Aberfeldy: Vegetarian Restaurant
[purchase]
I fell head over heels in love with the brightly melodic Scottish popfolkers Aberfeldy back when their bouncy, gentle Love Is An Arrow hit the early blogs in 2004, though I seem to have missed the recurrent commercial exploitation of fellow single Summer's Gone off the same disc by Diet Coke and Traveler's Insurance; by the time the cutsey companion video for Love Is An Arrow, with its playfully animated love story of Inuit love, emerged a few months later, I would have done anything to show my love for the band.
But this was before my world was made of shuffled singles and socially-networked sharing spaces: I was pushing my mid-thirties already, it was still the tail-end of the CD era, and so - unlike the vast majority of the indie kids - I bought Young Forever, and thereby found a complete set of joy that still makes me smile when it pops up on the errant playlist. The living-room tones and and tableside love story of Vegetarian Restaurant makes an apt if belated b-side introduction to an album whose infectious levity was recorded with one microphone and no overdubbing, fitting for theme and temptation alike; dig up the disc, and you'll find that this is actually one of their slower tracks, though all are worth mention.
