8 Best Get-Over-A-Break-Up Albums

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The post break-up period can be terrible. That’s why we’ve put together a list of the eight best musical albums to listen to while you put your ex behind you.

You feel like crap, you’re newly single, or have been alone for so long that you start thinking of all the mistakes you’ve made in your life. It’s a Friday night (the weekend!) and you have no plans, don’t have the will to try making them. That bottle of bourbon on your shelf wants to be your best friend, if you just give it the chance. So sit down on your couch with a whiskey on the rocks. Something essential is missing from your pity party. Oh, that’s right, music! You’re able to tap into your emotions more freely when there’s a soundtrack to your sadness. But what should you put on? Coming from an indie-rock prick who faces this dilemma all too often, here are some suggestions:

8. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
Lead singer Kevin Barnes wrote this album while confronting his own depression and sexuality, and dealing with a divorce from his wife (they have a daughter, Barnes is gay). Of Montreal crafts extremely complex sounds and transitions, and at its best the band is excellent at condensing them into a psychedelic medley. The music fits like clockwork with Barnes’ lyrics about mood swings (”Come on mood shift shift back to good again / Come on be a friend”) impossibly unattainable love (”Thought that if I sank the Seine I might find you”) and in the album’s grand 12-minute opus “The Past is a Grotesque Animal,” trying to make sense of life at present (”At least I author my own disaster”). The album has line after great line about the darker side of love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

7. The Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
This album is the best of The Arcade Fire’s three releases to get sad-drunk to because of its sweeping metaphors and epic imagery. The sound takes on varying degrees of church atmosphere, the most poignant of which is the finale, “My Body is a Cage,” in which an organ blasts up after about two minutes. If you can maintain consciousness till track 11, you will be bawling like an infant from this song. The album lifts the listener up and down through many different moods before finally settling on the idea of imprisonment, trapped by your physical self from being with the one you love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6. Band of Horses - Everything All the Time
The lyrics evoke death and equivalent alternatives. The progressions of chords and drumbeats often feel like waves crashing on your ears. From straightforward songs of death (”At every occasion I’ll be ready for the funeral”) to ones of helplessness or unwillingness to change a situation (”I know evil people who say things they don’t know / Oh why do I even care / It’s nothing now, oh”), the music brings with it a sense of dread, foreboding. “St. Augustine,” the final track, has a cappella voices chanting about the glass ceiling (”I know you tried I know you’re cursed / I know your best was still your worst / when Hollywood was calling out your name”). An excellent collection of crestfallen hopes and dreams.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5. Antony & The Johnsons - I Am A Bird Now
Here is an album that potently captures the inevitability of one man’s sorrow. Antony’s voice vibrates and throbs through ten laser-point intimate songs about struggles arising from the singer’s homosexuality (My Lady Story), inescapable depression (Hope There’s Someone, What Can I Do), relationships and heartbreak (Fistful of Love). The sound is honest and touching, and when you are downcast, hearing a kindred spirit can be intensely validating.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Once OST
The movie musical “Once” has many terrific scenes involving the spontaneous creation of songs. If you have never seen the film, don’t put the soundtrack on; it will have little or no impact, since the music alone tends to feel over dramatic, even cliché. If you have seen it, the music will bring you back. “The Hill” to the scene where ‘Guy’ stares barely blinking at ‘Girl’ while she plays the recording studio piano; “When Your Mind’s Made Up” to the intensity on ‘Guy’s’ face when the band finally lays the song down; “Falling Slowly” to the piano store, when the two first play together. The film is sometimes too hard to watch, which is why the soundtrack makes for an effective drunken nostalgia trip.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. Iron & Wine - Woman King EP
Sam Beam’s 6-song EP stays to the topic of the album’s title. Beam’s folksy and gentle style with instruments nicely complements the lyrical themes of beautiful women admired by a man. They are terrifying to him (”Jezebel” is his perfect partner or would be, but she has gone away), courageous (”Gray Stables,” the woman holds her head high although she has suffered much in life) and receptive (”My Lady’s House:” “Thank god you see me the way you do / Strange as you are to me”). This is a brief, emotional album that recalls the many different approaches men take towards the fairer sex.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. Neutral Milk Hotel - In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
Another all-time great, which fits on lists of many things. Jeff Mangum wrote these songs about his deceased wife and the painful minutiae of their love. As suggested by many, the album deserves to be listened to in its 39.8″ entirety. Mangum, whose voice is miles away from Antony’s, belts out the lyrics in his nasal, is-he-trying-too-hard yell, and the listener can feel the wretchedness and heartache through the speakers. For poetic creativity in dealing with hard feelings, there is none better. The more expansive your imagination, the more forcefully Aeroplane will affect you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Elliott Smith - From A Basement On A Hill
Committing suicide as he was beginning to be recognized (mostly due to his Oscar-nominated “Miss Misery” in Good Will Hunting), Elliott Smith was a shy, melancholy musician who made intimate, lonely music. Basement was Smith’s first posthumous release. Smith, always possessive of his own sound, loops his eggshell-fragile voice in harmonies with itself and over instruments he played and recorded. It makes for an intensely personal journey into the mind of a dead man, looking at the world the way he saw it. “Twilight” is my personal favorite, as he sees the chance of something better and cannot take it; he is trapped by his own circumstances. “Haven’t laughed this hard in a long time / Better stop now before I start crying” evokes the depressive tendency to shrink away from feeling anything too warm and sincere, afraid the feeling will go away and hurt worse. An ideal album for turning on the tear ducts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Put on the vinyl, sit back, and let it all out!