LaRM day 140 (Explosions in the Sky + catch up)

If there's one person who is overlooked in Explosions in the Sky it's their drummer. In most of the pieces the majority of the burden of the tunes is carried by him alone, and interestingly it's his extremely subtle rises and falls and martial rills that allow the emotive nature of the rest of the music to be fully realised. Hard to imagine "emotive drums" I know, but there it is. All Of a Sudden I Miss Everyone (2007) is more of the same kind of manipulative emo-post-rock that they had already perfected on The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place, but there are subtler tones added in this time around. The piano is a nice touch for a start, particularly the pretty little riffs in album closer 'So Long, Lonesome'. There's no denying that it's essentially a formula that the band alighted on and have stuck to, but it's a surprisingly adaptable and rich one considering that there's not much genuine variation in the fundamental nature of the music they write. The build-ups and crescendos are as gently constructed as ever and, again, it's nice when mainstream post-rockers don't feel the need to suddenly and without warning become very LOUD or to have something like pretend recorded voicemails or "overheard conversations" in the background. For some reason I don't feel that next album Take Care, Take Care, Take Care (2011) works as well. I'm not sure if there's some kind of natural entropy in this style of music or whether it's just that it starts losing its interest in concentrated doses, but something's missing from Take Care that means that unless you really focus on it, which is a tough ask for stretches of its running time, it's hard to really engage with it at all. It's in no way a bad record and it's certainly another decent example of the genre, but it's not of the same calibre as their previous two albums. It has got a nicely over the top fold out CD sleeve though.

God, I'm feeling really ill so I'm going to race through these next few alphabet catch-up albums. The Alabama Shakes album that the middle-age man music mags were raving about (Boys and Girls (2012)) is a decent bit of 70's soul done as Joplin-esque rock, and although it stinks of a kind of fabricated retro it's a load of fun while you're listening to it. There's no denying she's got a great delivery and as southern rock-soul goes it may all be like something from Mark Ellen's wet dream but it's pretty good nonetheless. Next is this year's Beach House album, Bloom. As usual it's taken me a while to get to grips with this but everybody was right all along, it's superb. It may hide it's grace with a subtly coy indieness, but it's a charmer through and through. There's a slightly more convincing upbeat poppiness to it that has been lacking in their previous rather studied records and pulling less sulky thousand yard stare faces works wonders for them I reckon. Then we have Boy's album from this year (Mutual Friends) which is either charmingly fey indie-folk or the kind of offensively inoffensive garbage that graces the soundtrack to Grey's Anatomy type TV shows, depending on your point of view. I could certainly understand the latter view but personally I can't help but be charmed by its pretence at a guileless "autumnal" pop feel and I really like it. The cues are all pretty obvious and this stuff has been done to death, but if you can wring a little bit more whimsical melancholic pop out of the well-worn template then fair play to you I say. And finally before I crawl off to bed it's the thoroughly surprising album this year from the Blue Nile's Paul Buchanan, called Mid-Air. Unless of a particularly romantic turn of mind, nobody in their 20's is going to listen to and enjoy Mid-Air. For those of us rather older however, it's a true masterpiece, a revelation of the glory of the songwriting process and the limitless power of well-used phrases both musical and lyrical. Like sketches for Blue Nile songs, none breaks the 3 minute mark and has only Buchanan's voice and piano and very occasional almost inaudible strings, yet each is a perfect universe in itself, completely whole and completely realised, and it's not only one of the most delicate records I've heard in many years, it's also one of the most astonishingly moving. I suppose when you get to a certain age that's the thing about telling the truth about small things, it means much, much more than pretending to tell the truth about big things.