#458 King Creosote & Jon Hopkins - Diamond Mine

On the 2011 lists.

Isn't it funny how setting matters? How albums become soundtracks? How that one time we heard that album in the most important moment makes it our favorite album ever, a title applied again and again and again.

Had I heard this at my desk my review would have consisted of pointing out how spare it is. How it evokes the smallness of The Microphones, the brittle everyday glimpses of The Books, the haggard texture of Neutral Milk Hotel. I would have observed the similarity to my own songs, with the clumsy singing, the texture, the spare structure, the obsession with mini epic build and buzz and bass. It is a gorgeous, minor, album, coming in at a perfectly slight 32 minutes. I would have observed all of this and all of it is true.

As it is, I heard it on a lonely, desperate night, walking and walking down Elm. A child in a second story window taps on the glass signaling to no one; the ebb and flow of breath fogs the world; a feather falls spinning from nowhere; a girl with golden hair so thick I think its a head wrap steps out of the T station and stuns me; everyone sees me walking and we all look each other in the eye; bare trees spiderweb city-lit cloudscape; a stranger's TV pulses on the window; a man puts his hand on a woman's back as they shuffle from their car to their apartment and everything is tiny and huge and goes on forever and is gone 4.5/5

You might like this if: you want to feel small and sad and open and through