Toad Top 10, 2007: 6-10
6. Richmond Fontaine – Thirteen Cities
Willy Vlautin is one of the most gifted storytellers in modern music. I have never known anyone so effortlessly evocative. This is a desert western classic, all beauty and rambling stories about drifters and losers, the normal and the ordinary.
Richmond Fontaine – The Kid From Belmont Street
7. Monkey Swallows the Universe – The Casket Letters
Sometimes God is a bastard. These characters have gone on potentially permanent ‘hiatus’ just as I started to get all excited about them. The Casket Letters is one of the loveliest albums of gentle folk-pop you’re likely to hear, and then they go and pack in it. Swine!
Monkey Swallows the Universe – Down
8. The Sequins – The Death of Style
Genuinely innovative style, boisterous and the very definition of infectious. Who’d have thought Coventry was so much bloody fun!
The Sequins – When the Flames Went Out
9. Ray’s Vast Basement – Starvation Under Orange Trees
Beautiful, wistful and very old fashioned. This is an album of dust-bowl Americana with a sprinkling of loveliness, all based on the work of John Steinbeck which, on listening to the album, is no surprise at all.
Ray’s Vast Basement – California’s Gone
10. The 63 Crayons – Spoils For Survivors
Electronic and relentless, always travelling forwards. The band Kasabian wish they could have been.
The 63 Crayons – The Squeeze
What’s more amazing? The music of Richmond Fontaine, the lyrical genius of Willy Vlautin, or that this is a band that continues to work in near complete obscurity here in the U.S.A.? Thirteen Cities is one of my top picks for 2007 as well.
Cheers.
A friend of mine told me that when I initially reviewed the album. I can’t believe it. Mind you, Pink Floyd and Led Zep are both British bands, but far more popular over in the States. Willard Grant Conspiracy also do better over here than in the States, and they play similar stuff to Richmond Fontaine.