She used my head like a revolver...

In all the foofera surrounding the 40th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper's, I'm pretty sure that Chris Molanphy has written the last word. You can check out the full text of his column right here over at Idolator.

In essence, he argues that the current re-ascendance of the single song over the album form has vaulted Revolver over Sgt. Pepper's in the critical consciousness as the best Beatles album. I particularly like the part where he calls Revolver the Beatles' greatest mixtape, which sums it up nicely.

I just went back and listened to all of Revolver myself, and with a quite different set of ears than I had on the last time I listened to it, I'm sure. See, I'm an album guy going way back, and for a long time, my favorite Beatles album has been Abbey Road. Plus, like many people, Sgt. Pepper's was the first Beatles album I fell in love with.

But listening to Revolver, and trying to evaluate it a.) on its own merits, and not within the canon of Beatles albums and b.) with something approaching fresh ears, I'm struck by a couple of things.

First of all, the album sounds amazing. I listened on headphones, and it's striking how few of the techinques that make Revolver such a unique sounding record are used today. Panning, people. Menomena's Friend and Foe is actually the current album that it most closely resembles it in the stark separation between the component parts. The bass and drums, particularly on a track like "Taxman" act as a unit. The guitar on "Taxman" sits way to the left and the vocals are right down the center. What makes this sonic picture challenging is that there's absolutely nothing on the right side of the stereo picture. It's like a giant dead spot until first the tambourine, then the cowbell and finally the guitar lead come in. Show me a band bold enough to leave such a giant swathe of space not just unoccupied, but postively and purposefully empty.

The cumulative effect is that it feels like you can hear every single thing, and yet everything is sliced so thin that you're not getting the whole picture of any individual instrument. Check out "She Said She Said": The drums are completely restricted to the left side of the stereo picture, reduced to just a kick, snare rolls and cymbal crashes. The cymbal crashes are the particularly brilliant part, because if you map the kit out over the whole stero picture (as the bulk of engineers are wont to do these days), that crash would wash out the whole song, but as it is, it's like a velvet punch that echoes the overtones of the sitar.

Secondly, "Eleanor Rigby"'s achievement as a pop song built around strings and nothing more hardly needs to be restated, but how about "Good Day Sunshine" being built entirely around two pianos? And not Elton John or Billy Joel-style piano songs, but more like what Spoon would eventually do with "The Way We Get By." And then there's the French horn solo on "For No One." It's bold and amazing, indicative of Paul McCartney at the peak of his game. It's like he's realizing he can do whatever the fuck he wants, and no one can stop him. Well, except himself, which is really what happened, post-Beatles. McCartney always played to the level of his competition, like so many forgotten basketball teams that would beat good teams and lose to bad teams. When he was pushing against Lennon and against himself, he wrote classics. Once he had conquered those two competitors, who could stand up to him? So he wrote "Spies Like Us."



Which leads me to my third and final point about Revolver. It's ripe. It feels like the moment when The Beatles had just gotten a handle on exactly what they were capable of. They weren't doing exactly what they were capable of, but the album's shot through with a sense of invulnerability. Ringo sounds muscular and authoritative on the drums (!), the vocal harmonies are crisp and clear, and they whip back and forth between guitar-driven pop numbers and exploratory, boundary-pushing structures without making either direction feel played out.

By contrast, Sgt. Pepper's feels almost overripe. They were hitting their stride as an album-making, studio-wizard band, but is full-stride ever as compelling as the moment just before? That's part of the beauty of the music industry system that was in place then: bands put out albums every six months, so there was a much greater "lightning in a jar" quality built into the release of albums. Revolver is an album teetering right on the brink between two ways of making music, as much a capper on an era of singles-based albums as Sgt. Pepper's is the keystone of an era of albums qua unified works.

OK, I just used qua. Must be time to wrap this up. Please note all discussions of the critical merits of different Beatles albums stem from an understanding that the best Beatles album must generally be considered the best album of all time, and even the fifth best Beatles album is at worst the tenth best album of all time.

CD Review: Digitata :: II Daggers

Digitata
II Daggers
Totally Gross National Product

You could take a look at the component parts of Digitata and think you know what's up: Female vocalist, Rhodes keyboard, squiggly electronics plus live drums equals breathlessly slick electro, right? Not quite. While Maggie Morrison's voice is capable of swooping nimbly from a hushed croon to a catty yowl, she's neither as dispensable as the guest vocalists on most trip-hop tracks, nor as front and center in the mix as all those electro divas with one name (Annie, Kylie, etc.). Instead, her vocals ride in lockstep with Ryan Olson's digital manipulations and Drew Christopherson's crackingly live drums. That duo's done time as the rhythm section of art-hoppers Mel Gibson and the Pants, and it shows. The texture of the album as a whole is kind of smooth peanut butter to MG & the Pants' extra chunky.

The first proper track, "Bangin' Jessica Alba," has been up for streaming on their MySpace page for a while now, but it's an entirely different animal when it makes its way out of quality stereo speakers, and not the shitty little ones on a laptop. What the track has to do with movie star and newly-minted Golden State Warriors fan Alba is anyone's guess, but the groove is certainly thick enough to bang whomever it chooses. The title track that follows is even more darkly menacing and the interweaving components of the song (a skittering flute-like triplet, a pulsing and distorted bass, Morrison's bell-like Rhodes chords) do their best to stay out of the way of the beat's thundering stride. It's not all menacing bass and pounding drums, though. "Marinos Amores" is almost breezy--Morrison's yearning vocals are drawn out over a pastoral backdrop that builds into a slow burn by the song's end.

In a uniformly solid album, though, the two standouts are "Digitata 4 Ever" and "Enter the Palace." The first's hyperkinetic and breathless pace stops up short in the chorus, creating a yawning gap that only makes what surrounds it sound more urgent. And the second features Ryan Olcott (of Mystery Palace, hence the title, I'm guessing) as a male counterpart to Morrison, and the pairing is perfect. Olcott's icy and ghostly vocals seem to grow from the electronics, while Morrison's have just a bit more flint and spark, and are grounded in the woodier tone of the Rhodes. It's most obvious on "Enter the Palace," but that intersection of organic and electronic, analog and digital, is the fulcrum around which Digitata teeters, and II Daggers provides ample evidence that it's a crossroads with a lot of directions to explore.

Buy it from Totally Gross National Product.

Digitata play Wed., May 30 at the Turf Club with Pit er Pat, Mystery Palace and Priestbird. 9:30 p.m. $5. 21+. Corner of University and Snelling Aves., St. Paul. 651.647.0486. turfclub.net. Check out Digitata's MySpace page for more info.

Building Better Bombs Feature in City Pages

Building Better Bombs feature right here, yo.

I had a CD review of the Bad Plus up in there a couple weeks back, but it was a treat to get to do a whole feature on Bombs, who are aboslutely ruining my life with Freak Out Squares right now. I need to listen to it all the time. And oh yeah, A-List for local rapper Golden.

Tomorrow, if all goes well, I'll be putting up a feature on Andrew Bird.

CD Review: Six Parts Seven

Six Parts Seven
Casually Smashed to Pieces
Suicide Squeeze Records

I see a lot of CDs, and this necessarily entails seeing a lot of crappy CDs. Red flags tend to include the following: blackletter typefaces, pictures of vikings and song titles like "Awaiting Elemental Meltdown." Things were not looking good for Casually Smashed to Pieces, the latest release from Ohio quartet-and-then-some Six Parts Seven, but I trust Suicide Squeeze, so in it went.

For a moment, I thought I had once again failed to remove the previous CD from the cut-rate CD boombox on my desk, creating an album sandwich up in there (it's happened), but no: "Conversation Heart" really does begin with a gently pulsing electric guitar motif that ably sets the tone. When it's joined by a banjo, the interplay of the parts sets in motion the model that will dominate the songs here: simple, well-crafted melodic lines will be spread across guitars, lovingly passed over to keyboards, and gently handed off to the sweetly yearning harmonies of a modest horn section. If you've come looking for messy, sprawling masses of orchestration, best look elsewhere. This is wallpaper music, and I mean that in the most generous way possible. Any given three seconds off this record could have been lifted out of the careful and crystalline confines of Sufan's Illinois, but as they cohere into entire mini-suites, they call to mind other products born of the Land of Lincoln, erstwhile Tortoise member Bundy K. Brown's Directions in Music and his later albums under the name Pullman.

I first heard Directions in Music under unusual circumstances. I was at an Indian restaurant in Los Feliz in Los Angeles back in 2000 or so with a small group of friends. A DJ (in a restaurant-- how L.A.!) was spinning instrumental rock music built from spare melodies and suspended chords, and it sounded, for lack of something more appropriately critical, magical. It was languorous and lush, beautiful in an understated way that eschewed sentiment. In short, a perfect soundtrack for a twentysomething's night out in a foreign town, and to someone who wasn't far removed from the snobbery of a degree in jazz performance, it came as a shock that you could even make music like this. That was Directions in Music, but Casually Smashed to Pieces could be an able understudy for the part.

Six Parts Seven display a great deal more intentionality than Brown's project. Where DIM often seemed willfully aimless, its improvisatory roots showing through when the music got away from the players a bit, CSTP simply bleeds careful planning. The songs blend gracefully into one another, drifting across dynamic shifts with a minimum of fanfare. Since the band began as a duo consisting of brothers Allen and Jay Karpinski on guitar and drums, respectively, it only makes sense that the compositions proceed forward from the guitars. "Confusing Possibilities" builds itself up around harmonics and stumblingly unresolved strums before revealing a rising-then-falling central riff composed of slippery hammer-ons and pull-offs. The stateliness of the arrangement presses up tightly against the casual charm of the execution, and the band works the pressure back and forth. The flesh and blood players behind the music are present throughout, revealing themselves through slightly muffed notes, the hum of tubes in amps (particularly noticeable on the very beginning of the opening track) and the barely audible click of effects kicking in. What makes "Confusing Possibilities" the highlight of the disc is the way it seems to draw to a close on a shimmering triplet guitar figure that goes from ornament to foundation as the song finds its legs once again. And then it happens again, the tempo slowing around that same figure, taking the song in yet another direction. The casual yet measured progression from idea to idea belies the tune's title, and this is when the album is at its best, holding your hand on the musical equivalent of a twilit, late-summer stroll.

The danger here, of course, is that an album of modest instrumental numbers is apt to come off as same-y, and that's a fair criticism of Six Parts Seven's approach. If you've spent a goodly amount of time digesting any of the other artists mentioned in this review so far, none of this album is going to come as a revelation. The best way to enjoy it is via a kind of middle distance focus that lets you absorb it without looking directly at it. Or better yet, drop it on someone who hasn't heard all those other bands yet, ideally at a hip Indian restaurant, where it might end up making him rethink his idea of what makes instrumental music interesting. It could happen.

New features added

So I've added a couple new little sections over there to your immediate right to highlight albums, books and DVDs I'm currently into, although I might not have time to always talk about them actively on the blog. At this time, however, I am.

Man, I couldn't have slept any harder on Emily Haines (of Canadian bands Metric and Broken Social Scene) and her debut album Knives Don't Have Your Back, but now it's what I listen to practically every time I'm listening to music without a distinct agenda.





"Doctor Blind" is the second track on the disc, and I think it's the first place I detected a bit of an Aimee Mann vibe to her stuff, which is something I would cherish in any artist. Haines also has this way of constructing her piano lines in skeletal fashion, rather than via complete chords. So the progressions don't always seem to make sense right away, but they hang together beautifully on repeated listening. So maybe skeletal isn't quite the word I'm looking for-- it's more like your nervous system: intimately linked to an underlying structure but weaving in and out of that foundation. The music geek in me also loves how the chorus breaks down into a measure of 5, a measure of 4, a measure of 3 and a measure of 4. I know, you probably don't care, but I have a deep love for tender and beautiful music that falls across the drums in weird ways. The lyrics from the chorus are also very Mann-ish: "My baby's got the lonesome lows, don't quite go away overnight / Doctor Blind, just prescribe the blue ones / If the dizzying highs don't subside overnight / Doctor Blind, just prescribe the red ones."

Here's another key to a good album: if the first four songs are good, and all in slightly different but related ways, it's usually an album worth your time. Other examples I can think of: Menomena's Friend and Foe and Grizzly Bear's Yellow House. I'm going to skip ahead to the fourth track on Knives Don't Have Your Back, though.





"Detective Daughter," aside from fitting rather nicely right into my recent mix, "A Mix for Private Dicks," has a fantastic rhythm track, all bass drum and handclaps. The ominous walking piano line and guitar hits put it squarely in the path of Fiona Apple comparisons, but, much like that guy in the U.N.K.L.E. video for "Rabbit in your Headlights," she blows that car apart. Check it out:







"The Maid Needs a Maid" has probably the finest line on the album: "Your mouth should be working for me, for free." This would be a great choice for plopping right into the middle of a mix, a romantic song that skewers the genre in kind of a Clem Snide-esque kind of way. The twist is basically that Haines is saying she wants a kept man. Um, sign me up, incidentally.







It's also the rare album that buries a track as exceptional as "Nothing & Nowhere" as deep as track 9 of an 11-track album. Much like "Doctor Blind," the song is draped loosely across its pilings, but here, there's no rhythm section to drive that home, so it floats a bit more. The conceit here is a nicely literary and narrative one ("Some say, our life is insane," goes the chorus, "but it isn't insane on paper") but what I'd really like to draw your attention to is the first couplet of the second chorus. "Some say, we always only want to get off," goes the first line, and it's delievered in a flat enough way that the double meaning could fall just as easily in either direction, but when she delivers the second half, her mischievious smile is actually audible as she coos, "Some say, our hands are much too soft." Sexy isn't a sexy enough word for the effect, because it's not just hot-- it's brittle and apologetic and vulnerable and forthright, all at the same time.

That's just good rock and roll.

OTHER ALBUMS MENTIONED IN THIS POST

Are you alive? I am, I am

Pitchfork Review of "All Day," Aesop Rock's Nike Run track

I've got to watch out, or Pitchfork commentary could become, like, a habit. I actually agree with this review, largely. Aesop Rock was not an ideal choice for the series--his track is not nearly as propulsive and chameleonic as LCD Soundsystem's, nor even as good as Crystal Method's, which is really more of a mix than a single track.

Here's what I can't fucking stand: Referring to Aesop Rock as "Aes." Just ... god, give me a break.

The La's and the quest for perfection

Case in point of the kind of album review I hate:

Pitchfork Review of The La's, BBC in Session

Personally, I couldn't disagree more with Mr. Tangari's opinion of The La's (I'm not going to even attempt to figure out what the possessive form of The La's is-- it's probably real ugly) lone studio album. And I'm not going to debate that these recordings from the BBC could very well be stronger in some sense.

But what I really bristle at is this: "It's hard to believe that the band on the last session is the same one that recorded The La's, mostly due to the fact that they sound so inspired, and it's weird that they couldn't duplicate the feel of the session in a different studio. It seems they may have simply put too much pressure on themselves recording the album to get what they really wanted."

There's absolutely no context given for this statement. While Lee Mavers' notorious perfectionism is alluded to early in the review, there's no delving into what that meant for him personally. No thought as to investigating the whole divide between what an artist hears in his or her head and what they hear when they listen back to their record. No hint of the frustration that can come with that, or how interesting Mavers' pursuit of an elusive sound was. Just the reviewer's assumption that he knows what Mavers is looking for and by golly here it is-- how could he not have seen it?

I remember reading a fantastic article in Mojo back a couple of years ago around the time when The La's was re-issued and it did what I like for music writing to do: it taught me how to love an album. It contextualized it and put Mavers' particularly stunted brand of genius into perspective. Since that time, I've been a huge La's fan, and I'll certainly be getting this new disc. But rather than introduce to you the glory of an underrated band and their entire tangled history in pop music, their struggle to grasp the holy grail of pop as defined by a very personal vision, Tangari has opted to tell you that if you have to pick between the two La's releases, get this one. Lame.

Duh daaaah duh-dah-dah

Menomena. My comrade-in-crime Max Sparber has just informed me that the tune we all know and love as one of the finest Muppets moments is actually from an X-rated movie from 1968 called "Sweden: Heaven or Hell". He's now pointing out that it's X-rated in the way that "Midnight Cowboy" is rated X. Not for being porn, but rather for general weirdness.

Enough about that, though. There's this band called Menomena from Portland, Ore., who are about to release a record on Barsuk called Friend and Foe. There are a lot of reasons to love this record: The cover art is by Craig Thompson, the comic artist who wrote the fantastically winsome graphic novel Blankets, and, even more importantly, it's probably the first great indie release of 2007. Of course, it's going to be joined this week by The Shins' Wincing the Night Away (which is also quite good-- I just finished an interview with guitarist Dave Hernandez, who was quite a pleasant fellow to chat with) and Deerhoof's latest, which people keep telling me will be incredible. I'll believe it when I hear it.

But Menomena (Duh daaaah duh-dah-dah). Short version: They sound like TV on the Radio cleaned themselves up and tried to be the Dismemberment Plan. Obviously, a gross oversimplification. There's something about the way that it's recorded that makes it, well, slippery. The vocals and the drums are very up in the mix, and they're often panned in creative ways, and good panning is something that's underrated and long-abandoned. Anyways, I'm just getting into it, really, but I'm planning on trying to nail them down for an interview in the near future. I understand they have some kind of crazy computer program that injects a bit of chance into their songwriting process, and it sounds fascinating.

Tapped out

So yesterday when I posted about that Mars Volta I was a little tapped out, as it was the end of the day on production day and I had just read the review while waiting for my pages to go to the printer, so here's what I forgot to mention: my favorite sentence of the review:

"Now, I dig indulgence when it's done well (see: Finnegans Wake, that skinny guy who wins all the hot-dog eating contests), and what got me through multiple listens to Frances the Mute was the album's overall ludicrousness, that weirdo King Crimson corn-dogging."

Here's what's just brilliantly ridonkulous about it: he manages to join, by the virtue of excessiveness, James Joyce and Takeru Kobayashi. That's the kind of "charter member of the hipster club" card flashing I can appreciate. There's something about his odd choice not to even bother mentioning Kobayashi by name (which, let me tell you, takes about 10 seconds to find on Google) which just screams I care, but I don't; I'm in touch with popular culture, but above it enough to have read Finnegans Wake (which I can absolutely guarantee you he hasn't--no one has). It's just the kind of world-straddling ennui that's apparently a prerequisite for rock writing these days, an "I've seen it all and can tell you when it's good and when it ain't" attitude that just seems faintly ridiculous when you get down to it.

I mean, put Finnegans Wake, a tape of Kobayashi highlights and a copy of the new Mars Volta in a time capsule and tell me that if someone opens it in 100 years they'll find Joyce and Kobayashi equally satisfying and find Mars Volta lacking on some kind of universal scale of over-indulgence.

Enough. I'm listening to a disc by a guy named Charlie Mars, who's supposed to be Southern rock meets U2/Coldplay or something, but really just sounds like James Blunt. I can't really hear the Southern thing going on here at all, at least not when compared to Drive-By Truckers or My Morning Jacket. Hell, he doesn't even sound as Southern as Band of Horses. I'm pretty sure when they recorded this album, they plugged in the machine with the big button that says "Embiggen." It's a perfectly cromulent sutdio technique, I assure you.

In good news, I got a copy of the new Huge Rat Attacks as well, although my office stereo (and I use the term "stereo" loosely--$30 from Best Buy, y'all) apparently hates it and will not play it. It just spins dangerously fast. Maybe those scientists in Switzerland working on that underground particle accelerator would be interested in it.

Savor it

Pitchfork review of the new Mars Volta

Now, I'm a fan of the Mars Volta, and I haven't heard their new disc, so there's every chance in the world I'm not going to like it. And the whole Pitchfork thing's been beaten like a dead horse recently between the City Pages and the Strib. But please, if you will, pause for a moment and savor Stosuy's overarching metaphor of comparing the album to masturbation and then consider how it essentially turns the review into someone masturbating over his distaste for someone else's masturbating. Hell, at least the Mars Volta made an album.

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.

she had lost with the bully conscience

So I'm bumping this disc by Margot and the Nuclear So and So's because I read on Salon's Audiofile about how the Margot in the band's name is Margot Tennenbaum from "The Royal Tennenbaums." And I'm a sucker for all things Wes Anderson. I'm thinking maybe for my birthday I'll organize a party wherein I show all of Wes Anderson's movies ("Bottle Rocket," "Rushmore," "The Royal Tennenbaums," and "Life Aquatic," for those of you scoring at home) and have some bands play. Don't even know how I would handle the logistics of that.

But about this band: I don't know who the Nuclear So and So's are or what relationship they have to the object of Richie's affection. This album doesn't sound very much like music that would appear in an Anderson film, which, of course, is not its duty, but the music doesn't seem unrelated to their vibe, as Thomas Bartlett at Salon noted. So far, I'm having a hard time thinking anything except softly brushed indie rock here. Of course, I could have said largely the same thing about Midlake, and their disc has gradually turned into one of my favorite of the year. So far, so hookless, though. I may just rewind back to the second track, "Skeleton Key," which Bartlett talked about.

sunny day real estate - how it feels to be something on

buy HIFTBSO from amazon.com

Late last week, I got the chance to interview Jeremy Enigk, he of Sunny Day Real Estate, The Fire Theft and two solo albums. Then, per usual, I wrote an article for the Pulse in which I felt obliged to keep the focus as squarely as possible on his new disc, World Waits, along with some more general history, but now I'm taking the opportunity to say what I really think is important about Jeremy Enigk.

If you buy one album this week, buy How It Feels to Be Something On.

I came to SDRE, like most people, via their debut album, Diary. Once I'd absorbed that, I bought How It Feels, since it had just come out (this was back in '98), but then I ignored it for close to six months in favor of delving into their second album, which is either called LP2 or The Pink Album.

Once I discovered the song "Every Shining Time You Arrive" on How It Feels, though, I was hooked. How It Feels was SDRE's return album, made after the band's breakup, which was due at least in part to Enigk's conversion to Christianity. Not that that solved his problems; How It Feels is one of the most deeply conflicted albums ever made, teetering on the knife edge between corporeal love and spiritual love and in the process addressing things like capitalism, infidelity, transcendence and utopia.

The tone is set by one of the best album opening songs ever, "Pillars." William Goldsmith is at least as essential to SDRE's sound as Jimmy Chamberlain was to Smashing Pumpkins', and the straightforward tattoo he lays down opens up for Enigk's almost subliminally whispered, "Help," which rises as if from the bottom of a deep well, eliding neatly into the tone setting couplet, "But you were always one to stay the same/ girl, I know you want to be the rain." "Rain" is one of those words that creeps up continually throughout Enigk's lyrics, standing in for change or cleansing, usually, as it does here.

The track is claustrophobic and ominous in a way that SDRE never really were before. Sure, they were big, and they were depressed, but the weight of the music, combined with lyrics that hint at attempts to convert the infidels ("We'll wait for time to turn around your faith," and, chillingly, "The world we sold; there was a choir there/ there's a place for you."), sets the pace for an album that will hit both harder and softer, but invariably go for the gut.

Musical motifs crop up here that will return throughout the album, including the doubling of the vocal melody on guitar or bass. It seems like a simple idea, but it's not something you hear very much of, although the most recent Wolf Parade album puts a spin on this by prefacing bridges and codas with mirrored guitar lines in the choruses and verses. Enigk's multi-layered vocals during the bridge here are used to stunning effect, and again, we'll see this again later in the album.

The next track, "Roses in Water," centers around a loping melodic minor (read: Middle Eastern-sounding) guitar riff in, of all things, 9/4 time. Plenty of bands use odd time signatures, but SDRE seems to have a special facility, and Goldsmith in particular, for making them sound natural. The lyrics here reflect the quasi-mysticism that runs through Enigk's output, but here, he's particularly adept at spinning out evocative imagery ("Roses in water/ Wise men see/ Move around me for/ centuries") without assigning a personal meaning to it. Despite the agitated and ever-shifting musical ground of the song, it's one of How It Feels most assured moments, not to mention a relatively light palette cleanser between "Pillars" and "Every Shining Time You Arrive."

As I said before, "ESTYA" was the song that really stuck with me when I first got into this album. On a purely sonic level, it's brilliant. The acoustic guitar tone was achieved, as best I can guess, by micing not just the guitar in the traditional fashion, but also with a contact mike on the inside of the guitar's body. The result is a piano-like tone which is one of the more unique guitar treatments. As much as I like it, Enigk's soon-to-be-released solo album World Waits could have done with more of this.

Note the brilliantly unexpected and semi-walking bassline in the chorus. It's one of the last things I really picked up on, and it's a completely out-of-the-blue sonic treat on an album full of such moments.

The lyrics revisit the themes from "Pillars," but with a note of conflict. The protagonist is searching for meaning, turning outwards towards those around him ("I want to change everything/ I want to blame everything on ...") and struggling for clarity ("So the story's told beyond our grasp/ We were climbing forever, an infinite task ... Oh and all these seed will grow anyway/ Even though the outcome, we cannot say."). The turn comes in the the bridge, when his desire for spiritual purity and relief from the every day whim of fate is broken by the simple presence of someone he cares deeply for: "In the depths of my gloom/ I crawl out for you/ From the peaks of my joy/ I crawl back into/ Tearing me down every time you smile/ Every shining time you arrive." Whether you take the song to be entirely addressed to a lover, a friend or a divine presence, or some combination thereof, it's a beautiful limning of the twin desires for salvation and independence.

"Two Promises" shows the considerable influence of the Beatles on SDRE's songwriting, an influence already in evidence with their dalliance with Middle Eastern tonalities on "Roses in Water." If the previous song was about standing on the precipice between spiritual and physical love, this one has pitched headlong into the disappointment and regreat that comes with any kind of relationship. It's a crushing song, with Enigk giving it his vocal all. It's tempting to label it anti-woman, and in fact, that would be an easy charge to make against this album as a whole, but things aren't so simple as that. The song also functions as a condemnation of man's earthly desire, in much the same way as "Butterfly" by Weezer. As a whole, the record is basically anti-flesh, anti-fleeting. It's searching for something that will last. In this way, it's quintessentially Buddhist, really, at least in as much as someone going down the first steps of the eight-fold path will rail against the world's impermanence before accepting it.

The album shifts gears in terms of song structure here at the near halfway point. "100 Million" takes a stab at capitalism and greed, lamenting our desire to own everything we see, and even things we can't see ("Pay for the hole in the ground to place your bones ... Pay for the simplest things"). I'm going to take a pass on analzying the lyrics with a microscope so I can focuse on the geekiest musical thing I can imagine. If you're not into time signatures and in-depth musical analysis, feel free to skip way ahead.

In what amounts to the chorus (in that it contains the song's title and is a different part following two verses and pre-choruses), SDRE pull of a neat trick. A lone guitar is introduced, playing a simple waltz-time figure: one bass note followed by a simple chiming figure over two different chords. It's four measures of 6/8, for those of you sight-reading along at home. The bassist (Jeff Palmer of the Mommyheads, filling in ably for absent founding member Nate Mendel--more on him later), though, plays a figure which breaks down into a measure of 6/8, a measure of 7/8, a measure of 6/8 and a measure of 5/8. Goldsmith, on the drums, kind of splits the difference, accenting the first beat of Palmer's third measure with a cymbal hit, but then hitting the snare on the guitarist's backbeat. The net effect is that the bass note followed by high figure pattern of the guitar is switched around, resulting in a chiming figure followed by a bass note. What's ill is how they pull it off so casually. It's really the thing that keeps the song pulling itself forward up the hill of the album as a whole, leading to a kind of plateau where the title track looks out over the whole affair from the midway point.

"How It Feels to Be Something On" is the dark heart of the record, possessing a mournful quality about wasted days intercut with moments of clarity and light. After intoning, "We're going nowhere," Enigk sings, "Don't tell me now, the days I've had/ To fill it up but spill instead." A list of empty objects follows into the chorus, which ends with the very slightly life-affirming: "All these things. I've seen/ How it feels to be something on," a line which Enigk sings with a combination of resignation and relief. His intimate relationship with his faith is shown when in the second pre-chours he switches the line to "Don't tell me God, the days I've had ..." He's practically begging/ordering God to not make him face his wasted life. He owns up to it, though, holding desperately to those few moments when he's been at peace. It's a kind of grace note of hope in an otherwise deeply dark album, and it leads nicely into the album's emotional highpoint, "The Prophet."

"The Prophet" is a song that I didn't care for for a long time, but once I could appreciate it in the scheme of the entire album, it grew in my estimation. Again, moments of light and hope are precious commodities on this album, and Enigk's entreaty, "Will you carry me cross the sea? Will you carry me?" has an innocence that's hard to resist. It serves as an answer to some of the concerns of other voices on the album. The walls that the protagonist kept trying to build in "Two Promises" here fall down, allowing "hearts to pour out/ when the frozen ground/ comes alive around us." The song stands at a turn in the road from weakness and depseration to strength, as indicated by the hopeful journey to the end of the album that begins in the next song.

Aside from having one of the great song title of all time, "Guitar and Video Games" is a heroic call to arms, throwing off the trappings of weak-willed human desire for something better and stronger. "All this time looking for love/ and you want to find peace but you find ... me," sings Enigk, drawing out that last pause to show just how disappointing people can be. Somehow, though, in some way, "we find the true story/ a tale/ writing itself as we sail/ a story/ a tale/ writing itself as we wail." The album's hero has grasped a thread running through, and he's prepared to hang on and ride it out to the end, saving just one last volley for those left behind.

In our interview, Enigk indicated that he was through pointing fingers because it was just too hypocritical, so I'm glad he managed to get "The Shark's Own Private Fuck" out of his system before he became the bigger man. Rumor has it that the song is directed specifically at bassist Nate Mendel, who decided to stay with the Foo Fighters rather than return to record the third Sunny Day album, but personally I think Enigk just took the kernel of his anger over that situation as the jumping off point for this harsh screed against materialism. "You talk to yourself/ Believing the fear that drives your greed/ When you discover the empty place/ A hollow world of instant pleasures," sings Enigk, condemning those who would cling to material pleasures, to the fruits of their labors: Things, and nothing but. It's a brilliantly bilious screed, but it doesn't hold out much to replace greed with. That's what the closing song is for.

"Days Were Golden" finishes the album on an up note, the protagonist waving goodbye to a place that promises only "a dying cold world but gold, shimmering gold" and onto a place of better things. The song's chorus neatly packages up the message of the album as a whole: "Come momma now, tell me a story/ Only laughing/ About our gilded wasteland/ Devoured, torn into pieces/ Come now we shine/ Small things ever calling out your name/ you hear some other time unchained, alive/ a world undefined."

The thing that makes this album outstanding is its cohesiveness. It's not simply a collection of woe-is-me whining and victimhood. It's not a parrotting of the words of the faithful simply entreating you to take their path to make everything better. It's a complex, nuanced look into the conflicts and desires that bind us to this world even as we strive to break them. And, in the end, it's a promise that there's a way forward.

god damn doo wop band

just got this release from afternoon records, who are expanding the sound of the label nicely with this disc from GDDWB. i met ross (piano/guiatr) at twin town guitars the other day the day before the band was heading out to nyc for some shows, about which he was pretty psyched, saying they hadn't had a bad show yet. bringing this kind of punk tock attitude to girl group pop from the fifties, it's hard to see how they'll ever have one. seriously, they just absolutely nail the structure of the phil spector-produced stuff, but then messy it up with a looseness and live feel that's instantly appealing. have i mentioned that the cover art is great? the three women in the band (kat, carissa and saumer) stand in floofy skirts, cut off from the waist up, in defiant stances. one of them holds a baseball bat behind her back. and then on the flip side lie all the guys from the band, beaten to a bloody pulp and laying spread out on the asphalt. i'm only making my way through this disc for the first time, so don't expect any kind of deep insight here. i'm simply trying to give you the heads up on this one.

the best virtuosic guitar album of all time

back in the day, i played a lot of guitar solos. i mean a lot, and i listened to a lot of music by people like jimi hendrix, duane allman, john mclaughlin, wes montgomery and all kinds of people who could just play their asses off. like vernon reid. and every once in a while i get nostalgia for blazing and unself-consciously gratuitous riffery. if you're like me, you should check out 'temporal analogues of paradise.' it's usually filed in jazz under jonas hellborg's name (who's the bassist) but the stars of the show are really shawn lane on guitar and jeff sipe aka apt q258 on drums. this was a power trio built to do one thing, and that thing is tear the ever-living stuffing out of modal improvisation. to the best of my knowledge, lane hasn't really ever done anything else worth listening to (although two other discs with hellborg ('time is the enemy' and 'abstract logic') are worth getting if you find out you like this one), but this one is the sine qua non of rock-jazz wankery. in much the same way that outkast is worth listening to even if you don't like hip-hop because they transcend it, this group managed to make an incredible live album which surpasses mere technique in the search for something higher. lane doesn't play guitar like malmsteen or other wankers: his approach is more akin coltrane's "sheets of sound" approach where he's playing so many notes so close together that it becomes something between a note and a chord and shifts the whole tonality of the song around. all that, plus, he fills in a lot of texture when sipe or hellborg are going at it (yeah, unfortunately there are bass solos, but what are you going to do). most albums like this evoke nothing. they're just displays of technique, but with only two tracks, each clocking in at 25+ minutes, the trio meanders through so many different sonic realms that you really get to feel like you're going someplace. the beginning of the second movement in particular always makes me think of the hazy summer afternoons of my youth in massachusetts. anyways, i have to get back to things like hot tickets, but if you appreciate master plying their craft, you gotta check this disc out. not available on itunes, i don't think, but i ordered it from amazon here:

temporal analogues of paradise

one-listen thursday

so this week one-listen wednesday comes to you from the comfy environs of my own house. and also on thursday. and i missed last week. i know, i know. shit's real. so better late than never. in case you're new here, i listen to a cd i haven't heard before and then hold forth on how it is while i'm listening to it. it's been called "the death knell of criticism." that's just super.

we are wolves
non-stop je te plie en deux
fat possum

i read a little bit about these guys in skyscraper, and it seems they're a bunch of montreal art school students and the guy who plays drums plays guitar here and the guy who plays keyboards plays drums or some such thing. and there's a drum machine.

from what i heard about this band, fat possum seemed like an odd label fit, but i can kind of see it. it's got a guttural thing going about it. a little bit like the black keys recording ethos. the name of which i can't remember. hang on ...

hey wow: in looking for the above info i just discovered that the black keys have signed to nonesuch records. their nonesuch debut will be out on sept. 12. okay, i'm going back to look for that term again ...

no luck. it's something about lo-fi meeting awesome. i'll try and get back to you. dude: the ice cream truck is right outside my house. the jingling bells are an interesting addition to we are wolves squallingly dirty sound. it makes me think of death from above 1979 except not nearly as propulsive; it's much slipperier and greasy. i'm on track 3, "la nature." it's held down by a killer great dirty synth line that's just begging to be remixed. i mean, you could hang a whole electronic dance beat around it, but mostly it's draped in lots and lots o' noise.

the title of the album means "non-stop i fold you in two." sounds super-uncomfortable. the drummer plays standing up with no bass drum, which is where the drum machine comes in. it's a very collage-y sounding record so far, with lots of little weird whoops and hollers going on in the background (and sometimes the foreground). there's something very art school about making music with a powerfully pounding groove and then singing like you're being eviscerated. this is like dance music for a david lynch movie.

is it in wings of desire where nick cave is singing in a club in germany? it's kind of got that vibe, where just even being able to dance to this just screams i'm wearing black and don't really care. i'd just as soon be writing pomo poetry.

i don't mean any of this as a knock, though, because this type of thing can be done either very badly or kind of sickeningly well, and we are wolves seems to be falling into the latter camp. the drum machine keeps everything organized, but the synth lines and guitar stuff sounds like it's in constant danger of falling out of time. it's a good tension. there's a great broken bassline in "snare me" that i bet would just kill live when pumped up loud and through a killer p.a. system.

have i mentioned that they're playing here soon? they are. i just went to check my e-mail, but then i realized that i already downloaded that message to my e-mail at work, so i can't get you the details, but i'll get back to you on it. plus: just scored an aimee mann interview! sweet!

track 5, "namai-taila-cambodge (go-tabla-go)," is probably my fave so far. it's tabla driven and more mellow and open than the other stuff so far. plus, it's instrumental. the screaming might be getting to me a bit. but if that's your thing, they're good at it. it's nice to hear a band switch gears.

wow, "nonstop" has a toy ray gun sound as a major melodic element. props.

so again with the black keys: they've invented this sort of idealized blues sound which strips all the crap away from contemporary blues and amplifies the groove, the grit and the soul to make a sort of simulacrum of blues and soul music. we are wolves sound much the same, except it seems like they've traveled to the future and done the same thing with stuff like nine inch nails and other industrial/electronic musics of the late '90s and early '00s.

jay clark needs to remix something from this album. did you hear his bloc party remix? stunningly awesome faux-nintendo work. at its heart, this is really a very simple album; it's just that each element that's there is ramped up to a quasi-ridiculous degree. these guys should be cast as the houseband in some kind of near-future, dark apocalyptic noir movie. the song "t.r.o.u.b.l.e." has only these lyrics: "t to the r to the o u b l eeeee ... looking for some trouble!" suffice it to say, they mostly keep their political statements to their volume and not their lyrics.

we're on the penultimate track now: "we are all winners." this album has a charming mix of world-weary posing and wide-eyed naivete, in the way that very abstract and arty music by its very nature displays a kind of contempt for the everyday, but at its best also makes us re-envision what the everyday is. there was a great little piece in harper's last month about exploring the quotidian, about going deep inside the everyday and non-descript to find a sublimality that's very different from our typical expectations of the sublime. we as americans expect to be entertained 24 hours a day and made to feel special, but this seems like a pretty recent development. there's a lot of beauty to be found in gentle observation of pretty much anything.

on the surface, we are wolves seem to not fit into the everyday with their glitchy and aggresive synth sounds and howling vocals, but there's something brave about not setting music apart from life. they're all playing off-instruments for the members and it sounds like they're having a hella fun time doing it. good for them. i'll bet they kick ass live.

and scene.

one-listen wednesday

so here's maybe what i'm thinking: i'll alternate weeks with local and national releases. that seems like what's happening anyways. last week all enjoyed one for the team, so this week i'm going to check out radio 4.

radio 4
enemies like this
EMI

well, first of all, now friends like these can't call their album enemies like this. i still miss their old domain name whoneedsenemies.com. that was so clever, but probably harder to remember than friendslikethese.com. the title track, which opens the record, has something in common with the more gothic dance punk stuff i've heard. i love you but i've chosen darkness aren't particularly dancy, but R4 has a little of that vibe, although much more free of reverb and amped up to 11 and cut in two with a rusty wire. there are these manic single stroke rolls in practically every measure that really keep you on edge.

right before i started listening to this i was listening to minus the bear, and i'm catching a little afterglow of that on this one. mostly in its immaculateness. and hey, it was mastered by the same person, emily lazar, who mastered heiruspecs' last album. apparently there are really only like four mastering places to have your stuff done. i'm thinking of the lodge, magneto mastering, (mumble mumble) and that other one.

this isn't exactly subtle music, but the differences between bands of the minimalist dance punk stripe generally reveal themselves over time. just how much gang of four have they listened to? bloc party? tons. franz ferdinand? less than bloc party, but enough. i'm already at track 3, "too much to ask for," which is showing its gang of four/clash influence proudly on its sleeve.

first impressions are a funny thing. oftentimes, as i'm listening through a record for the first time i'm having all kinds of different ideas about the disc, but the ultimate test seems to be if enough stuck at the end of the record to bring me back for more. there have been plenty of records that didn't initially seem that great that kept pulling me back for reasons i couldn't really figure. at the drive-in's relationship of command is one, crystal skulls' outgoing behavior is another.

"everything's in question" is the most interesting track so far. it has a massive attack-worthy bassline that seems a little dub and some echo-y edge-style guitar in the post-chorus section.

apparently, franz ferdinand's singer is putting out a cookbook of his recipes. i would assume the franz ferdinand diet is something like the all-ramen college student diet. gotta keep that wispy frame.

"this is not a test," which directly follows "everything's in question," is showing further sonic broadening. a decidedly (or maybe stereotypically) african rhythm track begins it and then squiggly guitar lines snake in over the top. this kind of broadness is making me feel better about the earlier, more straightforward tracks. it's got a chant-like mantra that repeats the title. entrancing.

and here comes the melodica. speaking of at the drive-in, i thought they were punk geniuses for using it in "quarantined" (i think that was the track; the names rarely had anything to do with the lyrics), but it turns out that, yep, gang of four did it fifteen years before them. the melodica is a little keyboard that you blow into like a recorder. you might not know what to call it, but when you hear it, you know it. ben folds uses one every once in a while. basically it seems like tracks 5, 6 and 7 are like a big old dub-influence samich. watch out, the clash.

one problem i had with the bloc party album (the silent alarm) was that it had this very strange characteristic of seeming great when you heard any one track and kind of underwhelming as a whole. there was a lack of connection amongst the tracks. i got the sense that you could shuffle the whole thing in itunes and the running order would make just as much sense. i think radio 4 might have a little of that going on. in that several of these tracks could make your summer mixtape a wonder to behold, but if you threw on the whole disc at a party it wouldn't make a dent after the first couple songs.

we're winding up to the last track here. this is nothing if not a crisp listen. i think i like this on first listen. at first it seemed to be a very straight-ahed dance punk kind of thing that didn't seem distinct from a lot of other stuff i've heard, but those middle three tracks really spread it out. funny how a couple tracks that show off another side of the band can make the down-the-pipe ones feel more significant. there are some really great little guitar stabs and the polyrhythmic aspects are a welcome change from four-on-floor stuff.

and scene.

the new pearl jam reviewed right

despite my mixed feelings, i ref pitchfork a lot on here, so now i'm sending you to a site i actually prefer for what i feel to be the most even-handed review of pearl jam's new self-titled disc i've read so far.

pearl jam review on cokemachineglow

i've been considering writing up my own review, but this one pretty much nails it. i don't know if i would have that much to add, really. pitchfork's 5.5 was laughable; i can't even understand why they would review it other than to confirm to snobbish hipsters that their dislike of pearl jam can remain intact. to call eddie vedder's voice an "acquired taste's acquired taste" is completely ridiculous for a site that has handed out sterling silver reviews to the likes of clap your hands say yeah, wolf parade and, yes, scott walker. i can bet you that vedder's baritone is a lot closer to what the man on the street expects from a rock singer than alec ounsworth or spencer krug's strangled yelping, which i love, by the way. i love CYHSY and wolf parade, but i think hipsters should acknowledge that there's more to the music scene out there than their little corner of it. pearl jam themselves said it best back on vs.: "this is not for you."

is pearl jam going to crack my top ten come year's end? am i going to find myself going back to it over and over again? probably not. but i'll just remember to check back in on any of the bands whose first efforts have yielded up 8.5s or above on pfork this year in 2021 to see how they're doing. pearl jam have been putting out good to great albums for 15 years. they make a living doing music, they play to scads of fans at every venue they hit and they've written some great songs. not a bad take, i think.

okay, i guess i did have something to add.

scott walker review on pitchfork

review of scott walker's the drift on pitchfork

i don't feel like i trashed walker's album or anything; i was simply giving my first impression of the disc as i listened to it. here's a glowing review from the old pitchfork, which makes the excellent point that "pretentious" doesn't necessarily mean "bullshit." but i stand by my opinion that this is a record that asks, "how much art can you take?" and i don't think anyone should feel bad if the answer is "less than this."

on a separate note, i caught sigur ros at the orpheum last night, and thought they were spectac. about four songs into their set, i was beginning to lose interest a bit since every song followed essentially the same dynamic pattern: slow build to climax, drop it back down, build it up again. i don't know the names of their songs, but there's one from agaetis byrjun that has a little flute melody that comes in about 2/3 of the way through, and starting with that one, i was quite impressed. the thickness of their sound is almost unbelievable, but they also stripped it down really nicely partway through and played a song with all the lights down save for a few that were linked into the sound levels from the mics. the result was a flock of lights that would brighten when a chord was hit, then flicker out as the sustain died. a great show for the orpheum's set-up, all things considered. the one disappointing aspect was the ruining of what could have been a beautiful moment of silence. at one point in one of their songs, the entire band and the video that was being shown behind them came to a halt, with all the members frozen completely still. the silence lasted about ten second before someone shouted, "woo-hoo!" and then another person piped up. and then someone took the opportunity to tell the band they were fucking awesome. kind of lame, folks. i know it's a bit much to expect people to shut up completely for a show, but instead of a beautiful 30 seconds of silence, we got a display of just how uncomfortable we are with pauses. why is that? why can't we just let an empty space be an empty space?

the death knell of criticism, mk iii

i'm about to launch into a one-listen wednesday of afternoon records' upcoming release by one for the team, but first this: there's going to be a slamming show at the triple rock tonight featuring headliners pretty girls make graves (including ex-twin cities bamf jay clark on guitar), giant drag and the joggers. pgmg just released elan vital, which i'm pretty sure means lively flair or something like that. there are throngs and throngs of kids who love pretty girls like rap kids love breaks, and i'm not super-familiar, but i love jay clark's remix of bloc party's "positive tension." it sounds like a nintendo playing dance rock. pgmg mix up the vocals between the dudes and the dudettes, which always gets the thumbs up from me, although the critical reception for this album has been somewhat muted. i brought along the new romance, so i'm throwing that in right now.

giant drag is another boy-girl affair, although just the one girl (annie hardy) and the one boy (micah calabrese). their disc kicks off with the catchingly-named "kevin is gay," and over the course of the whole thing cover a good amount of ground sonically, especially for a two-piece. it definitely falls onto the indie-dance-punk-pop side of things, but isn't overly aggressive. watching duos go at it live is always entertaining as they fill in parts on the fly. the best of them make up with energy what they lack in instrumentation.

this just in: the new romance is more immediately good than elan vital. i'm not saying better, just that so far it's making a better impression.

and now: one-listen wednesday

one for the team
s/t(?)
afternoon records

right away: guitar-through-a-tiny-radio sound. an immediate plus. when the track kicks in, it's damn solid. i don't have any track listings here, so i don't know what this is called. it's kind of clattering and great. tamborines should be mandatory on certain songs and this is one of them. and there they are. call me crazy, but i'm thinking matthew sweet here. it's got that vocals-in-you-face feel to it.

checking up on myspace (where else do you go for info about bands?), i discover that one for the team has 0 friends. not even tom. this would be ian anderson (who heads up afternoon records and writes for the pusle from time to time) and a bunch of guys doing anderson's songs, i'm a-guessing. the second song is definitely keeping up the ante with a great line about, "i've been coming of age for most of my life," and a refrain of "you're taking off, you're taking off your..." i really hope that's a double entendre.

apparently, power-pop grows on trees here in the twin cities, and this is one of the finer examples i've heard. personally, i like my power-pop a little shaggy, a little more organic. plug in, crank the amps, write a rocker, then add claps, harmonies, and yup, tamborines. another major plus: the fourth track's chorus references the band's name ("take one for the team, and one for me"). always a plus in my book. the pinnacle example being, of course, the song "in a big country" from the album in a big country by the band in a big country.

wow, killer little ac/dc style riff at the end of track five. razor sharp, anderson. track five is so far the most spleen-filled, but it's still pretty sweet and the breakdown part at the end reminds me of muse--one of my favorite guilty pleasure bands, like a cross between queen and rage against the machine.

i always struggle in these things to just say who bands sound like, since that's the cheapest and easiest way to explain a band's sound, but on the other hand, it's cheap and easy. track six has a great little interpolation of that childhood teasing melody of "na na na na naaa naaaa" (that looks horrible and not like how it sounds, but i don't know how to express it in print) in the chorus.

"making wishes under overpasses?" hell yeah, dude. i've always liked the stuff i've gotten from afternoon records from superdanger to viceburgh to look down to squareshooters, but this might be my favorite so far. hints of 12 rods? yeah, i think so. see, there are nasal vocals and then there are nasal vocals, and it's a really fine line to walk between braying and endearing; anderson's doing a great job here of staying on the right side of that line.

and now the track nine change of pace. keyboards! well, at least it starts that way, but overdriven guitars have taken over ... and now back to the keyboards. it's a song about school and buying houses. "someday maybe we'll be fine" is the chorus. this is what i love about a good indie rock pop moment: it's simple and almost dumb, even, in a way, but couched inside of support that's fuzzy and splintered and that tension gives it a certain poignance.

okay, i've got it now: built to spill circa there's nothing wrong with love. cross-pollinate that with matthew sweet circa girlfriend. who wouldn't want to listen to that? yeah, this is just super-pleasing over the distance. we're at track ten now and i haven't heard a clunker so far.

looks like they played with voxtrot on april 17. i'll bet that was a good show. and thus we've wound to the end of one for the team's disc. man, kudos, ian. this one's definitely going to be getting more than one listen.