First Aid Kit - Stay Gold

These days I'm pretty bad about listening to albums all the way through - it's all too tempting to skip through after a first couple of listens, just listening to the songs that've caught my ear rather than absorbing records as a whole. So what that means, though, is that I have to particularly like a new album for it to induce me to repeatedly listen to it in toto - which is just what Stay Gold has done.

It's not really a surprise, I guess, seeing as The Big Black & The Blue and The Lion's Roar were both excellent; if it lacks any individual moments as immediately utterly swoon-worthy as "Emmylou" or "To A Poet", it's maybe a touch overall more consistent. Thoughts and things I especially like:

• Three strong songs straight out of the blocks: "My Silver Lining", "Master Pretender", "Stay Gold", all of which you like straight away and only realise on repeated listens how actually interesting they are.
• "Cedar Lane" is as good as any country ballad recorded this side of the year 2000.
• The way the "we" is drawn out on "Shattered & Hollow" makes me think of Taylor Swift's "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together", and once that got in my head, the whole thing reminded me, in a vague, shadowy way of that other.
• I've drawn comparisons between First Aid Kit and Neko Case before; the surging "The Bell" again evokes the Canadian redhead.
• There's got to be a reason why the figure (trope) of the small town waitress - generally with some combination of a Past, a rich inner life or both - is such a popular one...I guess it's an archetype, or metaphor, that people can identify with. Anyhow, rarely can it have been set to such a triumphant musical backdrop as here ("Waitress Song").
• And just generally, the way that the underlying 'folk-ness' of their sound so clearly comes through, even if all embroidered and prettied up with electric instruments, country urges, little twinkling details and everything else.

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As an aside, albums that I've listened to all the way through at least 10 times since I got itunes, according to itunes (number of times in brackets):

The xx - xx (23)
The National - Boxer (20)
The National - High Violet (20)
Amaya Laucirica - Early Summer (16)
Jen Cloher & the Endless Sea - Hidden Hands (15)
Laura Cantrell - No Way There From Here (15)
Beach House - Bloom (14) 
Sally Seltmann - Heart That's Pounding (14)
Wild Nothing - Gemini (14)
Holly Miranda - The Magician's Private Library (13)
First Aid Kit - Stay Gold (12)
Robert Plant - Band of Joy (12)
Girls - Album (11)
Patty Griffin - American Kid (11)
The War on Drugs - Lost in the Dream (11)
Aimee Mann - Bachelor No 2 (10)
First Aid Kit - The Lion's Roar (10)
Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes (10)
Grimes - Visions (10)
Lykke Li - Wounded Rhymes (10)
Patty Griffin - Impossible Dream (10)
The xx - Coexist (10)