Biding time till the cassingle revival
Music blogging the first:
The Lucksmiths: Warmer Corners/Where Were We?
The Lucksmiths' 2003 album, Naturaliste, was a good album that suffered from a piece of unintentional comedy: practically every song contained a lyric about weather, specifically temperature. There was:
It's grey and wet and warm before the pending storm (The Sandringham Line)
Rest assured if you should ever feel the winter cold (Take This Lying Down)
But I refuse to waste this weather (Midweek Midmorning)
The afternoon has left the valley cold (The Perfect Crime)
And that's just a sampling from the first five songs of the album. So when I saw that their most recent album was called Warmer Corners, I wasn't particularly eager to go out and get it, having heard a lifetime's worth of weather imagery on Naturaliste.
Fortunately, the title of the album is the only major temperature image. "The Fog of Trujillo" is not actually about fog. "Sunlight in a Jar" is not about sunlight. The latter song is the strongest on the album, combining clever, dense lyrics in the verses with a simple catchy chorus. Generally the lyrics have the typical Lucksmiths cleverness without being as self-consciously clever as song titles like "If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home Now" and "A Hiccup in Your Happiness" would suggest. All in all, it's one of their best efforts and one of the best indie pop albums of 2005.
Where Were We? is a 2001 compilation of outtakes and other non-album things. While the other Lucksmiths compilation, Happy Secret, has the feel of a fully planned and sequenced album, Where Were We? is most definitely a non-album collection. Some songs dwell on the turn of the millennium ("The Cassingle Revival", "I Prefer the Twentieth Century"), others recall the joy and silliness of the band's early albums ("T-Shirt Weather", "Even Stevens") , but there is no unifying theme for the disc as a whole. A lot of good songs, but they don't stick in the mind particularly well.
So that's the first album. Next up is Royksopp.
The Lucksmiths: Warmer Corners/Where Were We?
The Lucksmiths' 2003 album, Naturaliste, was a good album that suffered from a piece of unintentional comedy: practically every song contained a lyric about weather, specifically temperature. There was:
It's grey and wet and warm before the pending storm (The Sandringham Line)
Rest assured if you should ever feel the winter cold (Take This Lying Down)
But I refuse to waste this weather (Midweek Midmorning)
The afternoon has left the valley cold (The Perfect Crime)
And that's just a sampling from the first five songs of the album. So when I saw that their most recent album was called Warmer Corners, I wasn't particularly eager to go out and get it, having heard a lifetime's worth of weather imagery on Naturaliste.
Fortunately, the title of the album is the only major temperature image. "The Fog of Trujillo" is not actually about fog. "Sunlight in a Jar" is not about sunlight. The latter song is the strongest on the album, combining clever, dense lyrics in the verses with a simple catchy chorus. Generally the lyrics have the typical Lucksmiths cleverness without being as self-consciously clever as song titles like "If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home Now" and "A Hiccup in Your Happiness" would suggest. All in all, it's one of their best efforts and one of the best indie pop albums of 2005.
Where Were We? is a 2001 compilation of outtakes and other non-album things. While the other Lucksmiths compilation, Happy Secret, has the feel of a fully planned and sequenced album, Where Were We? is most definitely a non-album collection. Some songs dwell on the turn of the millennium ("The Cassingle Revival", "I Prefer the Twentieth Century"), others recall the joy and silliness of the band's early albums ("T-Shirt Weather", "Even Stevens") , but there is no unifying theme for the disc as a whole. A lot of good songs, but they don't stick in the mind particularly well.
So that's the first album. Next up is Royksopp.
posted 9:24 PM
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