I have a new favorite…

I was kind of bummed about discovering Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavillion so soon after the new year, setting up 2009, I thought, as one long anti-climax. (And I am anything but anti-climax, personally.) Well, just goes to show you that life is unpredictable. The Floodlight Collective, a new album by Lotus Plaza (that's Deerhunter guitarist Lockett Pundt), has taken over my #1 spot for this year. In my Dusted review, up today, I call it “the most beautiful record of the year.”

Here’s a little bit from that review:

There is a dream-like quality to the whole record, a sense of endless vaulting spaces and time stretched out and slowed down. Light seems to be a metaphor, in songs like “Whiteout” and the abstract title cut. You have the sense of staring into immense, overwhelming brightness. Even the cover image is flooded with whiteness. It’s a photo of a young boy, maybe Pundt, on a rocking horse, overexposed to pastel tints. What you lose in clarity, you gain in pure buoyant energy.

And here’s the rest:


Pundt uploaded a bunch of his songs-in-progress to the Deerhunter blog . Here’s a link to “What Grows?”