The new Cardigans album, Long Gone Before Daylight, finally has a stateside release and people are talking it up.
But did you know that donewaiting.com England writer Steve Miller had that album as his #1 favorite release of 2003? This is what he wrote:
Long Gone Before Daylight is a staggering album with not a single misstep on it. It?s a seamless melding of Nina?s country leanings and the bands previous pop power, and oh, it?s so forlorn and resigned. It?s worlds apart from the indie pop of their earlier career, older wiser, bruised. Nina?s obviously been through the wringer but like a boxer who doesn?t know when to call it a day, she keeps getting up to give love another go. Wrapping gorgeous country-pop around depressing lyrics, it?s an object lesson in subversion and it?s to their credit that despite it being such a down album, it never pisses you off.
Lyrical dexterity abounds, my favourite still being the verse in ?For What It?s Worth?, where her previous pledge of “I love you” becomes “I like you.”
It?s this years great lost album, surely destined to be rediscovered in a dozen years, and yes, it?s the one album this year that speaks to me, that touches me, and that can make me cry, and if I was asked to boil this year down and save one album for posterity, it would be this one, a hundred times out of a hundred.
The Cardigans are on a tour this summer with Liz Phair, and I forget the name of the tour, but I remember it being awful.