A Bulging Package.

I love getting stuff in the post.

It really doesn’t happen that often, so when it does it feels special.

This morning, I received a big jiffy bag care of AU Magazine.

It included:

The new issue of AU.

The new Duke Special Album, Songs From The Deep Forest.

The new Frames album, The Cost.

The new Lambchop album, Damaged.

I’m interviewing Lambchop tomorrow, so I listened to their record tonight, and have to say that I enjoyed it very much indeed. It is off-kilter and warm and cosy and reminiscent of a lot of things. You can hear elements of Tindersticks, Alt-country, and The Beatles circa Abbey Road in it.

I will be reviewing all of these in due course, but in the meantime here are some reviews from the new issue. Some were good, some were bad, and some were ugly.

I would really recommend the Sparklehorse and I’m From Barcelona albums. The other two are pretty cack.

Sparklehorse – Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain

Sparklehorse tend to hibernate for several years before releasing each album, a pattern that befits the sleepy, homegrown quality of their songs. Each record sounds as it has been sown and harvested rather than recorded in a studio. A new long-player has just been dug out of the dirt, and it confirms that, despite the five-year gap since their last emergence, Mark Linkous still has an ear for a memorable tune. As with previous albums, the songs herein lurch from sleepwalking laments to white noise wigouts. First single ‘Don’t Take My Sunshine Away’ is a fuzzed-up ‘Dear Prudence’, a creaky tea chest of static crackle, Morse code bleeps and layered harmonies. ‘Shade And Honey’, meanwhile, is as golden as the title suggests, and the instrumental title track is a haunting guitar slide back into the dark night. This is a troubled bad dream of a record, the product of one too many dog days, but its heart radiates much warmth.


I’m From Barcelona – Let Me Introduce My Friends

Sweden’s latest export I’m From Barcelona may have 29 members (Gotta catch ‘em all!), but that just means that there’s more love to go around. Like The Cardigans and The Concretes before them, the collective makes instantly appealing sunny day pop songs where the emphasis is always on melody, and the humability factor of this album goes all the way up to eleven. As soon as opener ‘Oversleeping’ starts playing, don’t feel embarrassed if you feel all gooey inside. Pretty soon, your ears will be further tickled by kazoos, banjos and xylophones, and, in ‘We’re From Barcelona’, the catchiest song you will hear all summer. Taking in elements of The Spinto Band and The Flaming Lips but retaining its own Nordic charm, this is poptastic fried gold.

James Yorkston – The Year Of The Leopard

If quiet is indeed the new loud, then James Yorkston should do very well. For the first few tracks, his sparse, mostly acoustic songs offer the ideal backing track for dimly-lit, late night meanderings - or if you just happen to be sailing up the French Riviera. It all comes a bit unstuck at the midpoint, however. ‘Woozy With Cider’ is a spoken word piece, in which, over a pleasant enough ambient interlude, Yorkston mumbles twaddling non sequiturs about the joys of country life and umm... dead monkeys. Things improve significantly thereafter, but Yorkston’s insistence on musical minimalism and talk-singing each line in a hushed whisper ensure that this album is not guaranteed to rock your socks off – or your slippers.

Seth Lakeman – Freedom Fields

How many folk singers does it take to change a light bulb? Four: one to change it, and the remaining three to write a ballad about how they miss the other. It’s an old joke, but it raises a question about the current fascination with music dubiously entitled “New Folk”. What, pray tell, was so bad about “Old Folk”? Seth Lakeman’s take on this genre suffers from the same problem that makes Jamie Cullum doing a bit of Jazz so annoying. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with his pretty, often complex arrangements, but the affected way in which he enunciates every lyric about mermaids and mystical kingdoms begins to wear thin pretty quickly. Not so much New Folk as Folk Lite.