She Reads Leviathan

Midlake's "Head Home" has been my favorite song for a few weeks now. I'm kind of late on board with Midlake, I know, but you get into the middle of your 30s and it's hard to pay attention to "the scene" anymore. I rely on the stuff that floats to the surface of the collective conscious. Most of the time, that stuff is forgettable. But this... this song seems to have its own realm, its own atmosphere. The whole album, The Trials of Van Occupanther, is a concept album about, I don't know, frontier development or something. It's all about people building houses in the woods, farming, and surviving winters with low rations. I love the risk of writing a 70s throwback rock album about the American frontier. That, in an of itself, is worth the admission price. But the music is also uniformly brilliant, it turns out. Bask: