Album of the Day 8/23/10

Every day, we count down the 1000 best albums of all time all the way to #1. Monday’s album is #890:

The Snow – I Die Every Night

As we are officially on vacation, this part of the countdown features albums that we had the good fortune to discover when they came out: one of the great challenges about following music and writing about it is to identify a genuine classic when you see it and this is one of them, our first from the year 2010. The Snow’s nuanced, stylistically diverse art-rock masterpiece, their second album, came out in January. Guitarist Pierre de Gaillande contributes the soul-infused title track, reassurance for a would-be suicide, along with the understatedly apocalyptic anthem The Silent Parade – about the snowstorm to end all snowstorms – and the amusingly metaphorical, tongue-in-cheek Reptile. Keyboardist/torch singer Hilary Downes’ equally artsy, richly melodic and lyrical songs here include the stately opening cut, Albatross; the ominously symbolic, unexpectedly syncopated Undertow and the understatedly bitter, minor-key chamber-rock ballad Shadows and Ghosts. And as brilliant as this album is, we can’t figure out whether it’s actually the best album of 2010 or not. It’s been a good year – for music at least. Stay tuned.