Lost At Sea

Import CD!! While its predecessor had a scratchy, forlorn nobility, "Lost At Sea" is a record packed with beautiful fully-blossomed nuggets of intelligent angst, wit and excellent musical ideas. Jeanne d'Arse's lyrical touch is more alive than ever with the best lines and titles and impossibly fine details of messy, sticky, drunken weekends. He uses the sea as his guiding metaphor - stormy, calm, engulfing, vast, journeying, time-suspending, aging. Jeanne's voice curls around the speakers and the ears like the warm breath of a jarred uncle and his bittersweet past. "You Always Find Me In The Toilet At Parties" proposes the sound of the Dirty 3, with gypsy mandolin replacing the gypsy violin. There's a funkiness about the whole album that wasn't present before - like the way "How Much Has Ended Here" almost breaks into an atomic piano boogie and then unleashes a buzzing, teeth-baring organ-outro. And there's the unadulterated hand-holding pop and sweet scientific notions of "The Fusing of the Continental Plates", with JG Gollier's delicate, oh-so-versatile drums. And there's the ominous bells, the use of the word "gee-eyed", the light sprinkling (is it?) rain sample, the guitars constantly cutting out fragile jangling ripples on the surface. And the record drifts off on an ethereal blanket of My Bloody Valentine-styled radioactivity with "While I Gather Dust". Best Irish album of the year so far. Reference: Will Oldham, Songs: Ohia, Neil Young.