You can download this song for free! by clicking on the album art.

It's lyric discovery time_!_ At 1:08 the lyrics go:

"He said I'm taking the farm out from under your knees / said I'm taking the air and ...

Taking the air and what? Here's what I got: "and the ? that you're leaning upon" so I'm just missing a word. I leave it to you, dear readers, what is he singing? Whoever guesses it can go update the lyrics on SongMeanings.

I missed so many good albums last year. I don't think I should do a "Best of 2009" so far this year as I am so slow on the uptake. My music discovery comes in violent spurts, where I ravenously devour gobs of music in a short amount of time and then wallow in it for a while until I feel that I need something new to catch my fancy. Sometimes it takes me a while to put my ear to the rail. I somehow missed all the hype in 2004 and didn't discover Arcade Fire until about this time of year in 2005. If I had a hipster badge, I would turn it in.

Would this song have ended up in my Best of 2008? Probably. Probably with a lot of other songs, too.

This is where I get to say something that I don't seem to often say about new albums: I quite like this one! It's split into sections by somewhat lengthy instrumental sections that are superfluous for the most part, but as a whole the album works quite well. You can download this song for free, but really you should buy the whole thing. Pitchfork's review says that it's a road trip album, and I suppose I agree. Just be careful, because if you turn the volume down too far, it loses a lot of its power and turns into a great bedtime album. (So it's like two albums in one!)

Most notable, of course, is the fact that the singer sounds like some high-pitched bastard child clone hybrid of Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, who alternates between impressions of them, sometimes on the same song, jumping from Bruce Springsteen (like on this song) to Bob Dylan (like on Buenos Aires Beach, which has two of the most fun "oh-oh-oh-oh-oh" syllable stuttering parts I have ever heard in a song ever in my whole goddamn life) as if he was meant to do so his whole life. The music backing him up sounds roughly the same: it's familiar, as if you've got an E Street cover band playing shoegaze reinterpretations of the Boss' greatest.

Overall, this album is totes win. I'm totes hooked.