Note: New Music Tuesday highlights something I’ve been listening to regularly during the week prior. I like it. I include critical comments both positive and negative to demonstrate my independent ignorance of musical convention.
Del Amitri is the love of my musical life. I fed on their ironic, narcissistic, self-loathing for most of my 20’s and am a better man for it. Since they broke up, I’ve had to content myself with a couple of fine solo albums from their frontman Justin Currie, but those just aren’t the same. I’m always on the lookout for some whiskey-soaked deprecatory literary Scottish rock. Always.
Where I Found It: Their previous two albums have put me on their watch list. This one was on my radar for awhile.
What The Critics Are Saying:
The tightly constrained rhythms and miserable lyrics that make the tracks catchy are also what make the album something of a downer. (Consequence of Sound)
Over the years, the group has been lumped in with the proud tradition of sad Scottish bastards, and Pedestrian Verse’s moody “Nitrous Gas” shows why. “Leave the acute warm-heartedness / Go where the joyless bastard lives / He’s dying to bring you down with him / Suck in the bright red major keys / Spit out the blue minor misery / I’m dying to bring you down with me.” (A.V. Club)
Frightened Rabbit’s major label full-length debut is a triumphant album. It expertly expands on their previous work with a big, muscular series of anthems that investigate faith, masculinity, and Scottish identity while sharpening their increasingly identifiable brand of wry, thoughtful songwriting. (Under The Radar)
Here are a few highlights, starting with the aforementioned “Nitrous Gas”:
Note: New Music Tuesday highlights something I’ve been listening to regularly during the week prior. I like it. I include critical comments both positive and negative to demonstrate my independent ignorance of musical convention.
Chad Andrew Herring is magic. He sneezes rainbow sprinkles. He sweats cologne. He burps laughing gas.
Where I Found It: (Do I have to say it?) Chad Andrew Herring
What The Critics Are Saying:
On “Heartthrob” (Vapor/Warner Bros.), the Quins’ seventh album, they let their inner dance-pop divas loose. Instead of Cat Power teamed with Ani DiFranco, they now sound like Kelly Clarkson paired with Gwen Stefani. And, in a bigger surprise, they sound pretty great doing it. (Glen Gamboa)
The album’s electro trappings may feel odd at first, but that sensation quickly fades thanks to the smooth, inviting textures — the Quins never sound like anyone but themselves. Whether sharing close harmonies or trading lead vocals, the sisters retain the engaging conversational style that values down-to-earth expressiveness over showy theatrics. (Jon Young)
With Heartthrob it sounds like the sisters have made a conscious effort to be more understandable, while maintaining some aspects of their signature poetic repetitious style. They’ve grown up in almost every aspect of music production. (Enio Chiola)
Seriously, at times listening to “Heartthrob” feels like nothing as much as Olivia Newton-John. Witness the opening track, “Closer”:
This is perfect pop candy. Echo, reverb, synthesizers. And staccato repetition lyrics like, “And it drove me, and it drove me, and it drove me . . . wild.”
Note: New Music Tuesday highlights something I’ve been listening to regularly during the week prior. I like it. I include critical comments both positive and negative to demonstrate my independent ignorance of musical convention.
If you do as the title of this post suggests, the sound produced might be something like the voice of Chris Senseney, the golden gravel voice behind the husband-and-wife duo Big Harp.
Album: Chain Letters
Artist: Big Harp
Label: Saddle Creek (Bright Eyes, Azure Ray, The Mynabirds)
“The opening track, ‘You Can’t Save ‘Em All’ sounds like mix of an old school country tune and a Cormac McCarthy book. Its dark, brooding and has this grinding lick to it. But weirdly enough it bounces along with lovely harmonies from Stefanie – has a kicking guitar solo in it as well.” (Hearya.com)
“Mr. Senseney’s underrated vocals are still achingly phenomenal, spanning the range of guttural Gospel wailings at the fuzzed out crescendo of ‘It’s Easy to Be Strange’ to the low and raspy march in ‘Call Out The Cavalry, Strike Up The Band’. (indierockreviews.com)
“The sound of Chain Letters is built around Stefanie’s bass; it’s the glue on this album.” (Thom Jurek, Rdio)
Apparently there was a stunning debut record a couple of years ago, but I missed it, so I have no basis for comparison. This, though, is so good it makes me want to cuss. In particular, “Bar All The Doors” is a mental massage–with tree bark (“If you bar all of the doors/and curl up easy on your hardwood floor/they’ll just come through the window.”)
Note: New Music Tuesday highlights something I’ve been listening to regularly during the week prior. I like it. I include critical comments both positive and negative to demonstrate my independent ignorance of musical convention.
Julie Shields’ singing is quite the acquired taste: Sounding like a cross between the Go-Gos’ Belinda Carlisle and the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan, Shields is either going to charm you or annoy you greatly (Zachary Houle, PopMatters)
The simplistic beats and forgettable vocal melodies on tracks like ‘Where It All Begins’ and ‘All At Once’ leave a lot to be desired, and they bear too strong of a resemblance to all the other dime-in-a-dozen electronic popularity wave surfing bands out there. (SowingSeason, Sputnik Music)
Normally, I wouldn’t get worked up about an album of live acoustic versions of songs I already knew and, in some cases, loved. But these songs make unique contributions. There’s no novelty in arrangement or vocalization (such as the irritating habit of inviting the audience to sing the chorus), only rich vocal harmonies and the addition of some simple strings. The recording of “Either Way” is as good of proof as there is:
I fell hard for Guster in 2003 while a seminary student. I listened to Keep It Together the whole academic year. Then, during my first year as a pastor, I would spend my morning commute pounding the steering wheel and stomping the floorboards singing along to “Happier” and “Two Points for Honesty.” They fell off my rader after that, though. It’s been almost 10 years.
Working along here to the sounds of The Mailboxes, a little Cleveland-based outfit I discovered yesterday in the New Releases tab on Rdio’s home page. “Red Flags” is the debut project of Jillian Spears, who funded it with Kickstarter. The first track on the record hooked me, and I’ve listened to it, like, six times over the last two days.
It’s not all piano pounding, though. “Just As Long As You Care” is a ukulele ditty that proclaims, “I don’t care about money or material things/Just as long as you care about Jesus and me.” Nice.
As in our Top Five Albums post, this one recognizes that we’re halfway through the year and a bunch of great stuff has been released. If I had to put only ten tracks into a playlist bound for a desert island, these would be the ones.
What about you? What are your favorite songs to come out this year? Put them in the comments and we’ll see what we come up with.
Here are five albums released since January I would take with me to an island vacation. My only rule for inclusion is my patented 3 Skip Rule: if I have to skip more than three songs on the album in order to enjoy it, it gots to go.
Here you are then, in no particular order.
“The Only Place” by Best Coast
“Lights Out” by Big Deal
“There’s No Leaving Now” by The Tallest Man on Earth
“The Lumineers,” by The Lumineers
Actually I lied. There’s only four. There’s five or six others vying for this fifth spot, but my love of them is not as enduring as it is with these four. Bhi Bhiman, for example. Or Rags and Ribbons, The Wedding Present, Said The Whale, and Nada Surf’s latest. They may grow on me as the year goes, and they each have terrific tracks on them.
Yesterday Landon and I posted our respective Top 5 Songs of 2011 lists.
Today we bring you our top five albums.
The album is a luxury in times like these. So much music–like so much life–is spliced up into episodic units for consumption during the commute or the wait at the doctor’s office. Maybe this has raised the bar for songwriting and maybe it hasn’t. It’s definitely made it more difficult for a music consumer like me to experience a collection of 10-15 songs as a unified work. This list is something of an effort to listen to music with ears tilted in that direction.
To make it onto this list, an album has to be enjoyable from beginning to end–no skipping around to the three of four tracks on it I like. By that standard the first one on the list blows all the others away. Something of a perverse irony registers at this point, because a really good album demands a sustained investment of attention, and lacking the emotional or intellectual energy, or lacking the time, for such an investment means that a great album doesn’t get listened to all that often. It’s like a really good wine or a limited edition Snickers Dark.
The other side of that perverse irony is that albums containing a couple of dynamite songs may never get the benefit of a complete listen. That’s why an album like Thao and Mirah isn’t on this list, because I didn’t have the patience to give every track not titled “I Dare You” a fair shake.
Here they are, then: the five albums from 2011 that I’d feel most confident putting on without interruption for a long road trip, a party, or a quiet evening at home. Here’s the link to Landon’s list (bonus points for whoever finds the Album on both our lists)
1. Destroyer, “Kaputt”
It’s almost hard to tell independent tracks apart on this album, and the whole thing feels like it could have been released in 1986. But that doesn’t make it gimmicky. It’s smooth and melodic and catchy and engaging and so, so interesting from beginning to end.
Sample: “Savage Night at The Opera”
2. Bon Iver, “Bon Iver”
I resisted this one because indie music fans are supposed to adore Bon Iver in the same way Star Wars fans are supposed to worship George Lucas. But resistance is futile. It’s so good. Justin Vernon’s falsetto, the electronic tinkering, the marching band-like percussion–it’s very compelling, and there’s no one track that takes attention away from the others, even if “Holocene” got a Grammy nomination (a fact that is supposed to enrage the bearded bespectacled faithful?). Whatever. This album is full of depth and texture, and it’s beautiful.
Sample: “Holocene”
3. David Bazan, “Strange Negotiations”
That David Bazan was the frontman of a Christian rock band and now writes songs full of profanity was an intriguing intro to this record back in June. I totally missed his first solo album, but music writers had a blast writing it up as Bazan’s break-up with God. Bazan’s reasons for falling out of faith (if that’s indeed accurate) are his own, and, frankly, I don’t really care. “Strange Negotiations” is a gritty product in its own right, and it is diminished by parsing its tracks for evidence of a religious beef. I listened to this album almost daily for about two months and kept discovering lyrics and notes I hadn’t appreciated before. It’s pretty intellectually rigorous (“I know it’s dangerous to judge/but man you gotta find the truth and when you find that truth don’t budge/until the truth you’ve found begins to change/and it does, I know”), which is what I most like about it.
Sample: “People”
4. The Decemberists, “The King is Dead”
The last time I got all geeked up for a Decemberists release I was left feeling flawed because I didn’t like it, and there’s this flannel-clad vibe out there that leads you to believe that if you don’t like The Decemberists it’s not a flaw in the music but in your intellect. “The King Is Dead” is the most mainstream thing The Decemberists have ever done, so I’m a little embarrassed to have liked it so much. On balance, it’s not as epic as “Picaresque“, and it doesn’t have any fist pumpers like “The Rake’s Song,” but it’s supremely listenable without compromising the narrative identity that makes this band such a cultural gem (i.e. “We all do what we can/we endure our fellow man/and we sing our song to the head frame’s creaks and moan”). Also, I saw them in concert this year, and the broad smile that show put on my face for two hours hurt for a week).
Sample: “Calamity Song”
5. Dolorean, “The Unfazed”
It doesn’t feel like an album like this is written with year-end-list ambition. It’s full of uncomplicated melodies on which hang cigarette pack lyrics delivered by serviceable vocals. I feel like any two of those qualities without the third would make “The Unfazed” pretty pedestrian, and, thankfully, that’s strictly hypothetical. All the tracks on the album gel together in a really pleasant whole that’s not overly ambitious. I don’t know how many times I put this record on at the house on a constant loop, humming along to melodies for which I hadn’t yet learned the words. Also, I felt like I was recommending the album to almost everyone I talked to about music all year.
Sample: “If I Find Love”
There you have it. Thanks for reading and listening. Please chime in with your favorite music of the year.
I used to blog about music, but I quit, because I realized how little I like reading music blogs. Why add one more?
I’ve left myself one music blogging indulgence, though: the year-end lists. I love year-end music lists, like this one. I used to pilfer these lists in January and get caught up on all of the previous year’s music. Then I decided to make myself into a more proactive music consumer and to measure that standard by my ability to assemble my own list in December. This is my third set of lists.
This list has the added benefit of being something of a collaboration with my musical compatriot, Landon. The two of us text one another music recommendations a couple of times a week, and so we decided to share our year-end lists as well. Here’s the link to Landon’s top 5 song list.
Two lists, then, both of them super short: top 5 songs and top 5 albums of the year. This post is the songs.
1. “Country Clutter” by Dolorean
“You know good n’ well/the way you treated me.”
It’s been my go-to since it came out in January.
2. “How Dare You?” by Thao and Mirah
“I swear it happens better/when it happens again.”
I listened to this about 15 times during a July trip to San Diego and back.
3. “We Don’t Eat” by James Vincent McMorrow
“We don’t drink until the Devil’s turned to dust.”
Landon and I actually discovered this one together when he was in CA last January. It stuck all year.
4. “Don’t Move” by Phantogram
“I’m not your drinking problem.”
This track is the perfect length for my commute to the church.
5. “Bye Bye Baby” by Hayes Carll (skip ahead to 0.50 for the start of the song)
“You kissed my hand and said you were beside me.”
What can I say? I’m a sucker for a banjo.
That these are my favorite songs of the year simply means that these are the ones I listened to most often, the ones I sought out, either by skipping to that song in my car or navigating to it on MOG or Rdio. There’s a much longer list of great tracks from 2011, and I’m happy to share that, but the fun of this exercise is having to choose five.
What are your top tracks from this year?
Watch here tomorrow for the top 5 albums of the year.
YoRocko! 