12. Other MenWake Up Swimming

This is a bit of a wild card. This has really gone unnoticed. I’d kind of left the world of that angular guitar thing, and then I heard this and I was like, "Oh god, this is just wonderful." The guy responsible, Rob Crow, is one of my favourite songwriters. He was in a band called Heavy Vegetable, who I was a really big fan of, and then another called Thingy, and then Pinback. But this is a one-off. Around 2007, he got together with two guys from Heavy Vegetable and just made this great, strange, angular guitar-pop album. I love it. I keep coming back to it. You play it a hundred times and keep finding more in it. It’s beautifully recorded, and even in the Rob Crow canon, it’s an oddity. It’s incredible. Heavy Vegetable was very pop-based, but this is much less so. It’s very melodic, but doesn’t really have choruses. It winds along its own funny path, and everything on it could only have come from this record.