The Leisure Society’s The Sleeper wins Schmercury poll, we celebrate with competition

For Folk’s Sake’s readers have voted The Leisure Society‘s glorious debut album The Sleeper their favourite album of the past year.

After asking for your suggestions to help compile our longlist we whittled it down, and finally gave you a choice between ten great albums. (See here)

 

Absolutely loads of you voted (thanks!) and in the end the Wilkommen Collective band won with a whopping 38%. The Scottish crowd were the next most popular with Camera Obscura  second, Grant Campbell third and Butcher Boy coming in fourth.

In FFS’s review of The Sleeper, our writer Matt Elton said: “In less certain hands melancholia would risk casting a gloomy pallor over the music, but here it’s just another part of the multi-layered sound. Indeed, it’s the seemingly effortless way in which the band’s scattered inspirations – influences, instrumentation, cultures – are combined that proves to be the album’s greatest strength.”

And at FFS towers we couldn’t agree more, (in fact, his brill taste in music is the reason we pestered Matt into writing for us). The Sleeper is a remarkable acheivement, despite its often very sad lyrics, it is never morose. Instead it’s bittersweet and truly beautiful. (Enough gushing, I’ll stop. Just buy the album)

Our most hearty congratulations to Nick, Christian, Helen, Will, Mike, Bas and Darren.

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WIN STUFF

To celebrate FFS is giving away an amazing batch of prizes. Thanks to the generosity of the bands, PR companies and record labels we have a huge stash to give away to a few lucky readers, including:

2 x Darren Hayman t-shirts
2 x Darren Hayman albums
5 x Grant Campbell albums
5 x Grant Campbell pin badges
3 x Camera Obscura albums
3 x St Vincent albums

We were waiting on some other stuff too (even more! imagine) but the postal strike is making us postal. Haha. Um. We’ll let you know if more comes in…

Sign up to our newsletter mailing list here for a chance to win, you’ll also receive occasional newsletters from us telling you about the latest music news, new interviews and reviews and the latest artists we’ve discovered. You can unsubscribe if you hate it, of course.

The first name to come out of the hat gets one of everything, the next gets one of everything that’s left and so on. It’s going to be GREAT.

Over and out.

Words: Lynn Roberts