As with yesterday's Hard Nose the Highway, I had a sense of déjà vu when this was picked out of my collection by the random generator. Hadn't I written about this on Music Arcades before? If so, Google couldn't find it, but then Google can't find lots of entries that are definitely there — I suspect this is a Typepad feature, a kind of Search Engine Anti-optimisation, designed to keep their bandwidth costs down. We are, after all, over 1,500 pages into Music Arcades, and if people could find all those pages, Typepad's bills would go up.
In this hazy mirage of a memory, the act of listening to the CD itself reminded me of my experience when I first bought it. Back then, in 2003, I put the album on and, for the first seven or eight minutes, thought I'd stumbled on something quite special. Yet the further I got in, the more the returns diminished. I decided it was 15% killer and 85% filler.
I don't think Out of Season has been on Music Arcades before, in fact. Still, I knew what I was expecting. So it was a great pleasure to listen again and discover plenty of good stuff beyond the first two tracks. Some of it I felt I had to work to hear; some (I hesitate to say this) needed to be played loud on the hi-fi, rather than the computer, to be found; and some seemed to slip away again when I went back to look for it.
The beginning of the album remains a tour de force. It led me to dial up that "new" Portishead album, which I'd studiously and snobbishly ignored when all the broadsheets were wetting themselves over it a couple of years ago. Yes, maybe that needs to heard on a hi-fi too.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
This is really moving and very melancholy album. Certainly as bleakly captivating as Portishead.
Posted by: M.J. Nicholls | 13 February 2010 at 06:16 PM