I read a glowing review of the new album by Patrick Wolf today on NME.COM and I was pleased to find that they had made a preview of the entire album available in RealAudio format. After a bit of dicking aroung with my browser to make their embedded audio player work properly, I started listening to the album and I’ve got to say, it’s damn stunning! Wolf was trained as a violinist, and his work with that instrument is all over the album. (He’s also a fan of the ukelele and theremin). Written in a seaside shack in Cornwall the entire album is beautifully arranged, recalling the best moments of The Arcade Fire’s debut, as well as his Tomlab label-mates, The Books. At any rate, I’ve said enough about this. You really need to hear it for yourself. And in order to make that as easy as possible, I’ve improved upon the original NME.COM presentation of the RealAudio tracks by creating this SMIL presentation (which should work on any computer with a recent version of Real Player installed). I was inspired to create this by a note on Patrick’s site wherein he complains that MP3 downloading (in addition to impacting sales) often leads listeners to experience an album incompltely or out of order. Well, so do poorly embedded RealAudio players that require listeners to click “Next” at the end of each track and won’t allow simple controls like “Pause” or “Volume,” but I digress. And anyway, you won’t have to deal with any of that BS with my SMIL link to the album. Do think about picking up a copy if you enjoy it though; I’m sure the RealAudio source files won’t be posted up forever!
(Oh, and if you’ll permit me one more digression, it’s this: Did you know that if you download RealPlayer from bbc.co.uk it comes without all the annoying “ad-ware” and related crap that usually gets bundled with it?)