Regular readers will be thinking to themselves “What the hell’s going on here? Four posts in as many days?”. Yes, folks, I’ve decided to finally get round to posting some of the stuff I’ve been blithely listening to over the past few weeks. This is, in part to rectify the situation in which the post-stuff-on-the-blog bit of my brain has been going “La de dah de dah!” and looking at the trees and the flowers and the sky and whatnot rather than concentrating on bloody posting.

Stupid brain.

There’s something irredeemably dour about The Magnolia Electric Company. Their final album as Songs:Ohia before changing their name to The Magnolia Electric Company, called, er, “The Magnolia Electric Company”¹, was a gloriously maudlin number, in which even the upbeat numbers sounded like they were giving up the ghost and wanted to go and lie down and sob gently for a little bit.

Needless to say, I rather liked it, “I’ve Been Riding With The Ghost” in particular, which drifted back onto my iPhone the other week². But for whatever reason I haven’t quite got round to ever buying anything else of theirs.

This is a situation I hope to change with their new album, “Josephine”. The title track is another lovely downbeat affair, a tale about a man who’s gone and done wrong by his woman. It’s had me wandering around the house dolefully wailing “Oh what a fool I’ve been” in a cod-Americana accent. If we had a cat, it’d have run away by now.

If you like your Americana as gloomy as a November night in North Dakota, this is just for you. They’re out and about touring too, including two shows in London. One is at the marvellous Bush Hall, the other at the nearly as marvellous ICA:

8/27 – Amsterdam, The Netherlands – Paradiso
8/28 – Berlin, Germany – Lido
8/29 – Aarhus, Denmark- VoxHall
8/30 – Malmo, Sweden – Debaser
8/31 – Hamburg, Germany – Knust
9/02 – London, UK – Bush Hall
9/03 – Brighton, UK – Duke of Yorkshire Picture House
9/04 – Leeds, UK – Brudenell Social Club
9/05 – Stradbally, Ireland – Electric Picnic 2009
9/06 – Porthcrawl, UK – Seascape Festival at The Grand Pavillion
9/07 – London, UK – Institute Of Contemporary Arts
9/09 – Stuttgart, Germany – Schocken
9/10 – Zurich, Switzerland – El Lokal

There really are far too many dates to post here, so please visit their site to see the whole tour.

That’s it for today. I’m out a-drinking tomorrow so I very much doubt I’ll be posting anything except a garbled 3am post about how I was forced to sing “Suspicious Minds” by Elvis Presley.

¹ I wish more bands did this. Mew should definitely think about changing their name to the title of their new album.

² If anyone at O2, Apple or Carphone Warehouse fancies sending me a nice new 32Gb iPhone GS, that would be lovely thanks. In the meantime I’ll just have to keep shuffling my 80Gb collection around.

MP3: Josephine by Magnolia Electric Company

Buy “Josephine” (CD/MP3)

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