New Branch - Fruit Tree Foundation EP

Fruit Tree Foundation - Hired Help

One of my fav cuts this year, this song rocks. As does the album. Members of awesome Scottish bands - Delgados, Idlewild, Twilight Sad, Frightened Rabbit, James Yorkston etc- combined splendidly to produce a great set of songs in aid of a mental health charity. That said, there is nothing charitable about the sentiments endorsed in these songs- harsh, bleak, yet beautiful- this album deserves an airing.
Download their new EP here for free. 'Quack', as recommended by said the gramophone, is perhaps the best track on the album, mixing REM style preppy rock with the hooky yet lugubrious style of Elliott Smith.
Makes me want to listen to 100 Broken Windows, one of my fav ever albums. Thanks Rod Jones.

Real Estate

Real Estate - Municipality


Possibly my favourite track of the fantastic Days LP, not least because it manages to take a mundane six syllable word and make it sound romantic. Brill.

Kathleen Edwards

Kathleen Edwards - Sidecar

 Lovely, Justin Vernon produced number from this Canadian chanteuse. I like a lot. Her new 7" Wapusk is out now. It's difficult to see the Bon Iver influence other than in subtle electronic flourishes, and more obviously, the raw sounding drums with which the song opens. It's much more straight forward than a Vernon penned number, but with just enough edge to keep the catchy melody from becoming saccharine sweet. Concise, too. Under Vernon's aegis Miss Edwards should find the audience her gorgeous voice deserves.

When Atlas Met Panda

03 Walkabout [w Noah Lennox]

Don't ask me why, but I've only got into Atlas Sound properly over the last two months or so. I remember being equal parts captivated and frustrated by Deerhunter's Cryptograms in 2007, so I just assumed (ignorantly) that Atlas Sound would be a vehicle for Bradford Cox's worst indulgences. I didn't realise that the chap just ain't got enough monikers to contain his music. Prolific's not the word, rampant's more like it. As with Will Oldham, Cox allies propuctivity with consistency, and I'm hard pushed to choose between Halcyon Digest and Logos. Lesser bands could (justifiably) dine out on these records, but not he. No, he's back in a few weeks with Parallax (which sounds awesome). But for now, check his breeziest moment to date, 'Walkabout', with Panda Bear's Noah Lennox, who lends his mighty lungs to this sunny piece of avant pop.

The Wee Bonnie Prince

If there's a better songwriter than Will Oldham over the last fifteen years or so, I'd like to hear her/him. Packed full of bleak gnomic wisdom and bizarre non sequitur filled humour, his songs posses an originality sorely lacking among today's singer songwriters.

As comfortable and eloquent detailing life's big questions as recounting the joys of cunnilingus, Will Oldham is an indie deity. And rightly so.

He's almost ludicrously prolific, rarely a year goes past without an Oldham composition of some sort- there are usually several- and they're always worth listening to.

His latest offering, Wolfroy Goes To Town, is great but today's track is from 2007's The Letting Go.
An album well worth checking out, as full of tunes as of insight, with beautiful female backing vocals offsetting Oldham's wizened bark.

The song is about the randomness of love, occuring as it does, in spite of 'the dead flying though the sky'. A curious and wondrous phenomenon, much like the Bonnie Prince himself. 

I must get round to a Wolfroy...  review, but in the meanwhile, check this, and check the rest, the dude ain't put a foot wrong, like, ever.


Love Comes To Me 

"Moralise all you might like - I don't believe in it"

This is my favourite Okkervil River song, indeed, one of my fav songs full stop. From the Black Sheep Boy Appendix album (the same sessions as 2005's Black Sheep Boy, their best album imo), 'No Key, No Plan' sees Will Sheff at his impassioned best. He uses his gift for narrative to imbue his characters with vital relevance full of implication as to how to live our humble everyday lives. In this case Sheff uses the persona of a destuctive criminal hell bent on "crash land(ing)", to represent the adrenalin of living for the moment. Of carpe diem. "Back on the road again, with maybe 13 grand", the song then flips to "a rich young sophisticate", who, like Sheff, is "doing what I really like, and getting paid for it". These worldly pleasures are elevated and justified in the song's transcendent finale where Sheff screams with that cracked voice, of how "There is only now", no hell, thus no use in inhibition or morality: "just breathe it in."
      This song always gives me comfort when I think of the essential senselessness of what we are doing, why we are here. Existing. It is so urgent, compelling a listener, if not to go out and pull a heist like the character in the song, at least to go out and truly live. This is your only chance.
Sheff seems to revel in this lack of a higher meaning. And obviously the song is very meta, (as with all Okkervil River). It's a song about itself, about being in a band, the rock and roll myth, and making art for art's sake. At once cerebral and fiercely visceral, Sheff transmutes the futility of life in a post religious age into something glorious, through an exaltation of hedonistic excess.
    I don't know how much hard living Sheff does- he's always a couple of steps removed from his characters- but he sure has put a cogent and passionately argued case for going out and getting wasted. Or at least doing what you want.