Scoop This Song Out Of My Brain...

...Using some form of futuristic metaphysical song-removal-scoop!


The last five days of my life have been plagued by the last two minutes of Ragged Wood by Fleet Foxes. I'm not as keen on the album as Pitchfork or AV Club, thinking the superb first half of the album is horribly let down by the shapeless medieval folk noodlings of the latter half, and yes, considering how much time I spent going on about Joanna Newsom's Ys (i.e. pretty much all of 2006), I appreciate those who were in my orbit during that period will think I'm taking the piss. But I'm not.

Ragged Wood is in the first half, and is one of the songs of the year, but the chord progressions of the almost ethereal surf lutes guitars in the latter half of the song have stuck in my brain like the head of a tick, and nothing do can shift them. Death Cab For Cutie, Stars of the Lid, Plaid; nothing has worked. It's a mathematical progression that I keep running through, as if it were a Buddhist mantra, but unlike that mantra, I am not achieving transcendental calm. I'm just going slowly mad. Sister Gaius Helen Mohiam said it best; Fleet Foxes, even though I love your song, you just did a Matthew and Son on me. And for that, I unleash this image at you for creating an earworm of mathematical perfection:


Stick that in your lute and smoke it.