Patrick Wolf,
Wind In the Wires -- I was annoyed that it took this long to track down a resonably priced copy (even with the US release a couple of weeks ago, no one but Amazon was carrying it and they took a week to even ship) but everything was forgiven once it started listening. To my delight and, frankly, surprise, this may actually surpass what Wolf accomplished on
Lycanthropy.
Early claims had his music taking a more organic, natural route here, which it does, but it (thankfully) retains much of the "laptop" stylings of the previous album. There are quite a few more delicate interludes this time, stripped down to minimal instrumentation and Wolf's vocals, which mingle effortlessly with the more densely layered tracks, ultimately culminating later in the album with "This Weather" and the unexpectedly bright closer, "Land's End." It works wonderfully as a cohesive whole, leaving you with the feeling that a journey of sorts has come to an end. Unquestionably, my early frontrunner for AOTY.
After
Wind In the Wires on Monday, anything else was bound to be a step down, but I didn't really expect this from the Decemberists. I might just be kind of tired of Colin Meloy's voice or their music in general, because I was genuinely bored listening to this. Outside of the first track (which I admittedly only like because it sounds like the opening to some international film spectacle) and a smattering of others ("Bagman's Gambit" is pretty damn good),
Picaresque hardly ever grabbed me. A few songs even sound like warmed-over reworkings of earlier, better efforts: "Engine Driver" is like "Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect Pt. 2" and is it just me or does "The Sporting Life" come off as a mash-up of "July, July" and Iggy Pop?
By now, everything that needed to be said has been. It's fantastic. The one new US track is really good, and as a topper, I grabbed the remixes from the Japanese release. Kind of "meh" on Mogwai's remix of "Plans" but the other two are überslick.
