Today, two songs about wishing other people were dead.

Herman Dune - "Walk, Don't Run". So Herman Dune have released the finest album of their career, one of the very finest albums of the year, an album full of so much humour, feeling, joy, sadness, and so much contradictory human experience that it feels like it ought to have been a group's life-work, the result of thirty years of sweat, tears and recording experience.

Many of you may have heard "Not On Top". It's extraordinary, silly, plucky, a happy blues to persuade you to get out of bed. At their website you can listen to "Good for No-One", brooding, self-loathing, a sort of opposite.

"And then you told me we had some chemistry / and I ran away and scared the shit out of two little Greek kids who called me a freak ... And I rushed to Seven Sisters and I met the magic rabbi there and he called me by sweet name and he took me in his magic cape and he told me the mission that god had planned for me / he said take a plane to Brazil and buy some good drugs there, baby, and then bring them back in your guitar case and sell them at twice the price you paid."

But here's "Walk, Don't Run," less funny than some of the others but jumpy in the shoulders, stamping over pavement cracks and nasty tufts of grass. The way that extra words are stuck at the end of lines ("bastards", "baby"), I think of Datarock's vivacious "Computer Camp Love". But there's none of that glee, here, just a triumphant pissed-off-ness. Julie Doiron's messy backup vocals are glorious, glorious, this tangled-up chorus full of snippy anger and gentle humanity. It's a song for an After, resigned but still raging, surprising yourself at the corpuscles of anger in your heart. You suddenly notice that your hands are in fists, and you don't know why. Oh wait, you do know why.

[buy US/Canada | UK]

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Jon-Rae and the River - "Prayer to God".

Popsheep taught me about Jon-Rae Fletcher. So now I've ordered the album and boy, you folks ought to as well.

"Prayer To God" is perhaps the most off-kilter of the songs on this album, the verses that don't quite scan, the half-collapsing swagger of the piano and bass. Inevitably, however, there's much to be gained from this gambit; we'll cheer, we'll roar, we'll explode when everything works out, outta nowhere, "THAT'S WHERE YOU OUGHTA KILL HER, IN THAT PARTICULAR PLACE!" Oh yes, it's an angry one, this - angry and harmless, drunk, on the verge of tears and laughter. There's something so wonderful about the sentiment: Jon-Rae wants these two people dead ("him, just fuckin' kill him!" ha!), but for all his Lear-like hollering, he'd never, never do it himself. No - this is a prayer to God, a plea, a hysterical request. It's a torrent of feeling, really, a release; everything coming coursing out through the mouth (yes), all that stored resentment, and just as he runs out of energy there's a girl there singing too, a comrade in arms or an alcohol mirage, but foremost she's simply some company, someone he can sit beside as he finishes yelling and sobers, sobers up.

[buy]

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Over at the John Guilt website, you can listen to the title track from their new EP.

It's called "By Any Other Name" and it's about Winona Laura Horowitz and Robert Zimmerman, only not really. It's a handsome song, a tender one, and it doesn't linger on the things it holds dearest: it wouldn't want to break them. The strings are great, thick cords of sound, like human hair. And just when you think you have it figured out, there's pizzicatto, an organ, a lap steel, and the sky opens up a bit wider.

Josh Rouse better watch out -- people are coming up from behind. (Also: Nashville sucks.)

[buy]

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Ok, again, if anyone knows anyone at mp3blogs.org, please tell them to update their freakin' links.

(Teaching the Indie Kids, Catchdubs, My Old Kentucky Blog, Final Fantasy, Blogotheque, Scissorkick, Scenestars, Leaf and Lime, Golden Fiddle, Popdrivel, if you wouldn't mind as well?)