The top 10 albums of 2008: No. 1

The Long Blondes
Couples

Life is short. Life is shorter
if you're a band.

The Long Blondes played
their first gig in 2003. They released their first single in 2004. They released their first album in 2006. They played their first Seattle gig on May 28, 2008. It was their last Seattle gig.

I was lucky to see it, because 12 days later, Dorian Cox, their lead guitarist and songwriter, had a stroke. He was 27. I'm 27. Twenty-seven-year-olds don't have strokes. But sometimes, sadly, they do.

Cox was hospitalized for more than a month. When it became apparent that he might never be able to play guitar again, they agreed to break up the band. On Oct. 19, Cox announced on their Web site, "We have decided to call it a day."

Couples, their second album, is fact sleeping with fiction: It's the photographs of couples the band stuck on a wall while recording; it's the romantic ghosts of Cox and guitarist-keyboardist Emma Chaplin, and those of drummer Screech Louder and bassist Reenie Hollis -- both real onetime couples -- and of those who came before, and of exaggeration, and of imagination.

Couples is a capstone, a headstone and a stone crashing through the windows of fantasy. It's a fairytale punctured by reality, "Sleeping Beauty" with a wall of brambles threatening to stretch forever.


Read my review of Couples here.