Tompaulin Into the Black. Named after an anti-Semite poet, yes, one who plays with the net down. A Harvest Minister, strangely enough, wannabe, check. An amazing female singer who bizarrely must share vocal with said wannabe, check. This was their second album. It's astonishing. I am going back to moments of pleasant surprise after the distaste of disappointment has begun to subside. Banjo. Country Music. Will Belle and Sebastian ever do a proper country record? They did Wrong Girl but that was one from the "others". It does not count. All brilliant bands must make a country record. BMX Bandits made one. This burns slowly from the start, all desperate intentions for intense smouldering and then very slowly the intensity is increased, by more banjo, prominent feedback, and utter patience in rainstorms, torment, travail, uneasiness. Her vocals are resolutely poised yet the words do tremble on their own. It's a winter album. It's an album for long journeys into the mists of exhalations, fighting the moon for solace, turning the hidden lattice of the crystal night air to cheek strewn roses and numbness of the heart. This was written for a friend who had died of cancer. I believe. Too young, but with friends, with love, with a light to battle against the oncoming darkness. It's so insistent at the moment, "on your skin, on your skin, on your skin, on your skin", it's a masterpiece. Really. You wouldn't have thought that Tompaulin had it in them would you have but they did. You certainly don't see any spark of "it" in the Fischers. Oddities being such as they are. Second song, This Desire. I am writing this in anticipation of the airport. I am waiting to fly to Florida. I am not a Florida person, I am certain of this, but I long to be near the Ocean again. It's a maudlin period. I have been dating" the last few weeks. I have spent too long in a maudlin pose, too long time have I been pining for someone who doesn't think of me at all. It seemed as if the comfort of unrequitted love could fill the emptiness of my heart with the bleak stillness with hopeful delusions. This is a marvelous song, it's heart burning soulful. There was no prior warning of this. They made a record with Jim Reid, it was nonsense accompanied with vocal flares about their raucousness and riots and fire. It was tepid, at best. Now to Promised Land, it's smart and knowing. Lovely. As tender and heart rendering as this is it does still fall short of a 'my soul laid bare' moment. Are there any such records? Aren't all musicians and poets and artists performers or poseurs at heart? I don't feel the agony of depression in the performances here, as delicate and warm as they may be. Would that be something that is comfortable to listen to? I am not sure, I have never encountered it. When Bob Wratten is writing his odes to the life of a stalker it's as creepy as it is romantic. Harvest Minister almost was on his first lead vocal, it's not so bad. He does a marvelous The Boy Hairdresser. Is it a slab of Americana? Why, I have nothing but envy for the traditions of the English. They have forsaken these as Evelyn Waugh says "ripped out the nourishing taproot". It does have the echoes of the sea in many of these spaces and notes, the landscape is not barren and devoid in their conscience but lush and with undergrowth to capture restless souls out in thier literate pursuits. I imagine the singer is well read though rarely is it reflected thus in his lyrics. I imagine too that he is all things political as well, probably longing for the reinstatement of Clause 4, with a seething sense of betrayal by New Labour, disillusioned over the Liberal Democrats and cynical over the greens or someone even more extreme. This brand of ache is slightly overdone, her voice is more naturally melancholic, he has to groan at it. Next song, it is tremendously gorgeous, so so truly, even his bits. It's more of a restrained whisper in this case, also topped up with the knowledge that it is a duet and his tedium is measured by equal opportunity. Tom Paulin is Irish. She rises from a pedestal of wisdom somhow accumulated in her emotional register. He might feel it in his pen, girded by his bits of rejection, but somehow her voice weeps elegantly while he bangs on in a bit of a whimper like berries in escape from a jar on the refrigerator shelf feeling no sense of duty to the preserves or silverware. Useless has a bit of a calculator rhythm as the elements seem scripted, well thought out and placed inside a story board with preset accompaniment chosen by consultants on taste and emotion. I have calculator rhythms animating my spirit, a delirious affinity for numbers and the breakdown of human emotion into logical numerary, in permanent assessment of sadness as epitomized by a menu from the economist. Tom Paulin advocates murder "with the net down". 3 in the Morning, double tracked vocals, his'n'hers, charming. The art of melancholia is in the documentation of how people deal with tragedy, turning it catholic, it is not always the performance. Your heartache is not on par with the heartache worthy of a tribute. Should you capture the essence of heart sickness, renderings of a forced smile through the agonizingly bewildering ecstasy found in shame, this intoxicating enchantment of misery then legend awaits, the canon. Deception becomes key, walking amongst the living wondering if it will resurface stolen from shadows of apparitions. Look in the inverted sky architecture, from an airplane there is a reverse topography where even the alien extremes of the Northern Flinders transformed into the prosaic by mountains birthed from the sky. Brave, alone, in the evening, on a powdered sugar beach, the popular designation. No distant rigs on the horizon, geology has let me down when I search for the hamnet players of the world's roils and rows. Powdered sugar cannot sate the engorgement. On my journey from the airport in my surrealistic haze, in my re-enactment of Alasdair Maclean's sense journals I ran across someone making the argument that WWII was essentially superfluous. He was backed up in this opinion by Patrick J. Buchanan. Solid footing. Driving is a lost art, the smooth acceleration, the measured reduction in speed when barriers present themselves, these are all vanished from our uncivil society. I mourn their loss. And yet the Hitler Youth shuttle was not even efficient as Germans are wont to pretend. There's A Name It Hurts to Say, kate Bush, the later years, maturity, maddenings subsided. The smell of the sea was a curious reminder. The smell of everywhere is to be catalogued in the future, a weblog, the nostalgia induced from a wafting of friends and geology, botany and microbiology. I shook hands with a giant with small hands and a Beatles haircut. His hair turned metallic from a distance, an undocumented fetal alcohol syndrome consequence and then there were Mao suits, stirring midnight thunderstorms over the sea, and brave helicopter rescues amidst the margaritas and powdered sugar. Jesus and Mary Chain duet, does not require a sleepwalking Reid brother, not really, but he was duly praised by the usual sorts. Does anything of timorous melancholy arise in Florida? it seems an unlikely origination point for anything thoughtful and sincere. The veneer scratched away reveals nothing more than powdered sugar. Perhaps. There was Larry Bonk and his Plastic Mastery. Along with giants with short hands came young, fair maidens with one leg shorter than the other. An examination of patellas and discussion of lifts and spine alignment was engendered and led to high level discussions about femur stretching and tendon length. I found it marvelous. When the Night Comes Like a Thief, authentically country, morose, beautiful. A jarring rebuke to the startling homogeneity in my shared airport terminals, all ethnicities bleed into one species evolved specially as species to haul the same luggage, be adorned with the same attire, adopt the same posture, accessorize with the same adhesions; cell phones, tattoos, ball caps and an affinity for dawdling. Most disheartening discovery is that I am an easy part of that horde, my investments in Turkey aside, the Tompaulin in my ears not withstanding, the insecurities within my psyche taken for granted.