Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Albums Of The Decade - 92. Bibio - A Mineral Love

92. BIBIO - A MINERAL LOVE 

Underrated sepia beige. Could there be a worse line than that to sell this album? It's folk with rose-tinted lenses, it's a dove cooing, it's spring spilling into summer. The production is as angelic as a delight, as a dessert. Normally. I'd abhor something so mucically fluffy - but Bibio has the depth to line this output with substance.

I first ran into Bibio at the top of the decade; glued to 2009's Ambivalence Avenue,making a big move to Taiwan in 2010. As I played tracks like Lovers' Carvings to my new roommates, it stopped them in their tracks. That timelessness of summer was captured in a few chords of gold, as Stephen Wilinson gave the bucolic sounds that chastened the city sprawl that we were feeling.

Advance it to 2016 and as I was leaving Asia, the technicolor hues were seeping through the audio, as four albums in-between had shown that Bibio, as a package, had finally put the feather in his cap. And. while it's rarely just a record that stands alone to represent an artist during the last ten years, at least with this effort, it typifies idealism in a laudative sense.




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