Perfect Album

You Forgot It In People is almost ten years old now, and I can't think of an album that I've enjoyed more in that intervening decade. The Canadian collective will never better this, how could they? The album combines the best elements of indie (angst, intensity, umm, guitars) allied with an invigorating post rock instrumentation, and sense of expanse.

It's perfect music for daydreaming, (which suits me perfectly!) there's just so much to take in, so many layers of noise and texture to spark thoughts and emotion. It will always remind me of rainy uphill cycle rides during a particularly tumultuous period in my life, but that's by the by. Nothing's direct or obvious apart from the power ballad epic, "Lover's Spit", and that's just great. This is a work large and vague enough to encompass all a listener can bring to it. It's good as 'mood music' in the background but even better when given proper attention.

It effortlessly manages to conjure a sense of drama and scope without using the flawed medium of lyrics. A case in point is 'Anthems For A Seventeen Year Old Girl', where the song's title perhaps guides a listener towards viewing it as an ode to innocence lost, but it can essentially mean everything and nothing at the same time ( like a great lyric ). There are vocal samples, obviously, yet never narrative voices. In 'Anthems..', for example, it's almost like a voice over for a film, and the effect is much like a montage, image after image colliding and building atop of the previous one.

I don't usually listen to a lot of instrumental music and it's refreshing to not have a singer's ego at the centre of proceedings for a change. There's no coherent, continuous voice guiding and limiting the songs. Instead there are myriad vocalists and talkers from Leslie Feist, to (most often) Kevin Drew  to anonymous effect drenched mutterers, buried in sound. This is an album unashamedly about the music; instead of choruses there are hooks (see 'Cause=Time'), and they use all of their fifteen or so players to the limit making a cacophony of noise, which must be a delight to behold live. I really hope they do that tour thing so en vogue at the moment where bands play a classic album in its entirety, as Dinosaur Jr did with Bug recently. The record has such a continuity to it that it's paying the work a disservice to take any given track out of its context. Each cut bleeds into the next like a long, languorous jam session. I mean, it's unthinkable for me to hear 'KC Accidental' without its tension taut prelude, 'Capture the Flag', which, equally, is meaningless on its own.

That's what I mean by perfect. Few albums are so coherent and unified, resisting the modern impulse to cut and chop into ipod sized pieces. Just sit down. Put it on - and forget about it. Forget about people, even. Sorry, couldn't resist.