Albums Of The Year: No. 3

LONEY, DEAR - 'Loney, Noir'

This album also falls under the category of a surprise, as I'd never heard of the band until iTunes offered up single 'I Am John' as their free single of the week. I remember downloading it, but not listening to it for weeks, possibly a couple of months. One night, bored as I'd watched all my telly for that day, I decided to listen to it, just for fun. No word of a lie, after the first listen I had it on repeat for about an hour - and this was a single!

Once I'd bought the album, I promptly told Jonster about them, and he also bought the album at a post-pub gathering. Since then, I've become slightly obsessed with the band. Although, from a recording point of view, it's not technically fair to call Loney, Dear a band. When recording, Loney is simply one man named Emil Svanängen, who writes and plays all the instrumental parts (he even does the girly voice parts as he can do a girly voice like no other!). All this makes a stronger case for the inevitable comparisons between Loney and artists like Sigur Ros and especially Sufjan Stevens. Which are fair, but unwarranted.

Aforementioned track 'I Am John' is a glorious slow-burner that starts with a single vocal and acoustic guitar but soon builds to an amazing crescendo of falsetto vocals, fuzz-bass, multi-harmonies and cazoo! Album opener 'Sinister In A State Of Hope' is the prettiest song to ever have the word 'sinister' in the title. The stand-out track, for me, is 'Saturday Waits', another slow-burner but possibly the greatest pop song the charts are too stupid to take any notice of. And this is what annoys me about today's music. I promise you, if Emil was writing songs for Kylie or Madonna, he'd be getting number 1's every time!

All in all, a fantastic album that has heralded what I hope is the start of a long and distinguished career from one of the best songwriters around. And one that seems to understand how to bridge the gap between muso's and regular punters; there's plenty of complexities in the structure of the songs if you want to look for them, if not it's simply bloody good pop music! Bravo, Emil, you Norse weirdy genius!