News ~ June 2010/I Am Kloot~ 'Sky At Night' released
05.07.10
Crud takes a clearly inappropriate metaphor to throw
the uplifting melancholy of I Am Kloot's new album into
dazzling relief. 'Sky At Night' is released July 05th
2010. Watch the 'Making Of ...' documentary here at
Crud.
23/06/2010
You can’t polish a turd. Whoever said that? Were they
onto something or were they just talking shit? The reality
was always something we knew all along: the turd was
quite happy feeling shit. When you’ve been unceremoniously
squeezed out of someone’s arse and suffered the ignominy
of being chewed up, absorbed and subjected to the usual
slings and arrows of the exhausting digestive process,
you’re unlikely to respond positively to the demands
of civil society, style or no style. Turds bear the
scars of everything we’ve been through – the biological
equivalent of tree rings or glacial ice-cores – so the
last thing you want to do is cover it up or sweeten
it in any way. Get rid of all that smelly albuminous
matter and all that microbial degradation and what's
left? Pooh that isn't brown, isn't really pooh at all.
So when we heard that the hugely talented Guy Garvey
of Elbow had sweetened I Am Kloot’s signature
brand of Northern misanthropy with bucketloads of strings
and sweeping orchestral arrangements, we naturally feared
the worst: if I Am Kloot were not reeking of last night’s
beer and the crude philosophy of a thousand cigarettes,
then they were not really I Am Kloot at all.
But we were wrong.
‘Skt At Night’ packs in all the usual tales
of quietly satisfying isolation, loathing and longing
of metro bus routes, pub tap-rooms and rainy afternoons
in Bolton and lays them against a starry, starrry sky
of dazzling, epic proportions; not so much polishing
a turd as putting it under strobe lights and inviting
a throng of astonished pilgrims to behold it. Why stew
in your own juices when you can saturate the whole unworthy
world with them? It's the same old wounds, the same
old pain but this time Bramwell's tears have a gravity
and sense of purpose rarely seen outside of days of
national mourning and 'Dancing On Ice' skate-offs.
It’s a wonderful and uplifting album, buzzing with
poignancy, rattling with great tunes and shaking with
the grim determination of an authentic delerium tremens
sufferer.
‘Sky At Night’ is released on July 05th through
Shepherd Moon.
'Sky At Night' tracklisting
01. Northern Skies
02. To The Brink
03. Fingerprints
04. Lately
05. I Still Do
06. The Moon Is A Blind Eye
07. Proof
08. Its Just the Night
09. Radiation
10. Same Shoes
