Love Songs of The Hanging Gardens (2005) is the album that made house music 100% ok for me. I can handle anything now! It was kind of a trial by fire: K.P. leans to the italo side, with really expressive vocal harmonies that sound straight out of '80s guitar jazz, and strings that are specifically styled after classic disco. Oh, and the whole album follows a theme about love in outer space. DORK PARADE.But if you just trust that this will be ok, and let the music into your head, it is the most rewarding album in the entire cosmos. Seriously. When I first got it, there were about two weeks where I had to listen to it twice through before bed every night, just staring at the stereo or laying on the floor with headphones.It's partly that the production is super precise and spatial, so it is very sensory. And then it is partly how sincere and vulnerable the songs sound. The lyrics involve a lot of feelings about romance (the love-in-space bits are metaphorical, not sci-fi), and the music involves a lot of feelings about, e.g., disco. Apparently Mr. Polar got kicked out of Juliard for spending all his time working on these dance tracks, and then left New York to live in a rural shed and mend his crushed spirit. That at least implies a certain commitment, I think.Also, Kelley Polar's handclaps are second only to the ones in "Where Did Our Love Go":/music/The_Supremes by The Supremes. (Listen and learn, dancepunk.)The album seems-- and granted my perspective might be skewed by those two weeks spent watching this album like a movie-- to have a conceptual structure that is almost on a narrative level. You go on a journey when you listen to it; each song resolves into the next and then creates new tension. (That might be another reason I find it hard to put down-- you don't feel done when a song ends, you want the next one.)This is the fourth track, "My Beauty In The Moon." It wasn't my first favourite, but it is up there now. The beats move in a retro, travel-to-deep-space type of way (and what is that one sound-- scissors?), but it's the vocals that rip my heart out. The harmonies! The breathy bits! It's crazy!
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