castles in the sky

Doveman – Breathing Out
Doveman – The Best Thing
Doveman – Tigers

I’ve already talked a bit about Doveman in the comments of the previous post, but I’d like to reiterate that his new record, The Conformist, really stands atop the records I’ve heard post 2009-list-making.  I haven’t really heard that many*, but I guess what I mean is that if I’d heard this record any time before the list-making happened, it would’ve made said list.

It’s a capital-b-beautiful record, lush and soft and billowy like the biggest clouds, while always threatening to be blown away by a big gust of wind or to be cut in two by a 747.  And it’s a wonderful meeting of vocal timbre, instrumentation and content — the always-kind-of-whispering, wobbly vocals and the often sparse (but steadily growing) arrangements help the heartbreak narrative.  These songs have a great catch-and-release quality that mirrors the best of  Elbow.

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*I’ve just downloaded a lot of the big, much anticipated releases for Jan and Feb 2010, including Heartland, Transference, Contra, and Romance Is Boring, along with a bunch of other suspect releases from the end of 2009 and early 2010.  I should have some opinions or thereabouts in a little while.  Can’t say much now except that I thought the video for “Cousins” was a clever enough take on the band-just-performing style of videos (no comment on the song itself, though).  Also, I feel like this is part of a new trend where you reveal the should-be-hidden mechanics of videos (in this case, the slide-track deal, which is also featured, incidentally, in the Mountain Goats’ video for “Ezekiel 7″).

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If you read music criticism, the best two bits have just happened/are wrapping up right now.  They are The Stylus Decade and The Singles Jukebox 2009 Best-Off (it starts way back here), which are both Stylus Magazine related (the former even more so than the latter).  The Decade is a review of the Noughties by the former Stylus writers, including articles and Singles/Albums lists, and the Best-Off is a World Cup-like showdown of the Jukebox’s highest rated singles of 2009.  Swifty’s most likely going to take it with “You Belong With Me,” but we’ll see.