April: What A Cruel Month! is the twelfth album by Moes Haven and the fourth of twelve from the 365 Project, released on April 23, 2006. It contains 18 tracks and a runtime of 28:35, and was released significantly early on in its respective month. It is the second-shortest Moes Haven album, behind August: Of Temporal Inconsistency (which clocks in at 27:48).
According to the Motern Media No-Jokes Album Guide, Matt Farley states that creative exhaustion had caught up with him and Tom Scalzo by the end of March. But instead of abandoning the 365 Project, the duo decided to spend a weekend writing bad songs, jamming, and forsaking quality in favor of producing any form of output for the month of April.
The resulting album has an intentionally rough and unpolished sound, with the duo barely mixing and mastering the songs in order to showcase the “cruel” month and their overall exhaustion. From their jam sessions, they chose the best parts and faded in and out of them. This gives the songs on April a more experimental sound, which in the No-Jokes Album Guide Farley calls “the closest we ever came to writing a Jandek album–and we didn’t even know Jandek at that point!”
Despite its rough sound, the fact that it was recorded in one weekend gives it a more cohesive nature, unlike collections of songs from various years such as Dislocated Songs or Down With Memories.
Unlike most other 365 Project albums, April does not have an episode of the Motern Media Infomercial Podcast discussing the album for its 10 year anniversary. However, Matt discusses it in the beginning of Motern Media Infomercial Podcast episode #101, where he calls it “hit or miss”. However, in the No Jokes Album Guide, Farley admits that he likes the album.
Farley’s friend Jon Noble is the man giving his best tough guy pose on the album cover.
Track listing
| # | Title | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | How Dangerous Can Pliers Really Be? | 1:41 |
| 2 | Coming Up With Ideas For Bad Songs (Is Harder Than You Think) | 1:10 |
| 3 | Violated Paradise | 2:03 |
| 4 | Waiting For You Now | 1:12 |
| 5 | Jimmy Don’t Be Afraid | 1:16 |
| 6 | Tom Waits Was Right | 1:41 |
| 7 | Snakes In A Plane | 1:14 |
| 8 | Rooster Spurs of Death | 2:11 |
| 9 | Fish in One Hand (And A Spear in the Other) | 1:21 |
| 10 | Be Right With You | 2:24 |
| 11 | I’m Tremendously Happy | 1:53 |
| 12 | Gershwin Would Be Proud (Continuing the American Tradition) | 1:04 |
| 13 | She Lost Her Identity (Literally) | 1:54 |
| 14 | Strawberry Plants Aren’t Easy to Grow | 1:37 |
| 15 | She Was Watching the Late-Night Movie Station (When I Came Home) | 2:10 |
| 16 | Why Does She Hate Tom Waits? | 1:00 |
| 17 | I’m Not From Australia (But Sometimes I Wish I Was) | 1:07 |
| 18 | When I See Your Face | 1:29 |