You know what I love about having ears? That feeling you get when you hear a song for the first time, and it completely overwhelms you. It starts with a buzz in your tiny little eardrums, and extends like a golden thread all the way down to your toe tips. Before you know it, your whole body is pulsating, your mind is scrambling to drink in the lyrics and all you want to do is press repeat, repeat, repeat.
This was my experience when I first heard Little Lion Man from Mumford And Sons. Sounding more like the name of a white goods chain or line of fruit-filled jams, this British band has been making me swoon with its banjo-flecked brand of melodic, bluegrass pop.
Mumford And Sons, a folk four-piece from London, have been around for a couple of years, they have toured with the likes of Laura Marling and they have a sweet selection of songs on their MySpace page for your aural pleasure. The video to Little Lion Man can be found by clicking here, and it’s gonna be the lead single from their debut album due to land in October, called Sigh No More. I won’t be once I get my hands on it, that’s for sure.
This song, and the tracks available on their MySpace are all dripping with melancholy and are surely featuring on someone’s breakup mixtape right about now. They’re painfully beautiful though, and unexpectedly, come with an explicit lyrics warning. As well as the banjos we’ve got a thumping double-bass, some tinkly organs, percussion that builds each song into a glorious crescendo, and a lead vocal that in my opinion is London’s answer to Jae from The Panics. It started in my eardrums and it’s steadily growing into a full-blown obsession. Bring on October, Sigh.
Mini-mix time and I’m going to unabashedly capitalise on Tuesday’s red dusty skies as fodder for this week’s theme. It was seriously freaky waking up and thinking I had either stumbled into a box of orange tic-tacs overnight, or that perhaps my eyes were bleeding.
The only thing freakier was all the boring-ass status updates on stalkbook claiming the apocalypse and other end of the world type scenarios. Nothing more than Mother Nature doing her thing. Here are three of my top songs about all things stormy.
Dust In the Wind – Kansas
The most appropriate song I could think of. It’s also in my hair, my eyes, and after riding my bike to work, quite possibly my lungs.
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Rain City – Turin Brakes
When the rain mixes with the dust, things are going to get mighty muddy and mighty slippery. And that’s how you make clay*.
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Hurricane – Bob Dylan
I don’t really think B.D is singing about inclement weather, and I don’t really think there’s one of these brewing in Sydney right now, but I do like the ominous feeling this song casts when coupled with looking out my window right now.
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* This may or may not be true. Katie Dazzle has never studied clay making.
