Ahhhh, Autumn. It seems to be the most fleeting of seasons, so short compared to the melting, dripping down your arm heat of summer and the brutal, seeps into your pores cold of winter. The season where the sky is a perfect blue– summer’s hard sun overexposes it to almost white; autumn’s sideways light reveals a deeper, darker, purer blue.

Ok, ok, so we’re not really getting that nice, crisp sweater weather this year. With the exception of an abberant two or three days of 50ish weather, it seems like Global Warming may have robbed us of that oh-so-perfect season. Fear not! These albums are fair weather Fair Isle sweaters for your ears.

Any long time Res reader knows that my favorite autumn album is Plaid’s horribly underappreciated and unjustly panned 2003 release Spokes. I was a great fan of Andy and Ed long before the album came out, and I couldn’t understand long-time fans who loathed it and thought they’d lost their touch completely. I thought they’d made a masterpiece with emotion and beauty that they’d never come close to before and have yet to replicate since (I still have faith).

It went out of print after the first run did so dismally, so I am going to put tracks up with every one of my top autumn albums posts until you have the whole thing.

That’s right. The whole album. Because no one’s losing money over you getting it, since there’s none to be made, I’m going to give the whole thing away. I do so, however, with a caveat– while I’m only going to give away two tracks at a time, this is not a “best listened to on shuffle” kind of album (none of these will be, but I expect that you’ll buy or otherwise procure the other albums in their entirety from some other source). You can listen to two tracks a day, and that’s fine, but make sure that after you’ve gotten them all together that you listen to it as a whole. Spokes is not a series of short stories but a gorgeous and cohesive narrative. And if you really love it and you have a turntable, get thee to Warpmart and buy it on vinyl. Seriously.

That being said, we start this journey into the greatest season for music with the first two tracks off of Spokes.

“Even Spring” begins the album as a balletic music box from a parallel universe almost like our own, a different and unsettling fantasy world for all its similarities. The vocals, indecipherable yearning cries overlay the baroque layering of sparkling bell synths from the tinniest glockenspiel to the roundest marimba. Plaid has achieved a sort of sonic magic realism, as evocative as the books of Salman Rushdie and Jeanette Winterson, or the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Get our your iPod and take a walk while listening to this. Just make sure you have good headphones– even at low volumes, the little white ones get blown out from the frequency range on these tracks.

Even Spring — Plaid

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The subsequent “Crumax Rins” is darker, picking up from the machinic end of “Even Spring.” It’s a sneaky soundtrack to peaking around corners and spying in a fun, Hardy Boys/Trixie Belden** kind of way. The breakdown is the chase scene, nervous and dashing, but ending in the relieved laughter of the escaped.

Crumax Rins — Plaid

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That’s all for now… look forward to the next few days, as I give you some Fiery Furnaces (ok, fine, you can have some of the new album, too), Sigur Ros, Kevin Drew, the Beatles, and more Plaid!

(Just a reminder: Spokes is available on vinyl from Warpmart.)

(Oh, and another reminder– Erol Alkan will be at Studio B tonight for Fixed’s three year anniversary! BE THERE!)

**Yes, this is where my pen name comes from, neither from a stripper nor the drag queen that Shaun, Miss Bette Noire and I met last year during CMJ.