I SAW YOU WITH YOUR MAKE-UP RUNNING DOWN

Elliott Smith

All Cleaned Out

There is no beginning. You (the listener) are thrown face forward into the frame. Straight in with the melody and the there-before-you-realise chorus. The misery of (maybe) a mother, who goes through new-boyfriends like she goes through old Biro's and cheap-beer, curled up in a sheet of note-pad paper and thrown from a window; gliding as it catches the air and reflecting sunlight in the same way that a mirror reflects eye-wrinkles and fake-tan-streaks. [Info / Buy]


(image credit: Ann Ranlett)

Patrick Wolf

The Libertine

It could be the creaky instrumentation that starts an episode of Poirot; melodramatic, curious, hackneyed, adored. The gallop of hooves and the troubadour lyrics; despair in a light-of-calm. "The circus girl fell off her horse - now she's paralysed." Cold and unforgiving, yet passionate and inspired - so altogether unjust, unhappy, unsatisfied and so altogether alive. "I'm going to run the risk of being free." Evocative of the type of controversial wisdom that be gleaned from aging leather-bound books - mere pontification on the fact that "the shackles that bind us are those that keep our lives unified." And (perhaps) unfulfilled. [Buy]

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Patrick Wolf had some convinced he was retiring. But really he's just taking a break. And this is good news.