Lanterns on the Lake Until the Colours Run. Second albums are key. The first Lanterns on the Lake was gorgeous sure but is the next version the same as the first with a few more monstrous licks they learned from playing the same 11 songs over and over, night in and night out in Nijmegen and the next in Heidelberg? Everyone has a "good" idea. The first Lanterns on the Lake album was an antique, or it was antiqued, it felt out of place, discovered, underexposed. They had ideals. Second record begins now with muscles rippling, tee shirts tight to the chest, band logos written in pen on spiral notebooks. Or on a nook. Does an antique have inherent value while new and modern lags? No. I have taken some time to warm to this album. I have needed sunday mornings curled in an uncomfortable chair with a special afghan and nutella and toes dipping into the cool morning air to learn to appreciate muscles. In music, muscles usually have negative connotation. In this city, this is true. We prefer the dainty, the delicate, snow filled globes and nostalgia rather than SUV's filled with the others. First track is a fitter Devics, it is very loud, except for her, the singer, music is still tender in her heart. Second track, a bit more nuanced, a bit more artistic, a bit more lovely. Now the chair where I came to my new conclusion has been moved to the basement and on the table next to it sits the Morrissey biography. My wife asked my mother to purchase it for me. I was delighted. It wasn't a set of golf clubs. I devoured. I read closely in haste. I was not inured. And today, I am heart broken. Devastated. Morrissey is small and petty, bitter, he is not worldly, not at all, in spite of the world having him in its embrace. It starts off vague and uninformative, he barely attempts to make pretty his mundane existence through a less than revealing concatenation of dour British television plots more poetic, he paints lovely portraits in inartistic prose of his favorite relatives and the image of his father the brawler is fascinating and when he speaks of his love for music I fall in love the same as he had, all over again. But his account of how the Smiths formed is almost vacuous. I was in a band, then I was not, oh and then I met Johnny Marr. Essentially. The Smiths were a love story but in his mitts its a discarded footnote. And the ponderous dissection of the Joyce affair, ugh. Is it about money? Was it only about how little Geoff Travis cared about the Smiths having a number one record? But Morrissey as Morrissey made the mundane poetic the way that Belle and Sebastian can not. Stuart Murdoch needs the fanciful and unreal. Perhaps because he did not have a Johnny Marr to fulfill his need for inspiration outside of the realm of imagination. Did Lanterns on the lake make this record hoping to make a mint? Perhaps not. I shall not taint them by association. But they trade in anonymity, assiduously cultivating it in their characterless montages. We, I, long for the intimate associations with our pop stars I think. We do. We want Paddy Mcaloon and, sadly, Morrissey. Or we want Stars, we long for their cleverness as homage in itself to Prefab Sprout and stories written by Torguil about Paddy. Love letters across an ocean. This, LOTL, is an open ended missive to the ocean of sound that is filled in with broad strokes. The delicate touches here are wonderful, but they are enveloped and smeared. These sexual coos, turned virginal do thrill, until the ocean swallows them, the sea swells rise and it is an impressive production but the moment of inspiration, the distillation of loneliness that propels their vision is lost and instead of the universal ache we achieve sympathy with their collective idleness, But it is individuals that make pop music most thrilling. A Bob Wratten line repeated ad infinitum turns catholic and we sing it in our inner voice and it is more beautiful than it has ever existed in the real world. This is the real world, with sparklers and twirling skirts and beautifl children with biblical names. I love it, don't mind my rambling. But when Morrissey existed in his pop songs only he was miraculous, he turned his mundane world into a shimmering escapade across the heads and crooked backs of those we knew didn't understand. We ate our burgers and wore our leather shoes, he would guess that this meant we did not get it, but he's wrong. Morrissey is dreadful. The Smiths as the Smiths exist only now. We can not isolate strains of genius from the whole, not any longer. Lanterns on the Lake exist only as a whole, the collective. They, allegedly, nearly split before making this album. It does not channel ferocity or anger, it's a gentleman's maelstrom on these first three tracks, and then the effects of the ubiquitous aether seeping into the grooves and pops and crackles are mostly implied but fervently. Would this music work with a personality? If the words were filled with meaning and desperate specifics and written with an agenda would it move the masses. I shared the Smiths agenda, I know I did, and I know that you did as well. I am uncertain about the agenda of Lanterns on the Lake. Green and Gold now. Pianos, Pianos. Her-whispering. I don't know any of the names. The names seem unimportant. This is gorgeous, it is the background soundtrack that plays when all of the best moments of your life occur to someone else. You live vicariously through the best moments of life because you can't remove yourself from the hope and comfort of conformity. This track is stunning, truly and this album is amazing and I love it but there is a higher ideal. I get it from the 1 minute trailer for the new Pains of Being Pure at Heart record, possibly only because I have angst and envy over his duffle coat and I am easily manipulated by the overexposed film of Kip Berman looking like a Dead Poets Society extra but it makes hairs flutter. His favorite romantic is surely Keats because even through Pains of Being Pure at Heart are affluent and have the disease of affluenza that has dampened the spirit of indiepop until it has reached near to its current state near demise and the idea of him writing a record where he really means it seems almost inspiring they still identify only with the purity of the struggle they are unfamiliar with. A small victory will win out and cheer us and yet...Green and Gold has finished and the soul is stimulated only esoterically, they haven't imprinted the feeling on my life's work. That sounds overly dramatic. My soul has impressions only of real life these days, reflections of unimaginable happiness and joy that lie less than a month away, of having a partner that fulfills all of my heart's desires and for whom I perform constantly so that she knows I am here. I am not inside of my own head. I am. But I am here in the world as well and willing and loud and unlike this song I am not the filler of her life. The drummer seems more important on this record than on the first record. Drummers having mothers, blah blah blah, it has all been said before. And the guitars are blurred into an unappealing tone of beige. Purity is normally white. The tumult that birthed this record has left a watermark. The sound comes first. Next track. Picture Show and there is the piano, the undistilled cacophony and her, whispering, they move her voice to a level just barely beyond discernible. Even when with sole piano accompaniment it's a bit too loud, the quiet made compensable by the masses. When they play the Broomfield Events center here this track will move the masses. Te entire state of Colorado will rise up and declare thir libertarian impulses freely and we will, with pitchforks, charge the hill and we will not be ashamed of gay marriage and weed for every one. And Lanterns on the Lake will sit on stage staring at their shoes. The heirs to Halstead have been exposed. Slowdive shall return. Piano and vinyl crackles. I mistook it for antiues and value once before now I understand it is manipulation of the loveliest sort. An experiment in the familiar until this track, ah, this track! Another Tale from Another English Town. Lying in bed one Sunday morning, while ti was much too cold to venture forth to my uncomfortable green recliner, I played this for my wife and it was astounding. The frisson between the notes and the air of a Colorado morning was remarkable, and we had hope, real hope. It remains. It isn't distinguishable from the rest of the record. But perhaps I long for their Englishness to be more prominent? We have given our son and anglophilic appendage, eh will love England as much as I love the England that existed in the Vistors Gold Mining in the Would Be Goods Marvellous Boy, here and of course in That Joke... and all of the other most important songs in the world ever that have existed forever in my heart where time is not fungible. The drama here is different, I was wrong, her voice commands instead of retreating and the force when combined is dazzling and the final few strums close the book on a beautiful chapter. The climax before a milder denoument. LAst track now, guitars and drums(how novel) and more of the beige we would have ben overjoyed with its exclusion. Her voice is pressed between pages but the pages are glossy and too thin and so it is all bleeding together and I can't quite make out the words and so my heart...the spectator...sigh. And the drums go on.