Is it too early to begin compiling TMT’s Favorite 50 Albums of 2012? Would it be unfair to campaign for an album’s inclusion roughly two weeks before that album is even released? After earning the deeply respectable number four spot on our Favorite 50 Albums of 2011 for An Empty Bliss Beyond This World (TMT Review), I’m surprised The Caretaker a.k.a. Leyland Kirby hasn’t decided to pack up all of his 1920s memorabilia and call it quits at the apparent pinnacle of his career. Instead, on January 23, he’ll be releasing his newest album Patience (After Sebald), on CD, which, ignoring the relatively minute possibility of a significant drop-off in quality, will almost certainly make our year-end list come December. (And if I’m wrong, I’ve been told that, as a consequence of making such outlandish predictions, I’ll be forcibly relegated to reviewing jazz standards from the early 20th century. Swell!)
As The Quietus reports, Patience (After Sebald) is a soundtrack to Grant Gee’s film of the same name, about influential German writer W.G. Sebald. The film premiered earlier this month in the UK, and Gee reportedly contacted Kirby about the soundtrack back in 2009. The film is described as a “multi-layered… essay on landscape, art, history, life and loss,” while Kirby himself characterizes the soundtrack as “a lot more of a winter album” and “a lot darker” than An Empty Bliss, which he began work on subsequently. There doesn’t appear to be anything terribly new about the way Kirby approached the recording of this album (sampling from old records and creatively highlighting the effects of degradation), but as they say, if it ain’t broke…
Meanwhile, check out this fantastic new video for “A relationship with the sublime,” directed by Video Marsh:
Patience (After Sebald) tracklist:
01. Everything is on the point of decline
02. As if one was sinking into sand
03. Approaching the outer limits of our solar system
04. When the dog days were drawing to an end
05. A last glimpse of the land being lost forever
06. The homesickness that was corroding her soul
07. I have become almost invisible, to some extent like a dead man
08. In the deep and dark hours of the night
09. No one knows what shadowy memories haunt them to this day
10. Increasingly absorbed in his own World
11. Isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance
12. Now the night is over and the dawn is about to break
• The Caretaker: http://brainwashed.com/vvm/artists/the_caretaker.html
• History Always Favours The Winners: http://brainwashed.com/vvm
