More than anything, Elbow's new album, Build A Rocket Boys!, keeps on impressing me. I've never been big into Elbow, but this album is just so well built. It starts off with the long, patient and mercilessly building tracks 'The Birds' and 'Lippy Kids', revs up with lead single 'Neat Little Rows', then kicks back again with the beautiful 'Jesus Is A Rochdale Girl'. Then there's the crooked 'High Ideals', and finally, the album finishes off on a high and cheerful note with 'Open Arms' and 'Dear Friends'. A very pleasurable album indeed!
Then there's Roskilde-bound (what's going on with the line-up this year by the way? Bloody sucks...) The Tallest Man On Earth's debut album, Shallow Grave, from 2008. Now, I had expected The Tallest Man to be somewhat of a "more of the same"-artist, in the essence that his albums were sort of interchangeable and pretty similar, sort of in the mold of Kings of Convenience. Of course, there are similarities, obvious as they are with such sparse instrumentation and such a characteristic voice, but there's definitely a difference in mood between Shallow Grave and his later album, The Wild Hunt from 2010. Shallow Grave seems much more melancholic and sad. There seems to be more minor and diminished chords, whereas The Wild Hunt has got at more prospective feel to it. My faves off Shallow Grave right now are 'The Gardener' and the obvious 'Where Do My Bluebird Fly' (sic).
So, from working-class indie-rock from Manchester and indie-folk with the wide expanses of Sweden as a key obstetric, we end up at an artist that's arguably among the spearheads of the omnipresent lo-fi movement, Wild Nothing's Jack Tatum, and his highly acclaimed album from last year, Gemini. Now, I'm not exactly diving deep into the plethora of lo-fi outfits that are just smart kids with stripped down recording techniques. Honestly, many of these bands nauseate me, I guess it's my synthesizer heritage and Continental love for production. But Wild Nothing straddles the border perfectly, to my liking anyhow - I guess it might be because this is in fact one guy in a studio, not just a bunch of blokes with guitars and lots of weed. Gemini in its entirety is just an incredibly uplifting record, which fuses lo-fi, psychedelic and more straightforward dream pop into a hazy sound of spring, of flowers in blossom, of skaters taking to the streets and of the first beer in the sun. Highlights include opener 'Live In Dreams', 'O, Lilac', 'Confirmation' and 'Our Composition Book'.
