When I first attempted to collate Necessary Evil 2016 back in the entirely understandable period of late 2016, I decided to write the ‘reviews’ alphabetically first before getting the abacus out and working out where the would be placed scientifically. This was a terrible mistake

-3

It was when I reached the Bs and had to rack my frazzled, depressed and artistically bankrupt brain for some response to the chiefly fantastic record by Band of Horses that I first began to seriously notice that I could no longer write, that to bleed each word of unmitigated drivel onto the page was an overwhelming effort, an effort to produce absolute shite for the eventual casual scrutiny of maybe four people in the fucking world who would read it. Suddenly, the fact that I was writing for nobody began to seriously upset me. I thought about how I’d revealed in the last pages of my book that my current disability came about because of a suicide attempt, but not a single person got to the end of the book and so it wasn’t really a confession at all

-1

To talk about ‘Why Are You OK’ I conceived a tale of an actual band made up of horses, and went into explicit and dismal detail of how they’d play their guitars with their fucking hooves, and incorporated lyrics and song titles into the story and

 

If I had released that piece to the blogosphere, it would have been by some distance the worst thing to happen in 2016, and would be the sole bad mark on a year otherwise made glorious by democracy finally wrestling power from the elite

+10

BoH can rock hard when they want to, so win

5 Guns ‘n’ Roses Points

Now however, as my passion and ability burn bright once again and it matters not a stinky shit that nobody reads this genius!

+8

And I was kinda struggling to write about this album again, so just wrote about the last time I struggled to write about it!

Bof are close to brilliant when they stay away from the horrors of country music- which as well you know is the sound that Satan makes when you ask him to describe hay; the sound that foxes have sex to block out; music that panders to it’s own fanbase by confirming how stupid they are; a barely-melodic rejoinder to evolution- as when they play more in the spheres of rock and indie they can produce pure magic that’s good enough for you to forget the numerous country music genocides they are ocassionally liable to dabble in

+5

I wanted to say ‘abortion’ again, but I feel having already used it once to describe baseball I should perhaps try a slightly different phrasing

You know what? I think I might have got this album mixed up with the Plants and Animals record when I wrote the chart down, they should probably switch places because that album’s actually much better than this… 

Metacritic: +68

Whaaaaaaaaaa? Guys, guys, whaaaaaaaaaaa? Come on! C’mon!

Length 49 minutes –3

Best Lyric: ‘Nothing else ever seems to hurt like the smile on your face/When it’s only in my memory, it don’t hit me quite the same’  +1

Number of AMAZING songs: 1 (+10)

Is the last song just the first track but played on Ukulele? No -1

Total 113

https://bandofhorses.bandcamp.com/