The magical music box

In a fit of guilt I thought I ought to try and be a tad more regular with posts and it occurred to me that apart from appending the odd "Listening to:" tag on the end of posts and a few links I don't talk much about one of the loves of my life, namely music.

I'll not pretend I'm a proper muso and can deconstruct songs and find their deep and meaningful roots but I do listen to a lot of music a lot of the time and I play the guitar a bit (and in my youth, the piano and the drums although neither for very long or very well). Even so I'm not one for all the flowery prose and polemic you find in the music press, NME being a particularly guilty party here for perpetuating drivel of such pompousness and ego strokingly kiss arse that I can barely stand to read it these days. So, with this in mind, I figured I'd share with you my current album(s) of the month every so often and today I'm going to start with the current Maximo Park album, Our Earthly Pleasures.

I'll admit the first time I heard Maximo Park's first single (Graffiti), I wasn't overly impressed. I figured they were another pretentious art-rock outfit very much in the mould of skinny pseudo-retro chimps Franz Ferdinand and I didn't pay too much attention to them. But eventually, their other songs began to seep into my consciousness through the radio and TV and I'd think "Oooh, that's quite good, who is that?". Eventually I found out it was the self same band I'd written off and so I gave their first album, A Certain Trigger, a good listen.

Well the upshot was that I ate my words and loved the album (in particular the slightly maudlin Going Missing and the lovely The Coast Is Always Changing) so when the new album came out I was only two months behind the rest of the world in getting hold of it. Now there's a phenomenon in music known as the 'Difficult second album' which usually occurs after a very successful first album. It's been quite a while since I heard a bands second major release that lived up to the first, recent disappointments including Bloc Party and The Killers (I'm rather hoping that as of next week I'm not including the Editors in that list...) so I was hoping that Maximo Park would buck that trend.

And boy, have they ever. From the meaty opening organ note and guitar combo through the lyrically brilliant Books From Boxes to the lively semi-retro pop and exuberance of Karaoke Plays and A Fortnight's Time to the vaguely disturbing ending of Parisian Skies this album is probably as near to perfection as I've ever heard from an album of any genre at any time and certainly the best pop-rock album bar none. As a bit of a closet Del Amitri fan (well, quite a lot of a fan actually) I can hear certain similarities between the Maximo Park sound, especially on this album, and the little known first eponymous Dels album with it's tight mid-eighties pop-rock sound influenced by the late 70s punk and power pop genres. This is unquestionably a Good Thing.

Sadly, I probably won't get to see the band play live this year as it's now the festival season and then the only gigs they're doing before the end of the year are miles away but I will definitely be making an effort to go and see them some time in the next 12 months and I will be hoping that they can manage another album of such brilliant composition next time round too. It is often said "If you buy only one album this year, make it this one" but I'm not going to say that because next week sees the second album from the abso-bloody-lutely brilliant Editors and I have seriously high hopes for that too. Instead, I'll say that if you enjoy well-formed, tightly played and lyrically intelligent pop or indie rock then if this isn't in your collection then you're missing out.

9.5/10