Birds sometimes dance

Albums that make me feel warm inside #1

Throughout your life there are certain albums and musicians that really strike you as different, special, otherworldly even. They mold and shape you and at the most extreme they might make you reconsider your whole way of life. The albums I’m featuring in this series of articles are the ones that did something like that to me, or at least the most prominent ones.

Being a non-religious person, these albums are probably the closest thing to a religion in my life. Some believe in God, some believe in Buddha, some even believe L. Ron Hubbard. I Believe in Magnus Moriarty™.

The Tallest Man On Earth – Shallow Graves

Otherwise known as Kristian Matsson, The Tallest Man On Earth is one of those few swedes that actually deserve to be hyped. I mean, is there any other country in the world with as many hyped up bands as Sweden?

Anyways, with his debut album Shallow Graves, Matsson proves that even if he might not really be 2.7 meters tall, the music he makes towers way above everyone elses. With its playful, yet elegant melodies played on banjo and guitar, the album might at first lead you to believe that you’ve just found yet another “folksy dude with an acoustic guitar”, but as you spin this record around some times, you’ll notice how wrong you were. You’ll realize that this isn’t just some guy with an acoustic guitar, this is the guy with an acoustic guitar.

The Tallest Man On Earth is a lot like early Bob Dylan, but perhaps with a greater flair for clever, intricate melodies and a beautiful, yet powerful voice that gives you a chill down the spine every time you hear it. As far as I’m concerned, Dylan can just put down his guitar, because with this Swedish singer-songwriter, do we really need him anymore?

The Unicorns – Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone

The Unicorns were a really influential indie pop band from Montreal, Canada. Playing a quite unique form of experimental 60’s-style guitar pop, they’ve become somewhat of a cult phenomenon. Sadly, WWCOHWWG was the only real album The Unicorns released before breaking up. Then again, maybe I’m just glad we didn’t get to see a mediocre second album.

From slow, yet catchy synth-based songs like Ghost Mountain to the jangly guitar pop of I Was Born (A Unicorn), this album delivers everything it should and way more. It gives off this feeling of being really obscure, yet really poppy and easy to listen to. While some songs might take some time to stick and give you that good feeling, others are  really catchy from the first listen, which in turn guides you all the way from first listen till you’ve really learned to love the whole album.

Neutral Milk Hotel – In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

This is somewhat of a legendary cult album in many people’s eyes, and just like The Unicorns, this band is broken up. Formed by Jeff Mangum, the band was one of the first bands in the Elephant 6 collective and In The Aeroplane Over The Sea was the band’s second album. Not to use it as the reason the albums here, this is a critically acclaimed album, probably featured on most music critics top lists, and though released in 1998, it apparently continues to sell well even now.

Describing exactly what’s great about this album isn’t an easy task. It’s one of those albums you can listen to again and again and still don’t quite get the whole thing. The lyrics of the album are catchy, beautiful, scary and impressive all at once. It’s sad, dark, tragic, yet so very beautiful at the same time. Like in the song “Holland, 1945″, mangum sings “And here’s where your mother sleeps, and here is the room where your brothers were born, Indentions in the sheets where their bodies once moved but don’t move anymore”, it gives you a picture of something tragic, but it’s all told in a very poetic and beautiful way. The overall theme of the album is apparently the life of Anne Frank, as Mangum read the book and got so utterly touched that it gave inspiration for a full album.

And what an album! This is poetry way beyond my reach, yet I can’t help but love how it makes me want to sing along, cry and laugh all at the same time. And with the quirky, lo-fi soundscape they create on this album with banjos, accordions, trumpets, flugelhorns, euphoniums, organs, zanzitophones, and singing saws, what’s there not to love? It’s either the work of a genius or a complete nutjob. I’d say it’s a combination, aren’t all geniuses relatively crazy?

Magnus Moriarty™ – Perhaps Interior Heart Politeness

Magnus Moriarty™ is the moniker of Magnus Nielsen, though it’s ended up being more of a two-man band together with Marius Ergo. They are a part of Metronomicon Audio and play a type of music that’s quite hard to describe, but I like to call it progressive pop, or progpop if you will.

The sound revolves around a 12-string guitar and a greek bouzouki, but is far from limited to that. Among other things, Magnus plays the 12-string, drums, bass, electric guitar, banjo, violin, organ, synth, keyboard and theremin, while Marius plays things like bouzouki, 12-string, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, saz, flute, drums, lap steel, bass, mandolin, banjo, organ, keyboard, synth, melodica and harpsichord. That alone should be enough to get your attention.

This band isn’t the only thing these guys do either. Magnus plays in bands like Meta Forever, Now We’ve Got Members and Marius plays in Truls and the Trees, Lukestar, Center of the Universe, as well as having his own solo project and playing in more hardcore bands like Kaospilot and Snöras. And you thought those Canadians were so productive.

Anyways, this album is a real pearl. Sadly, it’s a bit overlooked, but I’d say it’s one of the greatest albums to be released in Norway for a very long time.

Lower than Lo-Fi, but Higher – No Need for Ladders

This might be the album in this list that comes most unexpected on people. It’s probably the one least people have heard too. Not only is this the second norwegian album on this list, but it’s even from the same label, Metronomicon. Does that make me a hypocrite or is it just an insanely great music label? I might be a hypocrite, but I think the latter is also very true.

Lower than Lo-Fi, but Higher is the solo project of Christian Stouff who plays bass in Now We’ve Got Members. For the solo, he’s put down the bass and plays an acoustic guitar with four strings instead. The two deepest strings broke and he found out he didn’t need them, ending up with something that sounds a bit like a baritone ukulele. This is the most minimalistic of pop and the sound is only made up of the guitar and his voice, with some drums, violins etc. here and there.

Christian isn’t the world’s greatest singer, but he doesn’t have to be. This is Lo-Fi and and it only adds to the charm of it all. You really don’t need to have the most powerful voice in the world, something I think Stouff really proves on this album. What really makes this album great though, is the guitar, all those little sounds that get stripped away in a big and fancy production. It’s so real and acoustic. Like the fast strumming on the chorus of “Reign”, it’s just amazing. It might be kind of a personal thing, but this really is one of my favorite albums of all time. I also don’t think I’ve heard many names that explain the music better than this one, cause this is lower than lo-fi, but a lot higher!

This article is part of a series, so there’s more to come!

- André Lersveen, 30/09/2009

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Tagged as: Experimental, Feature, Folk, Indie, Pop, Progressive, Recommendation