Album of the Month: The Earlies – The Enemy Chorus / Patrick Wolf – The Magic Position

Ok, I ought to make it clear before some clever journalist from a weekly satirical newspaper does a bit of research and this ends up on the “spaga” pages. I happen to be good friends with The Earlies, who come from the same ultra-depressing town as I do. Or at least most of them do - the lead singer is actually Texan, and the group work long distance, sending bits of songs to each other. This, their second album is (insert superlative) and (inset superlative). No, really, it actually is an incredible album, and the music press in the UK are going crazy over them. The fact that I know them is really coincidental! Trust me! REALLY!

In any case, The Earlies are going to have to share the number one spot with Patrick Wolf and his third proper album, The Magic Position. I like this album so much that I’m liable to get all emotional just talking about it, and would start talking about my childhood or something equally pathetic – it’d just be embarrassing. Instead, I’ll leave it to you to discover just how wonderful it is.

Loredana – My Love

There are only two kinds of album in this world that have 21 tracks. First we have Hip-Hop albums, are legally obliged to be littered with ten second-long unamusing ‘skits’ and answering machine messages left by other rappers, by way of showing how well connected the artist in question is. The other kind of album with 21 tracks is the variety that you buy in petrol stations for the price of a Magic Tree air freshener – the “Best of Rod Stuart” kind, that are only good for scraping the frost from your windscreen on a winters morning. Loredana’s latest LP, “My Love”, is neither of these, yet contains a mega-value, cd-bursting twenty one tracks. That’s seventy-tree minutes and seventy seconds of music. I know, because I just sat with a calculator and added all the numbers up three times (I messed it up the first two goes). This is about twice as long as any normal album, and about seventy three times as long as your average punk album. Now. Commercial CDs hold 74 minutes of music, absolute maximum. Come on Loredana! Get it together! Couldn’t you have found a short 30 second track to fill that remaining gap? Call that value for money? I feel cheated!

While seventy three minutes and seventy seconds of most pop singers would probably be enough to make you want to bury your head in concrete and throw yourself into the river Dambovita, this is Loredana, and I’ve always had more than a bit of a soft spot for her music. Lots of the tracks date back to the late 80s, including hits like Buna Seara, Iubite!, making this almost like a greatest hits compilation. i like it. And even if you don’t, I suggest that you buy it anyway, just for being the best-value CD that has ever been made in the history of humankind.

Paolo Nutini – Those Streets

Damien Rice – 9

I’ve made enough jokes at the expense of James Blunt in the past few issues that I ought to tell you a little secret. I don’t really hate his music. It’s impossible to really hate what he does, because it’s been genetically engineered to be entirely inoffensive. I know for a fact that he never wrote any of his songs: they were written by a stack of complicated machines, based on the results of thousands of focus-groups and rigorous surveys whose purpose was to discover the scientific formula for music that literally nobody could possibly hate without hating the idea of music itself. It’s all the conservative, safe and comfortable things about music rolled into a hugely profitable, multi-million dollar package. Which is precisely why I hate him with such burning fury.

This month sees the release of two albums by people who walk the dangerous “could be the next James Blunt” line, and thus ought to be the obvious targets for my impotent journalistic wrath. However, both artists, Paolo Nutini and Damien Rice, managed to be just that tiny bit more credible, that tiny bit more ‘challenging’, rendering them almost acceptable to my hyper-critical ears, and thus decidedly pleasant for everyone else. Paolo Nutini, an Italian-Glaswegian wins credibility points for the fact that he used to work in his parents fish and chip shop, making him a salt-of-the-earth “regular” guy (James Blunt has never been in a fish and chip shop in his life – and if he did, he’d definitely ask for it to be served with asparagus or artichoke hearts or something). Nutini is also blessed with boyish good lucks guaranteed to have women queuing up to buy his records and throw underwear at him. Damian Rice is again a good looking (check) singer-songwriter (check) who has even more credibility than Paolo Nutini: some of his stuff almost sneaks into the decidedly cool “nu-folk” bracket. If you’re too ashamed to go into a shop and buy somebody a James Blunt CD (and Lord knows you should be) I seriously recommend getting one of these two albums. With the exception of overly anal music critics like myself, everybody else in the world is almost certain to really enjoy them.