It's not just "Outside Closer", it's everything. The everything - associated clutter along with the year's best album - is important, because Hood have managed something that I'd begun to accept as impossible: to make my thirty-five yearold heart fall in love with a band again, as completely as I used to do as a teenager. "Outside Closer" is an absolutely lovely record, rich and dense and balanced just right between adventure and reality, and it's kept growing on me throughout the year. It would've been my favourite record, regardless.
But the other stuff has been more than mere decoration. Some real gems on the b-sides of singles, especially "The Lost You" EP. The unexpected treasures on the odds-and-sods CD that they were selling on tour, the way that its fragments and fiddles became a delightful, almost Clouddead-ish collage of, well, fragments and fiddles. And the live shows. Bloody hell, the live shows: rarely has a band pushed itself so damn hard to realise a vision. The records have been so intricate, so complex, so technically demanding...and yet they just refused to back down. I'll treasure those gigs always, for their sheer lack of laziness. For their joyous, life-affirming bravery.
Bless 'em. Bless their little cotton socks. Hood ended 2005 by quoting a load of grime and dubstep on their own best-of list on Boomkat, suggesting that they might wander still further from their original indie blueprint next year. But the beautiful thing is that they'll always be Hood, whatever. And that'll always be wonderful.
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