Consider this album an honorary and deserving addition to the Best of 2011 list. To be honest, I had TW Walsh‘s Songs of Pain and Leisure for some time before I sat down to listen to it- it happens sometimes, I’d been listening to Make It Rhyme on repeat, and once I dug into the rest of the album I felt like it was a whole other world that I’d been missing out on. This album is beautiful. From what I understand, by virtue of the fact that I’ve been a loyal Pedro the Lion/Bazan fan for years- is TW Walsh is an anomaly in music. According to what I’ve been reading about him, he mastered over 40 EPs and LPs in the last year and released this record back in October, not to mention having produced records by Sufjan Stevens and playing solo for years.

There’s a real elegance to this collection of songs. Everything feels nurtured, with careful and equal parts attention given to lyricism and instrumentation. And man, the lyrics are fantastic. The album title itself suggest a co-dependence between pain and leisure. The lack of one doesn’t even always mean the presence of another. However stylistically varied between rock/blues/funk/indie – they’re all narratives pointing at a specific destination. Seeking truth and safety all at once – these things tend to conflict.

One of my favorite tracks, “My Little Brother” has a gorgeous guitar tone and a sweeping build that’s got a total Wilco vibe. Make It Rhyme playfully alludes to the relationship between Bazan and Walsh (I’m only assuming that’s why Bazan covered the track). Another beautifully sparse track is “Struggle and Strife” where he sings, “same love, same hate, same fear, new struggle and strife” he illustrates these cyclical pains, these manifestations of the same things we distract ourselves from dealing with. When he sings about being a man, he sings in a hushed tone, like a little boy. There’s a tenderness to it all, a kind of emotional intellect only found out of understanding pain intimately, and emerging from it- that’s what art is though, right?

This is the kind of record you’re going to want on vinyl. Which you can grab right over here.

Tags: TW Walsh

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