Some thoughts from the future:
There was a noticeable gap between the last two posts, as the family went to Canada on vacation for a couple of weeks – I remarked on it at the time, but perhaps hadn’t quite grasped the significance of what that trip was about to mean to us all.
Still, I remember vividly listening to ‘Caress’ on the flight over, and again in the hotel in Vancouver as we tried to rediscover our equilibrium and banish the jetlag. Maybe it was because of that that this review feels odd to me – I’m happy rediscovering ‘Fountain’ for sure, but at no point do I try to review it as a whole – and I think that’s why my optimism was misplaced; I genuinely did enjoy finding it again, but I’ve scarcely listened to it since, and I think that’s partly because there’s so much other good stuff out there, and partly because, for all my enthusiasm, it really doesn’t quite hang together as a coherent whole.
I put it away when I’d finished writing that post, and I doubt I’ve listened to the whole thing more than a couple of times since.
I did, however, buy a vinyl copy of ‘Archive’ some months back – replacing my original with another UK pressing was a joyful moment, and I definitely did listen to all of it then, so I know for sure I’ve heard it all the way through at least once since 2005…