – but that can only be expected in a 31 track album. This album pretty much has it all. No, really, it does.  There’s obscure, urban instrumentals to 1980s punk-rock to spacey, psychedelic indie stuff. Music For a Good Home 3 is for those who are neither Marmite lovers nor haters (symbollically) -  this is
the definitive album for those who like to dip their toe into all kinds of genres from all kinds of backgrounds.
Rating: 7/10   Audioscope: http://audioscope.co.uk/ Shelter: https://www.shelter.org.uk/

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