Loney, Dear
In probably the last five or six months I have been considering myself a lover of Americana music, listening to great bands like Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins, M. Ward, Midlake, My Morning Jacket, and Band of Horses. I figured that maybe at the age of 26 I have found my distinct genre of music. Bands that sing about God, heartache, and the United States are not bad at all. And I can deal with going straight to the Americana section at CD Central in Lexington and feel just fine.
But life and music are not that simple. Music is not like picking out a sports team that you live and die by. Our ears allow us to be bipolar. We can love one thing a lot at one point and then the next minute we fall in love with a new band, but our ears will always come back to what we love unless it is DMB or some other absurd band that came out of the 90s.
So my point is that I fell in love with a man from Sweden three weeks ago. Americana, move over, because this guy is good and the album he put together flows brilliantly. The band is Loney, Dear (Emil Svanängen), and this album released in the United States by SubPop is called Loney, Noir. This album was originally recorded and released in August 2005, and now it gets to grace our beloved country as of January 2007.
Svanängen is multi-instrumentalist and on this album he records everything by himself, and does a good job of it. One of the songs that stand out on this album is “I am John,” which is the heralded track off the album and a featured video on YouTube. The next track on the album is “Saturday Waits.” I love this track. The final song is “And I Won’t Cause Anything At All”—a great song to end a good album. This was the first record I think I bought on its release date in a long time. I forgot how special it is to buy an album without the certainty that you will like it. Fortunately, I do. And even though the last two days I listened to Midlake and BOH, today I am listening to Loney, Dear. My bipolar ears are being good to me.
2 comments:
hey corpsers. i was at work this morning, sweeping the hallways, mopping bathrooms and vacuuming lockerooms and i thought of, finally, what i was gonna post about. but, when i got home, another corpser had posted. and i am so glad he did. i've watched the youtube video several times since i read the post and am excited to hear more of it! Loney, Dear is incredible. this is based off only hearing 1 song. but i think i would go into a record store (if they had them in the UP) and buy this album with that lustful anticipation that I WILL LOVE THIS ALBUM. but, since michigan's upper penninsula still think's the 8-track is the greatest thing since the circle, i will probably have to wait. alex, thank you. thank you. and thank you.
shrontz
Al,
Thanks for posting.
I was wondering if you'd say a bit more about what the Americana genre means to you. I've been thinking about it, and I'm wondering what the difference is between this and country-politan, folk-rock, alt-country, etc. I'm not against the proliferation of genre names, but sometimes they get confusing. Like, I still don't know what math rock is.
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