St. Paul & the Broken Bones are a six-piece soul band from Alabama. And ironically, Half the City was produced by Alabama Shakes member Ben Tanner. The deep south influence, as well as Tanner’s keen production sense, is really evident throughout the record: there’s a sense of raw vitality to the record that isn’t always evident in modern soul.

It’s also clearly a live band’s record: the album was recorded while the band is on national and international tours, and you can practically feel the sweat dripping off of them due to the lights. It adds to the record’s youthful vigour.

The first track, I’m Torn Up, is really one of those openers that needs to be heard to be understood. These guys are the real deal. The James Brown evidence is evident, and I love the horns section. While these guys rock on tracks like Half the City, they’re at their best on tracks like Don’t Mean a Thing, and Call Me. And listen to that singer! While he’s great on rockers like Sugar Dyed (actually phenomenal), listen to him belt it at a live show! Bands like this only come from Alabama. Stupendous stuff.

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The album only took two days to record, and it’s about 45 minutes of pure jazz bliss. Classics like Flamenco Sketches, So What, and Blue in Green might sound familiar today, but at the time, they were nothing short of revolutionary — and entirely improvised.

What more can you say about a piece of history that will go down as one of the best jazz records of all time? It’s hard to write about something that so many people have already covered, but it’s a jazz record with the soul of a blues piece. Kind of Blue could have been called King of Blues and nobody would have minded.

Kind of Blue should be a permanent staple in your library.

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Musically, this reminds me of the gospel peak of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club in the Howl era (who were covered in Issue 6). I love Isaiah, which might be my favourite track on the record. Ledges is clearly the song Noah is gunning for a hit with. And while Dying Now is as emotionally accomplished of a folk song as a guy in his early 20s can muster, the most emotionally powerful track on the record (at least for me) is Cigarettes. Now there’s a heart-wrenching tune. I might be biased though. Not only is Cigarettes the song I would have written for a bad breakup a couple years back, the entire album is the album I would write right now if I picked up a guitar again.

Noah Gundersen feels like a breath of fresh air in a genre currently owned by pop stars and banjo-swindling electric rockers. Ledges is refreshing not because it’s a response to the current folk scene, but because it feels so natural and authentic that it couldn’t be anything less than real.

In a genre of full of fakers and people looking for the next chart hit, Gundersen is making his own way. And it’s beautiful.

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It feels like Metronomy is playing with their audience, though: Monstrous is where the album takes off. And Love Letters is where it just explodes. Once Love Letters takes off, it really just goes from there and keeps going. Boy Racers is just fundamentally interesting, and it reminds me of some of the electronic trance music that was hitting the scene around 1998 or 1999.

None of that is to say that Metronomy are interested in pursuing the brand of pop that got them so many accolades before. They’re taking the Radiohead route and reacting to their success by running in the opposite direction as quickly as possible. They’ve traded in the precision of their earlier picture-perfect pop records for a warmer, more natural approach that feels more organic and (dare I say it?) traditional.

By the time the album ends with Never Wanted, you, well, never want it to end. So Love Letters is a slow burner, one that starts with its toes and works its way up, and that’s okay. Structurally, it reminds me of The Beatles’s Revolver — and that’s not a complaint.

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In the post-Radiohead world, these guys are going to blend in just fine. Terrors is awesome, with a killer chorus, and Shades busts out a riff not unlike some of the stuff Radiohead would have been doing a few records back. I love My Moons, which has a great backbeat and a super catchy chorus.

Cosmos is one of those rare albums that has zero filler. Every track is great, so I want to write about all of them. Instead, I’m picking just one: How Do You Do It, which has the amazing opening lines:

How do you start when you know it’s gonna end? How do you wait if you never plan ahead? How do you laugh when you see what makes you cry? How do you sleep at night when you know you’re going to die? How do you do it?

Those are some fully loaded questions. Lyrically, they feel like questions Yellow Ostrich is interested in asking because they know everything ends. What sort of music do you make if, one day, you know it’s going to end? It seems clear, based on *Cosmos&, that Yellow Ostrich is planing to leave their mark.

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