When this album came out, two years ago, an eternity in indie terms, I reacted to it like most hipster kids did: I listened to it once, barely registering any of the songs that passed through my head, really liked "Skinny Love," and marked it off as a great album, one of the best of 2008. End of story.
Then I started listening to it more. At first, just once every few months, then slowly more and more, leading up to my present situation, where I absolutely have to hear it once or twice or three times a week.
At first I attributed it to my emoness. Because I'm a little bitch, and this is quintessential little bitch music, and obviously I only listen to it to make me depressed.
Wrong.
I'm actually pretty happy right now, all things considered, and I'm still listening to this album with every ounce of interest and pure unadulterated pleasure that I did when I was wallowing in self-what-have-you a few months back. Because it's a goddamn fucking fantastic album, nearly flawless, perfectly paced, absolutely nailing head-on every emotion it sets to put forth.
I've wanted to name my first kid Emma for as long as I can remember. My burgeoning relationship with this album has all but solidified this idea.
What might have been lost.
This album will be recognized as one of the greatest albums of the 00s. The only other album I can see challenging it is Arcade Fire's "Funeral," which, from the instant it was released, demanded the kind of attention and praise rendering it an automatic top-5 nominee for such a position. But this album is different. It's a grower. A true grower, not in the sense people use for pseudo-experimental pieces like Merriweather Post Pavilion. This is an album absolutely drenched in emotion and meaning and painstakingly precise notes of ecstasy and agony and everything in between, all of which is rendered impossible to notice with a single listen. That's the definition of a grower: an album that isn't too dense to enjoy on the first listen, but truly is too dense to understand on the first listen.
My listening habits include switching between full albums and a playlist of special tracks, which I ceremoniously dubbed "Good Stuff." Slowly but surely, every one of the tracks on this album made it onto that playlist, starting with "Skinny Love" and ending with "Blindsided." Every single track is immensely enjoyable, understated enough to not give away the essence of the track, yet visibly powerful enough to keep you listening over and over and over to uncover the densely packed subtle tones that lead you to the true meaning of every line, every syllable, every backtracked percussive strike, every pluck of every string layered on top of one another, trying to be lost, yet begging to be found, every sound waiting to be sound, to be appreciated, to be dragged kicking and screaming into your soul and placed stubbornly among those dead, lost moments in your life you treasure more than the very living experiences you go through on a daily basis.
Someday my pain
Will mark you.
It takes exactly three listens to discover how truly terrible this album is, because the first two are mostly spent trying to recover from "Lust For Life," which is one of the best opening tracks to come out in a long, long time. On that third listen, you come back down to Earth and realize the truth.
