O · Song!

For all the good songwriting, clever lyrics, interesting sounds, etc - sometimes songs and albums become your favourites not necessarily because of the goodness of the music, but because they get at who you are right now, because they pull some heartstring of mine. I want to point out that "Every Night" by Lazy Susan and "56k Hearts" by Jane Vs World are more or less the things that get at who I am. This shouldn't surprise anybody, as I played keyboards (and cowbell) at Lazy Susan's album launch, and contributed handclaps to "56k Hearts". I heard early versions and demos of both "Every Night" and "56k Hearts", I know the history of their gestations, what with ill producers and bedbug infested houses and whatnot. I know what Jadey's songs are about. I know there are songs on "Every Night" that Paul originally wrote for a commercial pop singer, who changed her mind and decided not to use the songs. Both are utterly fantastic. Lazy Susan's album is the best they've ever done, with great song after great song - it was a pleasure to play keyboards at the launch. "56k Hearts" is perfect pop, some of the best work that anybody connected with Jane Vs World has done what with all those catchy songs, clever harmonies, good piano solos, etc. I also feel, for some reason, that I shouldn't include "Every Night" and "56k Hearts" in my list - assume they're #1 and #2 in my heart.

I wrote this list of my top 10 sitting at home about a month ago. There's a variety of reasons why I haven't posted it until now, which aren't very interesting. If I were to make the list today, other albums could well have replaced the ones here. In particular, "Costello Music" by the Fratellis, "The Land Of Pure Imagination" by Roger Manning Jr., "Twelve Stops And Home" by the Feeling, "Casino Twilight Dogs" by Youth Group.

List follows, with mp3s, with a post for each album.

Bluebottle Kiss. Doubt Seeds
Nonzero Records.

"Nova Scotia"
(3:13, 5.56mb)
Disc 1, Track 2.

"Slight Return"
(3:13, 5.56mb)
Disc 1, Track 8.

The thing about Bluebottle Kiss that strikes me is how they seem so unhinged, yet so utterly in control. They're a shambling bear, immensely powerful, but deceptively agile. Musically, they have one foot in the camp of "let's make weird noises with our guitars" rock - see late 80s Sonic Youth - and one foot in the songwriting aesthetic of a Nick Cave or Augie March - probing the dark side of the Australian psyche. If they resemble any other band on Doubt Seeds, it's The Drones, another Australian band that have a similar aesthetic, though Gareth Liddiard of the Drones' voice is less controlled than Jamie Hutchings', and Bluebottle Kiss are more versatile than the Drones.

Bluebottle Kiss are equally capable of both sweet, melodic, piano-based tunes like "Scrub The Mist", the Tom Waits aping on "The Weight Of The Sea", full-bore rockers like "Nova Scotia" and jangly pop like "White Rider". What's more, they're capable of doing a very varied double album full of different genre exercises, yet they still sound mostly like Bluebottle Kiss. Jamie Hutchings has reservations about the current state of rock and roll, but it's in fine hands with him as far as I'm concerned.

"Nova Scotia" illustrates the power of Doubt Seeds as well as anything else; Hutchings begins the song with an arrestingly hoarse cry of "well!" before it collapses into a groove, rubbery bass, ominous warlike drums and grinding guitars colliding with spaghetti western Morricone guitars and Hutchings' well-constructed melodic phrasing.

"Slight Return", in contrast, starts off as a comparatively straightforward piece of modern indie rock; a ringing guitar figure calls-and-responses with three notes on the bass and drums. Lyrically referencing men who haven't sung since 1973 and Dante's Inferno, it's reminiscent, in a way of the lyrical concerns of Glenn Richards. Musically it has the rhythmic drive and drum patterns of Interpol or Joy Division - the vocal part has their staccato barking, too - but none of the cool reserve of Interpol. Instead, a relentless intensity builds through the song until it explodes.

Camera Obscura - Let's Get Out Of This Country
Popfrenzy Records (AU)/ Merge Records (US).

"Lloyd, Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?"
(3:13, 5.56mb)
Track 1.

"Let's Get Out Of This Country"
(3:13, 5.56mb)
Track 6.

I bought Camera Obscura's first album a couple of years ago, and I appreciated the biting lyrics and the melodies, but - gosh darn it! - I found it a bit hard to get past the fact that they really wanted to be a girly Belle and Sebastian. We're talking Belle and Sebastian circa 1997-1998, at their twee-pop peak. Their album cover looked like a Belle and Sebastian album cover, the songs sounded like Belle and Sebastian songs. There was a niche to be filled, I suppose, since Belle and Sebastian have been closer to Thin Lizzy than Love recently.

On Let's Get Out Of This Country, however, Camera Obscura find their own niche. No longer are they a Belle and Sebastian tribute act. They soak their sound in wall-of-sound reverb, filling the sound with organs, accordions, string sections, percussion, the kitchen sink, etc. We're talking Phil Spector and the Ronettes here. But, unlike the cold paranoia of a Phil Spector production, the sound of </i>Let's Get Out Of This Country</i> is lush, brightly coloured. It simply sounds beautiful. Over the top of the wall-of-sound floats Tracyann's wispy voice, intimate and warm as she sings biting, self-depreciating lyrics lamenting indie pop love lives.

What's more, the songwriting is topnotch - the first track "Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken" is simply a better song than Lloyd Cole's "Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?", which it famously answers. And Lloyd Cole's no slouch in that respect. In a way, the combination of upbeat melody and sad lyrics which "Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken" trades in has been done to death, but there's something about the chutzpah with which Tracyann and company do it which is endearing. Suggesting that you're ready to be heartbroken the way that she does it has a certain combination of carefree devil-may-care romanticism and bitter cynicism which somehow works. They say that cynics are merely disappointed idealists, after all.

Midlake. The Trials of Van Occupanther
Etch N Sketch Records (AU).

"Roscoe"
(4:49, 6.96mb)
Track 1.

"Head Home"
(5:46, 8.48mb)
Track 3.

I get the impression that Midlake have no idea what they're doing. They don't understand the music they make at all. Their first album, which has a stupid name I can't remember off the top of my head, is a bit of a mess - it's not terrible, but nothing to write home about. Sounds like the Flaming Lips or Grandaddy or something. Sure, they're jazz-trained guys who can sing and play like their lives depend on it. But Midlake have completely the wrong idea about the 1970s. I read a recent interview with them when they recently toured Australia, wherein they talk about the 1970s being a time of innocence, and how they wanted to capture that innocence on "Trials of Van Occupanther".

They're wrong. The 1970s wasn't a time of innocence. Fleetwood Mac and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young - Midlake's most obvious 1970s influences - took so much cocaine back then that it's a wonder that they still have noses. After the 1960s, every rock history and biography paints the 1970s in terms of loss of innocence, in fact - it was the time when the business guys regained control of the music. Moreover, Trials Of Van Occupanther has some cockamamie concept to it, and clumsy prog-rock poetry, which especially on the written page - "my young bride, why are your shoulders like that of an old woman?" - come off as a bit silly. There's even prominent flutes all over the album.

So, to recap, Midlake have no idea what they're doing, they're jazz guys playing rock, they have clumsy lyrics. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, but somehow their album is compulsively listenable. It just wants to be replayed. I suspect that the secret of Midlake is that in trying to emulate their heroes, but misunderstanding where the music originally came from, they have created something new. Their music does have a sound of innocence. They're not making the music so they can go on tour and get $1 million dollars each per show (see Crosby, Stills and Nash - how else were they going to pay for all that cocaine?). They're just making stuff they like. And they seem to have figured out how to write good pop songs since Peppercorn and Beefsteak or whatever their first album was called - namely, stuffing your songs with hooks and shamelessly ripping off your idols. Worked for everyone else, after all.

"Roscoe", the first track on Trials of Van Occupanther, and the best, sounds a whole bunch like Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon". Except, somehow, it transcends mere theivery; the jazz and prog-rock influences, the winding melody and the silly lyrics somehow bring out a new side of that kind of sound. I don't know how they do it, and I don't think they really know either, but it works. "Head Home" starts with a flute melody over Days Of Our Lives piano parts, before segueing into more moody Fleetwood Mac rhythms. It's one of those songs, however, where every bit of the song has a hook of its own (much like the best of Fleetwood Mac in the mid-70s); The flute melody is a hook, the groove of the rhythm section is a hook, the winding vocal harmonies that melisma on the word "home" after the lead singer sings "I'll think I'll head..." at the end of the verse - that's a hook and a half. And then there's the chorus, which breaks out of the tension of the verse, with more instrumental hooks and vocal melodies that are hooky. Did I mention all the hooks?

The Divine Comedy. Victory For The Comic Muse
Parlophone/EMI Records.

"To Die A Virgin"
(3:40, 8.73mb)
Track 1.

"The Plough"
(5:14, 11.93mb)
Track 9.

Neil Hannon comes from the kind of school of songwriting in which you write lyrics full of wit, forming character portraits with incidental social criticism, with kind-of-theatrical music hall melodies. An English Randy Newman, perhaps. Hannon's voice is reminiscent of Scott Walker's; it's oh so English, clipped and ascerbic, but with overtones of mournfulness and playfulness in turn. "Victory For The Comic Muse" was apparently recorded quickly, using old-style tape - but who really cares! It sounds great; the Divine Comedy in the past have sounded a little stilted and plastic due to the production style.

Lyrically, the album mostly targets the upper classes, from the female celeb of "Diva Lady" to the accountant of "The Plough" to the album's centerpiece, "A Lady Of A Certain Age", where the disgust drips from his voice as he details the utter vacuousness of the life of an aging socialite. The sweetest song on the album is "Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World" - I had assumed from the title that the song would detail what Arthur C. got up to in Sri Lanka with little boys - but instead the song is a sweet love song; the narrator is saying that women are a mystery that should be explained on a TV show called "Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World" - but despite his lack of understanding of women, he - aww! - still loves her mystifying feminine behaviour.

The opener, "To Die A Virgin", is the funniest song of the year. The lyrical conceit is that the narrator does not wish the song-name upon himself. His girlfriend had promised, on their first date, that she would let him deflower her as his birthday present. "Hooray, it's my birthday!" he sings in the first verse. The best lyric in the song, though, is the narrator trying to convince the girlfriend to honour her promise about the birthday; "with all the bombs and the bird flu/ we're probably gonna be dead soon." (That would work on how many of you ladies?) All this over a sort of musical amalgamation of 70s glam-rock and broadway sleaze which somehow seems entirely suited to the topic matter.

"The Plough", later in the album, is nowhere near as funny as "To Die A Virgin", but there's a certain something about that song that catches my heart. It could be a song from a broadway musical, in its tone, melody, sense of melodrama, and instrumentation. A song about a man who becomes disillusioned with his accountancy firm because of their embezzling funds, which eventually leads to him assassinating the police commissioner. It is a ridiculous and surreal story in a bunch of ways. But there's a heart to this song, which somehow emerges through the silliness. The song is about the difficulty of fitting into a fickle world obsessed with surfaces, full of people who gloss over complex issues and try to find easy answers.

Augie March. Moo, You Bloody Choir!
Sony BMG Records (AU).

"Bottle Baby"
(4:28, 4.72mb)
Track 9.

"Bolte And Dunstan Talk Youth"
(4:59, 6.18mb)
Track 12.

I knew "One Crowded Hour" was one of the most fantastic things I'd ever heard when I first heard it in 2003, Glenn Richards performing it solo at an afternoon show at the Hopetoun. What I didn't know was that Australia would agree with me. The song catapulted my favourite little indie band into the big leagues - now they're headlining festivals here in Australia, and "One Crowded Hour" is certain to be at least top 10 in JJJ's Hottest 100. And what was immediately clear upon hearing the album, which I excitedly bought on the day it came out, was that they were no longer mine. For better or worse, Moo, You Bloody Choir! is an album of compromise, Augie March doing a pop album. Robert Forster's lengthy review in The Monthly of the album suggested that it didn't go far enough in becoming a pop album - he was frustrated by the songwriting idiosyncrasies of Richards; my own thoughts were that it went too far in becoming a pop album, and that too many songwriting idiosyncrasies had been erased. I think the general view was that it wasn't quite a pop album and wasn't quite an art album, and thus sat half-way in between, pleasing nobody. Except all those people who bought the album, of course.

When the album got it right, it was superb - "Cold Acre" and, of course, "One Crowded Hour", are perfect. Glenn Richards can spit out good lines and write good melodies in his sleep. "Just Passing Through" has fire in its belly, and "Bottle Baby" is a stark, lovely, ballad that scares me to the point of rapture. There's plenty of pretty songs like "Bolte And Dunstan Talk Youth". The production is a little unfriendly to the more idiosyncratic songs, though. Someone told me that someone had told them that Sony had remixed the album without the band's knowledge to make the album more radio-friendly. I don't know if it's true, but it's definitely true that the album is Augie March done all shiny and radio-friendly. I liked listening to bootlegs of these songs much more, with all the grit and imperfections you get in live performances.

But still, Glenn Richards' songwriting is a step above almost anybody else in Australia, and as much as my feelings about this album are mixed, it's still arresting in most of the right ways.

L.E.O. - Alpacas Orgling
Cheap Lullaby Records.

"Goodbye Innocence"
(3:51, 5.61mb)
Track 2.

"Ya Had Me Goin'"
(3:10, 5.05mb)
Track 3.

A year ago, if you had told me that my 2006 list would have an ELO tribute band featuring Hanson higher in the list than an Augie March album, I would have laughed. Ho ho ho. The thing is, "Alpacas Orgling" is #5 in my list, and Augie March is #6.

Hmmm.

L.E.O. are a pastiche band, doing tributes to the style of ELO rather than faithfully copying songs. Think the Rutles, but a little less silly. I think the thing with this album is that L.E.O. are basically an improvement on ELO. ELO were pompous, self-consciously trying to ambitiously combine rock music with orchestral music. It was all very serious in that 1970s proggy kind of way. However, the thing with ELO is that the prog-orchestra stuff was pretty boring. At their best, they were basically just a band that played some straightforward pop songs in a distinctive way.

What makes L.E.O. basically interesting in a way that ELO aren't is that L.E.O. are a hell of a lot of fun. They're not taking themselves seriously. And there's that postmodern aspect - some would argue that ELO were more or less a Beatles tribute band themselves. Jeff Lynne and compadres famously claimed they were trying to start where The Beatles' "I Am The Walrus" left off. A tribute to a tribute band.

The lyrics are knowingly silly - at one stage, a chorus repeats "beating a dead horse, beating a dead horse, beating a dead horse to death". Irony intended, I suspect. The songs are nothing but pop songs that use the style of ELO, and, I have to say, they're better songs than ELO's. Pretty much every song is catchy as hell, from the "Telephone Line"-isms of "Goodbye Innocence" to the revved up Traveling Wilbury-ness of "Don't Let It Go".

"Goodbye Innocence", co-written by Jellyfish's Andy Sturmer, and featuring some of his vocals, features George Harrison-esque slide guitar, those distinctive ELO backing vocal harmonies clever/ridiculous lyrics. But above and beyond the "Telephone Line"-isms, it's simply a great song. "Ya Had Me Goin'", in contrast, is a pastiche of "Evil Woman", and its combination of the power pop backgrounds of most of the guys involved in LEO, the 70s prog-pop of ELO, and the disco beats of "Evil Woman" is strangely reminiscent of late 90s boybands like 5ive or N'Sync, except strangely musically satisfying.

It's strange; L.E.O. should be an interesting exercise and little else, but instead, it's a living thing.

Sorry about that last sentence.

The Bees (U.S) - High Society
(As far as I can tell, self-released.)

"The Country Life"
(2:39, 6.08mb)
Track 1.

"Catch Yer Own Train"
(3:16, 7.13mb)
Track 6.

These Bees aren't the ones paying back that chicken. They're the UK Bees. Anyway, in the early years of this decade, various bands made a name for themselves by being nominally indie bands who were making music influenced by 1970s singer-songwriter soft pop - Josh Rouse's 1972, Nada Surf's Let Go, and Guster's Keep It Together, for example. The music had the unassuming, winning melodies and sweet harmonies of bands like Bread, America, or the Eagles but without being quite so...inoffensive. The Bees (U.S.) have made an album that seemingly distils indie soft pop into its purest form.

"The Country Life" was one of the singles of the year for me, as I wrote earlier this year:

"The Country Life" is tremendously catchy, the stereotypical example of an effortless sounding perfect pop song. Reminiscent of the Irish soul shuffle of Van Morrison's "Jackie Wilson Said", the interesting hooks never stop coming; it starts with an acoustic guitar with a prototypical rock'n'roll riff (see: "Rip This Joint" by the Stones), before a drum fill leads into the first verse. Over a walking bassline and insistent piano, the lead singer, Daniel Tashian, sings, "her Mama thinks I'm made out of money, her Daddy thinks we need more time, sister's got her own opinion". Into the chorus, "So long" goes the hook, with great harmonies. The chorus ends with the lines I'm gone, I'll trade the trouble and the strife for the country life. The angelic harmonies on "country life" makes the country life sound like it's the best thing ever.

My Dad moved to near Mudgee when I was 15. To be honest, I found the country life pretty boring. I'm a city boy at heart.

"Catch Yer Own Train", a break-up song of sorts, with its shimmering honky tonk piano and blasts of harmonica, is surprisingly bluesy, but also unusually upbeat and bouncy for soft pop of this nature. Traces of country and Elvis creep into Tashian's voice as he sings the verses - they are from Nashville after all. By the time the singalong choruses have kicked in, it's sunk under your skin. Perfect pop in it's own little way.

I suspect that the rise of soft indie pop has a lot to do with the rise of emo. The music industry loves a bit of yin and yang sometimes - indie is nothing if not reactive to the mainstream. The mainstream of rock at the moment seems to be emo kids - your Chemical Romances and Panic! at the Discos. Against that, soft pop makes a lot of sense - if the current thing is tortured souls, teenage angst and transmogrified pop punk, there's a certain satisfaction in listening to music that doesn't even know that punk exists, that is too subtle and tasteful to scream out its angst.

I can't wait for indie yacht rock. Bring on all the bands influenced by Hall and Oates, Christopher Cross and Loggins and Messina.

Built To Spill - You In Reverse
Warner Bros (US)/Spunk (AU)

"Goin' Against Your Mind"
(8:42, 12.84mb)
Track 1.

"Liar"
(5:11, 7.87mb)
Track 3.

"Goin' Against Your Mind", the first track on You In Reverse, is utterly perfectly structured for a song that's almost nine minutes long, with only a couple of verses and a perfunctory chorus. Doug Martsch is a master of dynamics and structure. He knows exactly how to build up a song and then tear it apart again. Part of the secret of "Goin' Against Your Mind" is that Built To Spill's rhythm section have never sounded so alive as they do on You In Reverse - the song comes screaming out of the starting gates, and doesn't let up, building and building for half the song. The other half of the secret of that song - and by extension, Doug Martsch's talent, in general - is that every section of "Goin' Against Your Mind" has a hook to it. You In Reverse, however, isn't just "Goin' Against Your Mind and a bunch of filler" - it's strong and consistent the whole way through.

In particular, "Liar" is the equal of any of the straight pop songs Martsch has written (see "Twin Falls" or "The Plan"). Melancholy in tone, with an aura of reassurance, Martsch sings "no, I wouldn't be a liar, if I told you that", and there's a funny bittersweetness to the phrase, as if he's not quite telling the truth, but doing it for a good reason.

It's wonderful to see a band like Built To Spill firing at all cylinders again.

Tom Waits - Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, & Bastards
Anti Records

"Long Way Home"
(3:10, 4.69mb)
Disc 2, Track 3.

"Army Ants"
(3:26, 5.28mb)
Disc 3, Track 4.

These days, Tom Waits can just be Tom Waits and get away with it. He's in the business of being Tom Waits. He could release an album of emo covers and it'd probably be good, as long as it was clear that he was just being Tom Waits. His voice is still wonderful; he has the conventional singing ability of a wet balloon, but somehow manages to pull out complicated emotions from his songs using what he has left of his voice. He has a surprisingly versatile voice, does Tom Waits - by turns he can sound like a beatnik, like Louis Armstrong, or like a death metal singer.

Tom Waits' ability to release a 3CD boxset of rarities and still have it at the top of a whole bunch of people's top 10 lists is evidence not only of his songwriting ability but of his ability to be Tom Waits. "Long Way Home" is a beautiful thing that deserves dozens of covers (it was written for Norah Jones, who covered it a few years back). It has a stately, pretty melody, and the song feels like it's going nowhere fast, and is all the better for it; after all, it's a song about not hurrying here or there, and a love song at that. An accordion or harmonium, double bass, and light brushes of drums do the minimum necessary in the background, and Waits' growls are at their sweetest - on this song he sounds like your grandfather's beard when you were 5.

And the great thing about Orphans is that, across the 3 CDs of music, you get the most authentic and varied portrait of Tom Waits being Tom Waits that he's ever released as an album. You get the bawlers, brawlers and bastards - Waits being by turns sentimental, experimental, and just plain mental. He covers the Ramones and Leadbelly, goes down to Fannin Street, and gets all Kerouac. In a way, the most affecting and most surprising song is "Road To Peace", a forceful 7 minute ramble through the war between Palestinians and Israelis, Waits' first real adventure into topical song.

And perhaps the strangest, and silliest, is "Army Ants", where Waits reads out of a kids book about strange insects, over his usual minimalist musical style, that distinctive cross between beatnik jazz and bluesy Captain Beefheartisms. It's strangely fascinating to hear Waits' voice; you can hear his wicked sense of humour and his impeccable comic timing even when he reads out of a kids' book, and you get a sense of his humanism out of it. Somehow.

Sean Lennon - Friendly Fire
EMI Records

"Dead Meat"
(3:38, 4.84mb)
Track 1.

"Parachute"
(3:19, 4.42mb)
Track 3.

This album got so-so reviews, mostly because people didn't dig much deeper than the surface. He's someone's son apparently. And as a result rich and famous. He looks a lot like both of his parents. Join dots. Dismiss.

The thing is, the deeps of "Friendly Fire" are where it hits. Lennon's singing initially seems kind of emotionally flat, but with repeated listens it becomes obvious that it's not emotional flatness, but, instead, understatement. The songs on Friendly Fire are full of very strong emotions - bitterness, anger, fear, dread, sadness, regret - but Lennon understates it all, lets the emotions show through the cracks in his voice. The songs aren't immediately catchy, but after a few listens they've dig in under your skin, and you can't get rid of them. It becomes clear that Lennon is a first class songwriter, along the lines of Aimee Mann, Elliott Smith, or Jon Brion.

As I said earlier:
When I first downloaded Friendly Fire, I immediately assumed that Jon Brion produced it. It has that Jon Brion sound; think of the lush orchestration and production style combined with the quirky carnivalesque instrumentation that you hear on records by Fiona Apple, Rufus Wainwright, Elliott Smith, Aimee Mann, and Brion himself, or the soundtracks to movies like Punch Drunk Love and Eternal Sunshine. The songs are the kind of thing you'd expect to hear on a record produced by Brion - it has the clever Beatlesque chord progressions, the surprising leaps in the melodies, the personal, confessional lyrics. It's actually not produced by Brion. He plays a couple of instruments here and there, though.

Lennon seemed like he had a surprisingly weak voice (especially considering that his father has one of the most powerful voices in Western music) on what I heard from his first album, Into The Sun - you heard him singing flat a little too often. He didn't have the confidence to sell the songs, to harness his voice to the emotions he was singing. His singing on Friendly Fire, in contrast, is affecting. It feels pure. Anyway, I downloaded it and listened a couple of times, and dismissed it mentally as "eh, heard it before". It crept back up on me, though. The melodies insinuated their ways into your life; at first they're unobtrusive, and then they hit you like a sack of bricks.

"Dead Meat" sounds like resignation. It's reminiscent of late-period Elliott Smith, a song like "Happiness" or "Fond Farewell", musically - luscious chords, sophisticated harmonies, complex but understated rhythms (drummer Matt Chamberlain's specialty - listen to the drumming on Fiona Apple's albums). It contrasts with the incredible violence of the lyrics, though, which promise furious vengeance in no uncertain terms. When Lennon sings "you're gonna get what you deserve", he means it. But, in the context of the music, the lyrics take on a different character; Lennon sounds resigned to having to carry out the vengeance. He doesn't really want to, but he knows he should.

"Parachute", on the other hand, is restless, with something underneath the surface that seems profoundly uneasy. A meditation on love, it speaks of the illogicality of emotions, that we have to blindly follow our feelings despite knowing where they might lead us. Lennon seems to believe that we're fated to follow the paths we follow, and can only blindly watch as the path goes in dangerous territory. So thus, "if life is just a stage, let's put on the best show." There's a name for this kind of philosophical viewpoint, but the point isn't really philosophical - the point is more to portray the feeling of knowing you're going to make a big mistake, but knowing you have no choice.

There's a deep core of emotionality on this album that I can hear, that I can't really hear on too many albums from 2006. Maybe other worthy albums were speaking deeper in languages I don't know or didn't hear, but this was the album that moved me the most.

tim.