The Mummers are lovely. Are they for your mum and dad?

Update: Mink Hollow Road. Does this sound more impressive than it is? It's girlish and seemingly sophisticated, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Thom Yorke, etc...her voice is charmingly coy. It's Leslie Caron before she met Warren Beatty. It's Clara Immerwahr before Fritz started waering the Kaiser's uniform and working on his diabolical Chlorine while keeping the revolver in plain sight. It's rated G. It's romantic. It's the Divine Comedy circa A Short Album About Love Loads of orchestral flourishes, a small voice, big sentiments and weepy climaxes. Second track. I was eating some chicken. Her voice has a tinge of "Hi, I'm Bjork from the Sugarcubes", only a slight, not really, but in the climaxes perhaps she bites the same bits from Diamanda Galas. Records like these require directors and arrangers and people to drive the extended van shuttle ot record. That must be expensive. Was this expensive? It doesn't sound overly so. It isn't ambitious, there are just loads of people playing loads of instruments by the dexterity required seems workmanlike. I've spent the weekend elbow deep into the earth, toiling in the hypoxic and lifeless soils of the Colorado plateau. But then even though I live in Colorado I don't live on the Colorado Plateau. This track has a bit of Blur The Universal with a vocoder robot on vocals. I like it. It's got the feeling of a song that opens a serious television show about miserable people in their 30s and their parents who used to watch miserable shows about miserable people in their 30s in the 80s. Mel Harris guests. This is a bit sunny. it is sunny outside. it is always sunny. Even the industrial waste lands of the motor city are verdant compared to Colorado these days, smoke filled vistas, desiccated plants, peoples and buildings. An unslakable thirst has swept across the landscape and it feels as if the earth that i had my elbows into is shrinking, becoming eternally frozen in a dreary stasis. Third track, Driving Home, there are but six tracks in total. Rimbaud could describe and compare the industrial wastelands of the middle west and the sterile earth of the Rocky Mountains. Made for mountains not for verdancy. I planted a lovely clump style Prairie Fire Crabapple into the planet yesterday and it was more with hope and faith than with science. The tillage is beige, it's clay, it doesn't breath or lend itself easily to romanticization. If Zola were alive and forced to make a flowery descriptive introduction to live in Westminster, Colorado where the workers toil in inexactly planned technological parks and alongside windswept roadsides he'd consider giving up the gift. There are paintable landscapes on the eastern plains, A long riparian Cottonwood making a fierce stand against the will of nature, the tumbleweed's journey across unnatural boundaries, an emaciated coyote with your neighbour's kitten between its jaws. Fourth song, Cherry Heart. If people still knew how to make movies this could be the soundtrack of a sophisticated style musical set n the glamourous 1970s, perhaps in Gainesville, Florida, along the beach, a single story welling, a young girl at her piano writing songs for a Broadway hit musical and by the time her dream comes true the characters are dressed as lemurs and in spacesuits and on board unicycles in an irradiated Hiroshima. The music is tender and sweet but it hides a darker interior. It does have a touch of the same flowery hope as It's Oh So Quiet! but then that's not Bjork really, is it. If people still remembered how to make movies they'd make more movies like An Angel at my Table. It is so brilliantly uncomfortable to watch. when I was mired in my New Zealand obsession I was drawn to all things NEw Zealand including Janet Frame, well Janet Frame came after the movie and after Sweetie and to Weetabix and eventually to New Zealand itself. All because of a cassette of Kaleidoscope World but the only reason movies are uncomfortable to watch these days is because they are dreadful and uninspired and awful. Really. More of the vocoder succeeded by the most heartfelt seeming vocal immediately after. I do really enjoy this album. It is Sunday, late afternoon, as a child I would be just returning home from Church and the world seemed infinite and hopeful and now it is merely sunny and dormant. There needs to be an awakening, the sun must stop rising in the east, the canopy of stars needs ot be extinguished, something must come about to shake the state of torpor that has anesthetized humanity. Should we send an army to Libya, unite the Greeks and Phoenicians finally? rebuild the ports at Carthage? Tear down the Pyramids and install the terra cotta army in Westminster. yes, yes, yes, let's do all of this and more. Later. After I've planted my new boxwood hedge, after I've eliminated the bindweed that has usurped the bluegrass in the battle for turf prominence and after I've finished listening to the Mummers because they make everything seem lovely and charming and a bit inconsequential.