Tompaulin: Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

"All that I remember / is your wrists and they were slender"

Forty minutes of scanning bookshelves, books and Google Book Search hasn't found it for me, but there's a William Burroughs essay where he argues for the importance of the opening line of a book, and lists some of his favourites (Hemingway and Conrad among them, I think). I only heard the beginning of this album a couple of days ago, but in my canon of great openings, it's already up there with This is Our Music: just the words above sung to a pretty tune with a drone and a soft beat behind them, they got me on-side straight away and ensured that everything that followed received a sympathetic ear.

For this is the fourth of six "lucky dip" albums from Track & Field (1 and background story, 2, 3), and I don't listen to them, or even take them out of their wrappers, until their number comes up on Music Arcades.

I think I'd heard of Tompaulin before, but then again, if you called your band Tonyblair, I'd think I'd heard of you too. The Belle and Sebastian comparisons are unavoidable, even on the Wikipedia profile, and after three or four listens, some of the songs are sounding less fresh already. However, I was at least inspired to listen three or four times, and it's music like this that comes close to giving "indie" a good name.

Once again, a footnote: I was intrigued at the number of albums with the same title, Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt. It seems to be an epitaph for a character in a Kurt Vonnegut book, but as the book is only ten years old, I wonder if Vonnegut himself borrowed it from an older source.

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