Eating my words

Oh Mercy have pulled their ingeniously titled new album "Great Barrier Grief" fresh out of the oven and they have me eating my words.

When I saw these guys warm up for Ben Folds a few years ago, I thought they were a bit underwhelming.

To brutally honest, I declared that they were boring and should be kicked off the stage because I wanted to revel in the magic of Mr Folds. But having nibbled on their album throughout the week, I realised that Oh Mercy create subtle songs that are very pleasing to the ear. In fact halfway through my first listen of the track "Let me go", I was overcome with chills and yelped out "classic! classic!".

Lessons learnt:

1. "Great Barrier Grief" is a nugget of aussie aural gold

2. Unlike Oh Mercy, I am not subtle in the least.

Lyrics in the liner notes

I saw the original white, middle class male - Ben Folds at the Opera House last September. He charmed the crowd with some songs that he was working on with Nick Hornby [whose essays I adore –The Polysyllabic Spree had me squealing like pig for slaughter] I’m not sure if anyone else can make a MySpace site seems so effortlessly lyrical [Levi Johnson’s Blues]

Ben Folds promised that the album would be released sometime in late 2010 – well it’s now late 2010 and the album is so close to dropping its causing ants to run around in circles.

Lonely Avenue has been made specifically to be listened to on vinyl… it’s out in Australia September 24.

In the mean time you can sup on this song, while shopping for record players on ebay.

It features spoken word by Nick Hornby and the quirky antics of Pomplamoose....I wish all news were delivered to Ben Folds mouth popping in the background.

Here are some more of Nick Hornby's hilarious soap box lyrics that had to be cut from the song (lest the song be 6 minutes long)



"I’ll tell you what they should do to improve women’s soccer: lower the crossbar. It’s obvious! No female goalkeeper is six feet six! So in the women’s game, balls keep sailing over the keeper’s head. Makes them look amateurish. Drop the crossbar by six inches."



"If this stupid kitten walks over the keyboard of my laptop again, I swear I’m going to put her in a bag with a couple of bricks and drop her in the Thames. I’m not even joking. And I’d tell the kids she’d run away, like the last one. The last one actually did run away. He added hastily."