Hardest working band in the world contenders
Loney, dear seem never to have been off the road for the past 18 months. This, of course, is a Good Thing, giving this blog and all right-thinking types plenty of opportunity to share the Scandinavian joy. Not quite such a good thing is that their current slew of UK dates are all support slots to sundry lesser acts - Athlete, Andrew Bird, Maps - who will all be politely-but-firmly humiliated by the life-enhancing greatness of Emil & co.
reallyrather opted for the cheapest and cosiest of the London options, Kings College with Maps last night. One major compensation for LD not headlining is to witness the now ritual conversion of someone else's crowd, hitherto mostly oblivious to the wonderous bonus they have chanced upon. And so it was again. A compressed set tossing in the odd unreleased cracker like
Don't use harsh words, by the time of their closer, the transcendental pop delerium of
Ignorant boy, beautiful girl, they'd won the room. Happens every time. That last tune is the stand-out reason to seek out
Citadel band, Emil's cd-r from 2004; it's a must for completists and includes a clutch of other lovely if less memorable songs. Utterly essential, however, is the debut self-release from a year before.
Will
The year of River Fontana be the next Loney, dear recording to get a formal release? It would easily stand up against the Sub Pop-optioned
Sologne and
Loney, noir. If you've got either or both of those and are thinking you've got about as much of this romantic folk-pop goodness as you're ever going to need, you've just set a new personal best in wrongness. The Loney,dear
MySpace hints at a pending release (
Dear John ?) which might include at least
Hold me from
River Fontana. This belter begins as an elementally satisfying soft chug, a single note keyboard line tugging at the emotions before the kneebuckling swell of high vocals and tambourine. And there's about another six where that came from.
Your time is to come taxis about and rattles off the runway in similarly glorious style. There's always a lot of hope-fuelled soaring going on with this band tho' darker clouds sometimes hover as with opener
Here comes the lonely ones.
Lower your head is a driving, clamourous hosanna to the gods of soft pop and the record closes out with
This ship is going under's beautiful glide into the sunset on pulsing keys.
Helpfully, this blog has no idea how you can acquire these two cd-rs outside of buying them from Mr Svanängen himself after a gig. Happily, as mentioned, he does provide lots of opportunities to do this. But if Loney, dear aren't coming your way soon, here's an NPR-recorded
show from earlier this year...
Some things change, some things stay the same. In a shock development,
Pitchfork hands out its now fairly ritualized
kicking to the latest
matt pond PA release. Judging by past instances this is unlikely to be wholly deserved but
rr can't yet judge since strike action in the UK postal service is enforcing deprivation. But for true believers
Allmusic makes rather better reading:
'It's a leap forward for an artist who rarely, if ever, heads in the wrong direction.' [
go]
