Created
Jan 14 2009
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Simon Bookish - Everything/Everything
can you build the atom, particle by particle?
2008 has just ended, and already comes the time for repentance. The chart I posted just about three weeks ago in these pages has been quietly, though drastically, rearranged because of the discovery of a new, radically original record.
Simon Bookish is a 30-year-old English gentleman, a friend of Patrick Wolf who even played in his first record, opened a concert for Late of the Pier last year and usually works in the background of the records of others as a mixer. His first two albums were a complete disaster: a bunch of laptop-made crappy music and lousy songwriting. So figure my distrust while approaching
Everything/Everything, his new record.
Well, I was just plain wrong. This time, Bookish employs all his musical background (he studied at the Conservatory) and enjoys the help of a real orchestra of wind instruments. His arrangements are something that pop music still had to bump into: it's as if
Philip Glass built them up and stuffed them into the music of
Divine Comedy (Neil Hannon's band) and
Patrick Wolf himself.
The result is nothing less than amazing. Below you can find the first three songs of the album, but my advice is that you buy/get the whole thing as soon as you can, because this record is destined to change the way great music will have to be built to fit into new standards in a few years from now.
Simon Bookish -
The Flood (vaguely reminiscent of The Passage)
Simon Bookish -
Dumb Terminal (it starts like The Books, follows Divine Comedy-ish, turns in the direction of Go-Kart Mozart sprayed in Bowie, and ends up... no-wave, with the wind section going crazy. Astonishing)
Simon Bookish -
Portrait of the Artist as a Fountian (needless to say, my favourite)
