Rook

Shearwater - Rooks

I've been listening to this album quite a lot lately, and it's so damn good, it's almost too distracting to play and write about at the same time. It's even hard to pick a single song from it to share with you, though 'Leviathan, Bound' and the above track are early favourites. It's serene and beautiful, and has a weirdly open and outdoor sound to it, as though it was some sort of natural phenomenon. Even the crashing electric guitars sound like cascading landslides, natural disasters, acts of God. The beautiful, elongated moments when Jonathan Meiburg's vocals waver and sustain are like those dark hazy evenings when you can feel the light changing and slinking away around you, the gentle moments broken only by piano chords are as serene as the surface of the lake in the album's cover image. The whole record is just put together as beautifully as a landscape.

Slightly unsurprisingly, Meiburg is a trained ornithologist, and if you'd like see him wandering the Falkland Islands looking at rooks, you can do so here. The album will be released on June 3, and it might be one of the best we hear this year. You can read more about it on Matador's site.

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For some reason I forgot to mention this earlier: you can read contributions by myself and Sean to NBGL's new monthly feature, which is a very nice idea indeed. Also, Irish people: maybe this goes without saying, but pick up a copy of the wonderful new State magazine, in which I get to review the Times New Viking album (it's brilliant) and talk about the Manics a little (they're not so brilliant), and lots of fine people write about fine music.