kitchen sink music

isn't there a saying about good things coming in threes? i was commenting to my friend martine last night at big trouble's weekly show at the kitty cat klub (plug! come next week when we play for free and with rob skoro on a handful of killer cover!) that i seem to latch onto three records at a time. for a while, i was all about band of horses, crystal skulls and the national. then it was small sins, phoenix and midlake. and now i've recently been getting into this collection of bands that grab things from all over the map and throw them all at some analog tape or a disk drive, hoping something will stick.

i was compelled to check out danielson's ships after watching the danielson family movie, which will be showing here in mpls during the sound unseen festival. long story short, daniel smith started a family band in 1995 for his senior music thesis project at rutgers, and here we are ten years (okay eleven) witnessing the collective fruits of his labors. ships draws together everyone who's been involved with smith's particular vision of music since he began the project and it's stunningly bombastic, but not in an over-the-top, giant distorted guitar kind of way. like sufjan stevens, smith is very upfront about his faith--probably even moreso than stevens--but, like stevens, this doesn't mean his music offers easy answers or bland restatements of christian doctrine. you could probably listen to this disc for months or years and never pick up a distinctly religious overtone. forgive me, steve marsh, but i'm going to lean on an old crutch here and tell you that it comes off like modest mouse crossed with sufjan stevens. seriously. and i feel justified in saying that here, because if you like either of those bands, this one is worth checking out, but if you aren't familiar with stevens or modest mouse, you should probably go to them first before you hit up danielson.

And I just realized that I'm still typing in all lowercase letters, but I'm trying to type in sentence case on the blog from now on.

The second of the troika is Return to the Sea by Islands. Cats love this record, but I had a bit of a hard time getting into it at first, what with the 7+ minute opener, but it's hard to deny an album with track titles like "Don't Call Me Whitney, Bobby" and "Jogging Gorgeous Summer." The key for me was "Rough Gem," though, whose skewered bubblegum groove is as off-kilter as the rest of the disc, but warm enough to provide easy entrance into their stuff. You can check that track out and the rest of them for yourself at their MySpace page. I'm not ready to discuss it too much more yet, as I've just gotten into it.

And then in the mail today, I got the new disc from Dosh, The Lost Take. I've only been through it once, but it should come as no surprise that it's like a fun toybox of musical snippets and melodies. Marty makes it sound like he's just playing with the stuff, and yet I know from messing around with some of this kind of stuff myself, it's not easy to do well. And I'm not calling Dosh out for this, more his publicity, but was Eric Applewick a member of Tapes 'n' Tapes when they recorded this stuff? I mean, I'd do the exact same thing: If somebody I was working with was suddenly a member of a suddenly high-profile band, you better believe I'm putting that on my one-sheet. It doesn't matter one bit as far as the music's concerned, but it's just something that stuck out to me.