I listen to Sound of Arrows Into the Clouds each and every morning, it makes me heart smile all day long.

Veronica Falls - the less good Je Suis Animal. (sarcasm)Woo(/sarcasm). They are pretty people in photographs though. Is this the source of such undue praise?

Update: New Crayon Fields nearly makes up for the fact that the Clientele are now silly. It is nice, yes, and less polished sure, we could claim it as flecks of hearts on the sleeves. Oh, and of course the Cocoanut Groove record had already made us forget about the flabby Clientele anyhow.

Cats on Fire Our Temperance Movement. When last I wrote about Cats on Fire I was hysterical with praise. I am aged these days. I don't get hysterical, not any more. I am cynical and unfeeling and nearly dead. All these years piling up under my skin. Cats on Fire have fermented as well and somehow they're much older even than I am now. This is mature and docile and dutifully pleasant and really rather good. At first, a few months ago, when I was young, I dismissed it as dull and dull. It isn't dull dull dull, no, he's still Morrissey on a budget. He's still stylish. They still look fabulous but they've turned pensive and reflective and they luxuriate in the middle ground, the home of nuance and delights that escape notice of the frivolous. They are still Finnish. They are miles better than the Harry Hunks. Is he still a pop star? Indeterminate. That was a great deal of the appeal of the first record, there was flash and verve in his performance that overcome some of the perfunctoriness of the music. He's still a star. I think so. I find him splashy and debonair. He could be a host on HGTV even. How different the HGTV experience becomes when you are a prospective homeowner. I close on my home this Friday erm....Tuesday. I am trying to decide between Wildflower Honey and Amber Sun for the kitchen. I barely have any furniture. I am counting on my tax credit to furnish my spaces. Empty spaces could be temptingly inspiring, I could lie down in an empty room and inhale the history that has permeated the walls. It is 51 years old. Not that old, not nearly as old as Cats on Fire, but there must have been a fair amount of heartache and melancholy that has lowered the ceiling height by a few millimeters in that time. Rad-on teen experiences in the dark corners of the basement. Second song was just brilliant. Third song is just brilliant! He is keen on enunciating. We can can understand all of the words and they arrive understated and modest. Much unlike the aura that he radiates bashfully before entering a room. Do the girls swoon for Cats on Fire singer? Surely. But is he a sacrificial lamb for the muse of pop perfection? It is a romantic notion, foregoing the sustenance of mere mortals suckling instead on the nectar flowing from the trumpet vines strewn down from heaven above, those that long ago bypassed Stuart Murdoch and Richard Davies and Alasdair Maclean and heralded a brilliant return to form for the geriatrics in Cats on Fire. I don't much appreciate the fact that they mainly belong to the indiepop sorts, the Cloudberry sorts, the indiemp3 sorts, but I can share. I get a stomach rumbling from most of the bands listed on indiemp3 these days, they'll even rep for vivian Girls you know. Payola? Does Slumbrland have deep pockets or a killer depp research team to uncover the secrets lurking behind the gneric description factory on the thames. No idea if they are on the Thames. I've recently finished the Ghost Map which recalls the Cholera outbreak of the mid-19th century just near Soho and John Snow's heroics in uncovering its cause. Putrefaction of the Thames was once broadcast widely as evidence of the ineffable progress of science. It carried the bad air out to sea, to France Messionier's midgets and horses. This song is quiet, hollow drum mixed lowly, his voice elegantly restrained. The entire record is admirably soft spoken, it reminds of the bold underachievement of say The Boy With the Arab Strap, really, not that it sounds anything at all like that. This one is very Swedish, very Seashells, very Radio Khartoum, very North of No South. I mentioned the Bats before but it also reminds of Sneaky Feelings. They were also very old,truly frail, almost infertile men in boy's sweaters and trainers. Small shoulders are so indiepop. New Zealand had its niche because it was approximately 10 years behind the rest of the world fashionwise. Is it still? Unlikely. Now they're all mad for Kanye and My Chemical Romance and Julie Chen. Now they eat in cramped booths and wear unedifying footwear. Just the same as everyone else. And now when Cats on Fire have elements of the Bats in their songs or elements of Sneaky Feelings in their whimpers it's no big deal, globalization is a fine thing in this case. Of course it is evil in all other aspects. Let us forget the unprecedented gains in global wealth as a result, a nasty side effect, what about Global Warming after all! Next song, more jangle, more goodness. His style seems to accentuate his being, too often people who have overbearing style are making up for the fact that their level of compelling biography is limited by the lack of punctuation in air quotes. Remember the last Cats on Fire record? It was terribly exicitng. This one isn't. But it's a different level of profound, sad mopeys singing the lament of youth and despair. Nice. I am watching HGTV with a jaundiced eye these days, I watch House Hunters and all I think is "ooooo, my house is nicer than theirs!". It is so nice. I was lucky. I looked at 13 houses before and it was frigthening. Bad taste is so universal. Were you aware of this? Do not walk into other people's homes! You will not feel comforted, cheery or kind! Look at my witty post-modern reference. Oh I am a card. Next two days I have to attend sales training that I am coordinating. I sit in a room with loads of salesmen who don't want to be sitting in a room with me and their glances cast in my direction only at lunch time. I met a strange man today. I was waiting at the baggage carousel to pick up a visiting VIP and a man cme up to me and knew my place of work, it was on my shirt, and begged me off and then boasted about how he had created the logo on our corporate credit card. He was fantastically, terrifically proud. I smiled! I pulled out my corporate credit card for a reminder and I was disappointingly unimpressed by his handiwork. He spent hours on grass, lengths of his life on a lawn. Pah. I could design credit cards! He works for a bank, perhaps his right brain is locked in some safety deposit box. Perhaps he was delinquent on his payments, foreclosed on. I am overloading on exclamations, I don't feel exclamatory, I apologize for my profligacy. Some song is playing. Remember we are meant to be speaking of Cats on Fire. I like his style. If I was brave and kind and talented and people were willing to overlook my lack of those qualities then I would dress like him. My brother used to have hair like his, except he had whitewall sides because he was very pale and ghostly, small shoulders, but he was not indiepop. My shoulders are imposingly un-indiepop. My curse. I was looking at my new hardwood floors, this is me boasting, I may need to refinish them soon. Is this somethign I can do myself? I remember when we had hardwood floors when I was a kid. We covered them with carpet and then with carpet tiles, we were part of the hordes of ill manered assailants of good taste. We had copper jello forms on the wall, dinner plates on plate hangers and wallpaper with schooners on the kitchen wall. Garden Lights just now. Thankfully it does not sound like the Puddle. Fire Escape Talking is all about the Puddle. Why is this? They have a few unbelievably calssic songs including one that rips off the theme from Doogie Howser and loads of drivel. I was in a Dunedin McDonalds when George Henderson and his coterie of young female companions entered and shared a burger over dreamy stares and his frakly disturbing lack of hygiene. It was late at night. I was reading about Joseph Gordon Leavitt. I didn't think a Kiwi Burger was a wise choice, I've no idea what George ordered that evening, perhaps if I had joined them I could have been roped into a life in the Puddle cloud cult fantasist conglomeration and I would be as fond of GH as Fire Escape Talking seems to be. This is a brilliant song. He does have a lot of Morrissey. He seems proud of this. He is singing, proud enough to sing, proud enough to perform and sell his soul as a drama rather than a meidtative monologue. Most musicians are dreadful lyricists. Why is this? Why don't more bands have one person to write the music and one person to write the lyrics. Midnight Oil worked under this model, they were dreadful. Rush also employed this division of labour, they were brilliant. Hard to say what would happen if say the drummer here decided to write the lyrics. Is it the drummer from Cats on Fire that is in Aboa Sleeping? That's a terrifically dreary record but I dont remember if the lyrics are profound. I would venture they are not. The lyrics for Le Future Pompiste are not magnificent. When is it that they will release something new? Worldwide acclaim for Burning Hearts shold not delay a second Le Future Pompiste record, please no. The Borders of this Land is on now, it is in that delightful midtempo sweet spot, where you are convinced they really aren't as clever as this seems. But they are, really, it is just that you, me, in this case, are not. The awful truth, call Irene Dunne. Next song, perhaps the only dud. It's very slow and ponderous and it should have probably been a b-side. But we forgive them their indulgences. Vampires are all over television. Soul destroying vampires. Words should have fangs, words should be vampires, words should bleed, but I am listening to vampires speaking now and it is banal and flat and anemic. A vampire's kiss would be fatal. Our Days in the Sun, not for vampires then perhaps for daytrippers and medical students high on oxycontin. It is not exciting. It is almost over. It is an examination of lethargy. No powder kegs between the legs. Last track, Fabric. Before I move I need to clean the keys on my keyboard. I have dirty fingertips seemingly. Are your fingertips as dirty and unkept as mine are? I hope not. The last song is another mid tempo strummer. Oooo! the new Crayon Fields has appeared. It is unaccompanied by band photograph, a triumph, they sound a great deal like Cardinal. Cats on Fire do not. Some female voice joining his high, pointed voice, he has subtle urges in his breathing, there's a charged electricity to his being, there must be dozens of Cats on Fire appreciation societies only a beard or three away from obsessive status. To beard or not to beard. Such a difficult decision. Beautiful, beautiful.

New(?) Monica Queen song on her Myspace? Possibly, woo! Entry on Cats on Fire tomorrow, for some reason I am over the moon on the most recent album now. I have worked something like 31 of the last 32 days. I took Labor day off, for the cause!

The Clientele album is a dud. Good thing that they are over. He should join God Help the Girl.

Odland The Caterpillar Ep. Whatever happened to Emily Lloyd? It was Emily lloyd and Helena Bonham Carter that mattered to a young sensitive boy once upon a time. Helena Bonham Carter is off having babies with a creepy man and dressing like a goth. I found a website that made calim that Emily's dissappearance can be traced to Larium and fear of Malaria and the Dalai Lama's dog. If true it seems a marvelous story! Tragic sure, but certainly worth a soundtrack in its eventual retelling. This EP could provide that soundtrack. It is all things French. It is desperately serious. Dramatic. Beautiful. The first track starts off with some toy inclinations and a whispered spoken word bit in English. Then a dour violin accompanies the piano, ukulele, ah, but...it isn't anything at all like Beirut. It's decidedly more glamourous than the American Southwest. It's Lillian Gish movies, the White Sister, Lillian posing with a book, looking over the cedars, tears on her cheek, Italian aristocrats in love. The music falls away, the voice returns, it sounds like a school lesson, a teacher explaining the horrors of life to young children in her role as fading spinster relaying the dastardly tales of romance to innocent hearts sprawled on berber. It's dancing now, the music has got up and swings across the room, delicate steps and effortless grace, more English. How did L'Academie permit this? It feels perhaps more sophisticated, worldy, learned and charming than it is. I am not a musician. It's constructions like these that once enticed the Huns to take a stroll in the east. Is there such a thing as French camp? They don't seem embarassable when it comes to their inherent pretension. This is desperately pretentious but it is arrived at so effortlessly we feel privileged in being condescended towards. The voice is a young French actress. On song two she is speaking her spoken word bits in French, oh it is a ripping yarn! There is a Merlin handheld in the background, a cell phone, pianos, violins, the collision of civilization and the civilized. This was recorded in a bedroom. it does have an amniotic evocation, a warm atmosphere to turn the moments cordial and agreeable no matter the state of British finances. Emily Lloyd was rumoured to have been the choice for a British version of Sex and the City. I would have excised her from my memory box had she agreed. She shoudl never be so agreeable. perhaps a move to France and a role in some terrible Emmanuelle Beart movie where Emmaneulle Beart does not shed her clothes. This is artfully vague. There is a storyboard imagination painted in the listener's head with the well thought out structure and loveliness on display. Third song, a bit more song like. This is on Aerotone records. I've only just discovered Aerotone records. Well three members of Aerotone records. There is this, this is marvelous. There is Anois, Anois is marvelous. There is Entertainment for the Brainded, which of these band names does not belong, and she's marvelous anyhow. A German Emmy the Great if I mean to be rude by comparison. Third song is turning playful, vaudeville, sound effects, tiny tiny tiny little hands on very large pianos and scarves and boots that riddle the ankles. She's singing now. Almost. They have an album on the way. Terribly exciting news. Hopefully it does not end up on Bella Union. It might I am not certain why I am anti-Bella Union. These are complicated songs, they are filled with spaces filled with hollowness. The echoes search for the hollow. Marvelous. I received a note from someone in regards to the Palms entry. I did not read it. I re-read the Palms entry to see if someone could have found it objectionable. I didn't think it was all that disgraceful except for the reference to Amerikkkans but this is my being ironic. I am aware that not all Amerikkkans are racist and that it is Europe that actually elects nationalist monsters but you know, I feed the animals in the zoo animal crackers and honey. It is always curious when bands write me. There are 3 readers for this website. an unscientific guess sure because I don't have a counter but it's not that interesting to learn about the Hendra virus and wonder why I haven't breathlessly recounted the tale of Unnikrishnan the tragic Elephant as compelling as it is as a story. I am not clever enough to craft tales as splendidly rich with detail as an elephant dying of anthrax, a lament over the difficulty and expense of burying an elephant, the process of elephant decomposition and the threat to human drinking water as a result. Third song was beautiful. Fourth song was more beautiful. It is more French now than it once was. It is all very declarative at the moment, Gerard Langley's influence and now singing. Chanson! She's clearly imagining herself in a sailor's outfit saluting the drunken patrons as they dream of Tuaregs and Yves Congar dancing across the horizon. Dilapidated spoons or toy telephones have joined the delightful discombobulation, it's rather smart, it features smartly in my repertoire as a fromerly anglophilic dandy. Baudelaire and Manet. Let us just make a list of French notables. Back to spoken word, and squeezebox sentimentality and now to a player piano outro. Beautiful. I love this label.

The new Clientele seems not awesome. Not on first listen.

Palms It's Midnight in Honolulu. The beginning is primitive drum beatings and howlings. And then German, or not, she's singing in English isn't she, oh wait, now it's German. It's sensual. It's terrific. 15 years before Too Pure would have considered releasing this. The band name is stupid, the album title is stupid but the record is fabulous. It would have been on Too pure because Too Pure weren't always lame little fangirls who signed bands with beards. Did any of the original Too Pure bands have beards? Let's see Stereolab-uh, I don't think any of them could grow one, Moonshake-Dave Callahan can probably appreciate the primitivism of going unshaven but I don't think so, PJ Harvey-now I could see one of her band bearded but certainly not PJ, Seefeel-do beards go with drugs other than the hippy lettuce? Long Fin Killie-it would have been caught up in the cowbell, Mouse on Mars-uh, nope, Minxus-ah who cares about Minxus. You see, there's your proof, the greatest label in the hisotry of the world ever and not a beard among them. Granted I am not sure I've ever seen a photo of Seefeel so I could be making things up. But today everyone is bearded. On the website where I sometimes "try" out music before buying it they post photos of every band they link to and the art of band photography has taken a dramatic step backwards really. Every band looks lame and without effort, their uncoolness is all very natural. Sure sure most of them are making lame music as well but they could at least attempt to look good while making insufferable music and not completely assault each of our own good senses. Second song. The first was tribal, brutal, and now- a cheerful acoustic duet. Really. It's almost romantic until they get semi-doomy on the chorus and turn the blood chilled. It should have been on the soundtrack to Deadgirl. Animal Collective was. The Liars were, the Liars song really sounded perfect in the moment. You should go see Deadgirl. "Don't dance by yourself, dance into the light". It's lovely really. Germany may have former communists take a major step towards national office because they are meant to come close to taking office in one of the departments in the west, in Saarland, Oskar Lafonatine. Is he related to Pat Lafontaine? Pat Lafontaine grew up in my neighbourhood. There are avowed communists in the American government, it's frightfully chic at the moment, private property rights are so passe'. Third song, another acoustic strum along but multi-tracked female voice instead of a male-female sing-songathon. It's dreamy and charming, but in that darkly forlorn manner so endearing to Germans. Angela Merkel in lecture tone, pant suit and physics. Already over. Many short songs. Next track, some french, some carnivalesque wheezing organ and then spaced out super synths, pretty cool. It's back to the dark matters at hand. Sounds like some sort of human squeal electronically affected, and a laconic pace, some guitar, it's all very random sounding but its cacophony is an apt metaphor for European politics. Communists in Germany, Magyarisers in Hungary, steroid junkies in the Kremlin. It's all very silly. This is mainly instrumental with some dread pale conversation going on underneath, it's lovely. Lovely is the wrong word. Lovely was Rudi Arapahoe, this is pretty but in the sense that Joy Division was pretty, that the serene atmosphere they plied their trade in was pure and uncontaminated, artful and melancholic. This isn't on that level, obviously, but it exists in its own vacuum of indifference to popular sentiment and tee shirt sales. They weren't on the Glastonbury Highlights show I watched part of this aftrnoon, in High Definition, but the Ting Tings were and Bloc Party. Bloc Party are four of the dullest boys on earth. They might make a song like this but somehow I'd have been bored by it straight off. Next track, more electronics, more woozy ambience, more of kilter emotions, her coos leavening the mix, a dream sighting of souls and anit-souls mixing in the aether. It's probably very well engineered. It could be a monument to the Solvay conferences of yore. This is the ethereal moment, the track that vaguely underlines the extant manifesto of their forebears. It isn't anything at all like Kraftwerk or Neu or Can, well a bit like Neu and the Velvet Underground. All your favorite Germans. Too Pure was obsessed with Can, they would do wise to remember that at one point nearly every band on the label was in some possibly minor way indebted to Can. I hate Can but it is very much like the relationship I have with the Velvet Underground in that I love most of the bands that cite Can as a direct influence and I can appreciate Jaki Liebezeit most of all. Next track, more primal urgings, sexual incantations, wordless exhultations. Semi-Wordless. The music is rote and uninteresting, Amerikkkan, but it fits perfectly into the model of social aggro blood from a stone rock, now there is a climax, a panting screech. Delirious. Beth Ditto should listen and learn. Now the guy sings, he's coming off a bit like the fellow from Roxette. It's meant to be sinister and sleek and it isn't, it's a bit camp and friendly. I would have advised him against it. He's just followed a Skeptics-ish bit of meandering, unfocused impotent rage with some sort of man on the make posturing. Bah. He should stick to wearing PVC jackets and zip up leather boots and The Shins tee shirts and leave the singing to her. What's her name? I don't know anything at all about Palms. I am somewhat certain that they are a duo. Leather Daddies is over. Now another guitar ballad. Back to her singing. Agnieszka, it is very Velvet Underground and Nico. It is unremarkable except in its grasping for climax, you can sense in her voice a yearning for climax. I quite like this even as it is smothered by subdued hues and subtlety. Lyrics are silly. Are the lyrics written in German and then translated to English. He's singing again, I don't mind when I can't hear him, it adds a shadow to the tenderness, the sinister malevolence of male hormones and militarism. This is really really really Velvet Underground. It's very New York. Is the Amerikkkan from New York. I have been reading about Palms while writing this and yes, he is from New York, the music travels along the undersea cables between the USA and Britain and then is transported to Berlin by carrier pigeon where there is a cipher code that needs to be employed to reconfigure all of the notes on the page. It is top secret. Next track, air raid sirens, stukkas, drum machines in kitchen armoires. It isn't scary at all, it's relaxed, if you know it is coming just lie back and enjoy it right. As Bob Knight might say. Do it for your country. I like this. I like the mix of the possibly frightening(the ones in German) and the softer focus bits. Goethe versus Dreiser. He's shadowing her vocals again, down a telephone line, in a PVC jacket. It does remind me of the Skeptics. Was Nick Roughan involved? Maybe these two are the world's most devoted Nick Roughan fans in the world ever. It has that stale Auckland metally sound. This record will not be giving birth to anyone soon, but the German is key, David D'ath had that nasally Kiwi accent which made him sound like a muppet in comparison to the icy cool teutonic tones here. Nice. Last song. Piano, fairy tales told backwards, bones outside the body, music to make charcoal to. Black.

Downloading the B**tles, there is shedloads of filler on these records. I've only ever owned Revolver and so I was unaware. They died in 1966, impostors took over.

Update: Can anyone really love the Beatles? I am listening and there are all sorts of pleasant memories attached to the songs but their ubiquity renders the songs themselves meaningless doesn't it? Or are all songs meaningful only in the sentimental attachments that each person affixes to them? I don't know. Got to Get You Into My Life makes me think of the 'tilt-a-whirl' at Boblo Island.

Puh, new God Help the Girl ep is mostly a drag. He's seemingly now a creepy old dude.

Rudi Arapahoe Echoes From One to Another This is the most beautiful thing. There are soft plucks and hints and smudges and perfectly aligned moments of melancholy all coalescing into some alluring feature of bliss. Take a spoonful and live to be 100 years old in a day, live your life in a song, here the majesty of tiny earnestness, a tender whisper, a gentle reminder to watch, see the wave before it consumes you. That's the first song, only a few moments stretched. A brief instrumental passage that opens the door to greater passageways hidden beneath the floorboards. Beneath the paving stones, the beach, as Ian Brown might say, I wonder why he didn't mention the gendarmes and their blue capes with lead sewn into the hem to keep the wind from roiling their flouncy capes about and to beat the protestors and their lemon fresh faces. Of course, Ian Brown would not have mistakenly referred to the French police as gendarmes. But I am not sophisticated. In the wake of rudi Arapahoe I fall apart. I don't actually, this is but hyperbole, but imagine if I truly meant every word I am about to type. I might. I have heart, soul, I just keep them hidden tucked in a box hidden within a paper box hidden within a box. Wordless bits accompanying tingled pianos and symphonies dreamed of by the wind or poured forth from bellows or a hand crank, you come across an orchestra in the forest and turn the crank and something close to this appears in front of you with minstrels and gymnasts and shooting stars all for effect. It's gorgeous. The poem bit was a bit Even As We Speak, oddly enough. "Just occasionally a whale song" indeed. Third song, To Gather Flowers, nature song=field recordings of a rain storm, bubbling underneath is something more sinster and lovely. A heart beating outside of a box tied by expectations, beating loud enough for anyone to pass by and be entranced by the sonorous rhythm. When your heart is tied and bound and held in wait it lies unaccompanied, alone, forlorn. The music is not morose or melancholic, it's beautiful. Normally I associate sadness with beauty, it is my natural inclination or mode of recourse but this is beautiful only for beauty's own sake, the goal is loveliness, a place where emotion is indefinable except in vague terms of sensory perception that can't be exposited. A theremin breeze, a harp's trail of softness, it is all mesmerising. I've had this album for some time. I never thought to write about it because it requires the right frame of mind, a state of being where you can listen to the music and simply allow for a jettisoning from the disappointment's in all of the hollowness of life. But then a moment, a sitting down, a kind word taken for what is actually said and appreciated for what is actually meant. And then the haunting aura underlying all of this loveliness. Rudi Arapahoe is a monster. The dream is insidious, you hear this record and the dream is that it can be this lovely, that two hearts can compete for hope. But it isn't real. One heart in a box, one heart served already to another ready to be eaten. Better to sign up for the pro-med mailing list and feel the whispering ache of sadness that reverberates across an ocean when a young man is struck down with Hendra Virus. A young man who may have awoken that morning and imagined all of the possibilities of what life had to offer and bounded forth into the day and then the ugliness in shadows slipped from behind the curtains, took hold of the day and turned it to blackness. But, breathe easier, the Ebola outbreak in Uganda is not real. A herd of sheep in the Levant with scrapie and a man allegedly testing positive for both Avian Influenza and Swine Flu with a possible scenario fitting some ridiculously written, best selling right wing spy novel about a sleeper cell making the Haj where biological warfare is being enlisted in his immune system, a breeding ground for sentient jihadist bacteria to be unleashed in an unholy land. The responses on the Pro-Med list are excellent as well, I rather love when smart people slap down less smart people. "Don't be silly that's Buffalo Pox and not Foot and Mouth you fool!". It is all very civilized which is calmingly serene when we're essentially reading casual correspondences about the four horsemen of the apocalypse in a test tube. Dionysian Birds has ben playing in my ruminations on tragic deaths and the fascinating microcosmos. When extinction comes to the human race I hope to be listening to Rudi Arapahoe. At least this is my choice for today, a perfect Sunday Morning. Soon my Sunday mornings will be spent somewhere else, a higher plain, ha, in Westminster the elevation from sea level is actually slightly lower than here, imagine the triumph of the lungs. Dionysian Birds is a respite track, field recordings and sparse accompaniment. Next a briefer interlude, a retiring from a respite, an insistent whistle and a poem. It's silly poetry but it works. "Every time I sleep my internal organs fall into decay, little by little..." then marvelous pluckings roust the soul. Next we move into first His Name is Alive record territory? It could be considered a modernist update of Livonia, honestly. The voices are more arch and the music is even more fissiparous. These might be the descendants of pencil guitars playing on these tracks. It's devastatingly gorgeous, it is wordless and the singing violin expresses the human emotional lexicon in much greater detail than the voice. I've been doing some reading on this album and in some corners it did reign supreme as the greatest album of 2008. Not in many. This is a travesty. I am one who slept on it, I apologize Rudi. Rudi is some person who probably isn't named Rudi but he's more the architect of this album than anything else by more superficial skimming, he did the field recordings and made the tea. He did a wonderful job. He's in line for a position with the EU I am sure. The EU has begun to ban incandescent lighting. Epileptics beware! The story in the New York Times without irony held up the idea that Cuba is in the vanguard of this earth shattering idea as a beacon of ope to the rest of the world. Cuba! Ha. Germans are hoarding light bulbs. Oddly enough the legislation that has passed banning incandescent lighting in the US by 2013 has had a huge effect on my current occupation. I am the Lamberton Lamplighter, yes yes "I really haven't got much time for girls...". That is me! Not really. I am the prince of Christmas. Will Germans establish a black market in incandescent fairy lights to counter my good faith adherence to the dictates of our rulers on the Potomac? Possibly. Next track, aching piano, a vague ambience stirred up in the distance. It's similar to the first tow His Name is Alive records and its density approaches that of the Mark Hollis solo record. There is more space than music and it feels like an invitation to the warmth of human reflection. It is just the most beautiful thing. I've said this. I love this album. In Cuba ill they be allowed to play the new Manic Street Preachers record? Or have they soured ont he revolution since Raul has taken over for his deceased brother? Fidel is dead. Know this. He's been replaced by a double recruited off of the streets of Tegucigalpa by the SDE. The piano is having a conversation with the room. A short poem and now so His Name is Alive. It's is titled Conversation Piece and I allege that she is singing in English but it is indecipherable except that it could have been an out-take from Home is in Your HEad, it's gorgeous and plaintive and resonant and dramatic. A softly spun melody on an acoustic guitar and heartbeat percussion with the occasional tinkling of a piano. Beautiful. Beautiful is the key descriptor. I have purchased a home. I may buy a stereo and play this album at skull crushing volumes and send a gentle tsunami over the neighbourhood and announce to all of my neighbours that I have brought them the enlightenment in the form of Rudi Arapahoe. I will conquer hearts without a single blow except for the overwhelming sadness of love. Vulture Phantasy, field recordings, the ominous clouds, the tempered shadows and a silly poem. I could live without the poems. it really is the sequel to Even As We Speak's adventures in literary adventure but it always seemed theirs was a journey with tongue in cheek. I imaging the Arapahoe manifesto is dreadfully more earnest and sincere. Dreadful is not the word. The music rises above such human foibles. Pleroma now, space and lightness of touch, repeating figures on a guitar. Are these merely tricks of the light? These pieces that reverberate with melancholy and seeming profundity, is it merely my unfamiliarity with the cliches of human manipulation? I don't know. The voice has arrived, wordless once more, pitched steeply, a cappella, the power of this lies in the hollowness it evokes. Born in a vacuum all sensory implications are provided by the listener and it is a thrilling experience. Truly. I am perhaps overpraising this record. Perhaps you should proceed with caution. Now to another mournful lament keyed on a piano. an ode to the current dilemma in the global milk market perhaps? have you noticed that Milk is practically free these days? Has Jim Jeffords, hero of the New England Dairy Compact, released the stranglehold on the free market? I don't know but a gallon of milk is now less expensive than a half gallon of milk and less than half of where it traded a year ago. This record could be a diary of a struggling polish dairy farmer who must contemplate euthanising his entire herd because he can't make a profit selling their wares on the open market and the CAP has failed him and he writes this gorgeous tune My Shadow while contemplating death from removal of subsidy. Government largess is an insidious thing. I am mainly a libertarian but the idea of my uncle Barack granting me an $8000 tax credit for purchasing a home has me all a titter. I would never vote for the man because he is an absolute incompetent but I've had my experience at a home depot change markedly because of the possibilities of free government money. Of course it isn't free. My taxes will be raised and so will yours and you will live less well as a result but your rulers will have you convinced otherwise. You'll need this astonishing record even more, to provide sympathy to your inevitable decline into egalitarian.