The Hall of Fantastically Fine Things

     Introduction We are edging ever closer to the albums that I haven't, as yet, listened to. But we still have four to go, so this is still one that has been part my evolving whole-album / sequences of LPs rotations. However, as it's close to the end of where I've got up to, it's not one that I've listened to extensively before doing this post. I have made a point of not doing any research as to the context of any of these releases. For now, I am focusing on listening to them with a 'pure' focus-on-the-music-only approach. That said, I can't help but notice that - after seventeen years of at least an album every two years - there's an eight year gap between  Let's Go Eat the Factory and  Half Smiles Of The Decomposed . I'm sure there's a bit of a story there... The Album Unthinkable / undrinkable What's immediately apparent is that  Let's Go Eat the Factory is a significant departure from the sound of (most of) the late 90s - e...

    Introduction As I spent the first half of this year almost exclusively listening to whole GBV albums (or chronological sequences of them) on a loop, this was one of those that, l ike  Earthquake Glue , seemed at least reasonably strong without actually leaping out at me. One of the joys of doing this blog is taking a deep dive and seeing how each LP stacks up against the others... The Album A wash of warm, gentle chords Yet again (for the fifth time in a row), the album commences with a cracker. ' Everybody Thinks I'm A Raincloud (When I'm Not Looking)' is a driven piece of carefully controlled riffing overlaid with an uplifting melody. There's a bit of philosophical introspection (' I crept from a soft dimension / w here one of my souls was lighter'), but overall there's an optimistic, forward-looking tone to the lyric (' every change of tomorrow...  hungry to fix it... a miracle cure for my sorrow') that's perfectly in tune with the inv...