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| Touche, sir! I SAID TOUCHE! |
Borrow is the label I give to albums that I probably like but that I recognize might be outside the norm or something that may suffer from limited appeal. Give them a try and see if you like them.
Bury consists of the albums that need to be put out of their misery and put in a shallow grave out back. Or sometimes just albums or songs that are guilty pleasures--a moped, if you will.
(This post was mostly written in mid 2011 and just never posted. I finished it up and have now posted it. I think I'll keep this up--three up, three down--and I'm very open to taking recommendations and suggestions on albums I should give a listen to.
BRAG
Two Door Cinema Club: Tourist History
Word is, their live show is pretty solid as well. I saw them do a song on Palladia playing, Something Good Can Work. It was okbut but seemed a bit low energy. Part of that could be that it was one track and that it was recorded at a Glastonbury festival where it was pouring, but, excuses aside, you could tell they know how to play. Something Good Can Work is an interesting track as it mixes a Carrib beat with some steel pan drums and tight American Pop sensibilities. Coming in just under 3 minutes, it is a single waiting to happen.
They've started to get some radio play around the greater Boston area, but not nearly enough. I've heard Undercover Martyn on the radio a few times, but I think that's it. This is a top notch album and worth the six or seven bucks on Amazon. It is "office friendly" as well, with very few, if any, naughty words.
BORROW
The Dodos: No Color
This album has some broad appeal but it has a bit of that indie-folk dueling acoustic guitars that can turn some people off. It is one of my personal top albums of the year despite kind of not wanting it to be. I can't explain it and I'm sure that sounds like some damning praise, but, hear me out: it is album that is immediately catchy and fun and it has a lot of the elements that defined 2011 as a musical year (folk+, a bit retro, solid singles with an overall very strong album) and yet... It has a strong early Shins influence. It could literally fill out a checklist of things I want to hear in an album and come away with a full page. And yet...
I kept poo-poo'ing it and I can't figure out why--but I also kept finding it on my playlists and among my highest rated songs. The album owns a place in my playlists, but it isn't a place that I feel like I decided to cede. The Dodo's just kind of moved in, set up shop and said, We're here.
Listen to the album. Borrow it from a friend of put it into Pandora/Spotify/etc and give it a go. You may love it and own it, or you may love it and have it own you.
BURY
Iron & Wine: Kiss Each Other Clean
Early Iron & Wine is fantastic music that I cannot recommend to people highly enough. The Trapeze Swinger, sung live, is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. There is a recording on NPR's All Song's Considered that is Iron & Wine with Calexico at the 930 Club from a few years ago. It is magical. I believe they still have it up under the live concerts podcast. I'm sure someone has split it up into tracks by this point, so there might be an easier way to listen to it.
The first few albums are full of simple, folk-oriented songs that don't always hit, but they hit more often than they miss--and when they do miss, it isn't that far off the mark. Sam Beams breathy voice, as filtered by his beard, always sounds raw and emotional and timbrous. The instrumentation is sparse and clear and arranged in a way that highlights the lyrics and singing. They are very well put together and executed songs. Like I said, early Iron & Wine is fantastic music that I cannot recommend highly enough.
Two things strike me about that sentence:
1) The use of the term, "early".
2) the implicit understanding of an impending "but".
Here's that but: but, this latest effort is atrocious. There, I said it. This is the 4th studio album by the band. This should be the stride, not the falling action. This album is a compilation of failed experiments that have been wrapped up and packaged for our purchasing pleasure.
Walking Far From Home, the first track and first single from the album, is an abject departure from that simple elegance and raw emotion. Big Bearded Sam went from creating breathy dirges and folky love songs to generating re-imagined pop rejects from the 70's and 80's as sung by someone who sings in a breathy, folksy voice. There's a term for that: horrendous. There's something to be said for mixing genre's and expanding, but, there are also limits to that-- you don't have T-Pain sing opera, for instance. You don't have Rivers Cuomo sing duets. Kanye should never actually, ya know, sing. Rap, yes. Sing, no. I think this album is solid confirmation that Sam Beam should never sing 70's and 80's pop rejects.
A telling quote: (From SPIN)
“It’s more of a focused pop record. It sounds like the music people heard in their parent’s car growing up… that early-to-mid-’70s FM, radio-friendly music."
Dear Sam,
Please understand that the majority of people listening to your music were either not alive in the 70's--let along the early 70's-- or they were too young to remember the music being played then. Also, early 70's pop was terrible music. It was a rejection of late 60's experimentation rock and folk, and therefore very boring and square (to avoid the hippie, anti-war smear) or it was bad copy-cat artists who thought they were the Beatles. Why would you want to resurrect that?! The mid-80's and the late 90's/early aughts are equally terrible, homogenized periods in music and you don't see anyone (but major labels who made BANK during those periods) lining up to repeat the aural mistakes of those years.
Let's bury this album and pretend it never existed.
I kept poo-poo'ing it and I can't figure out why--but I also kept finding it on my playlists and among my highest rated songs. The album owns a place in my playlists, but it isn't a place that I feel like I decided to cede. The Dodo's just kind of moved in, set up shop and said, We're here.
Listen to the album. Borrow it from a friend of put it into Pandora/Spotify/etc and give it a go. You may love it and own it, or you may love it and have it own you.
BURY
Iron & Wine: Kiss Each Other Clean
Early Iron & Wine is fantastic music that I cannot recommend to people highly enough. The Trapeze Swinger, sung live, is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. There is a recording on NPR's All Song's Considered that is Iron & Wine with Calexico at the 930 Club from a few years ago. It is magical. I believe they still have it up under the live concerts podcast. I'm sure someone has split it up into tracks by this point, so there might be an easier way to listen to it.
The first few albums are full of simple, folk-oriented songs that don't always hit, but they hit more often than they miss--and when they do miss, it isn't that far off the mark. Sam Beams breathy voice, as filtered by his beard, always sounds raw and emotional and timbrous. The instrumentation is sparse and clear and arranged in a way that highlights the lyrics and singing. They are very well put together and executed songs. Like I said, early Iron & Wine is fantastic music that I cannot recommend highly enough.
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| Album art done by Timmy, age 9, in Cray-pas |
1) The use of the term, "early".
2) the implicit understanding of an impending "but".
Here's that but: but, this latest effort is atrocious. There, I said it. This is the 4th studio album by the band. This should be the stride, not the falling action. This album is a compilation of failed experiments that have been wrapped up and packaged for our purchasing pleasure.
Walking Far From Home, the first track and first single from the album, is an abject departure from that simple elegance and raw emotion. Big Bearded Sam went from creating breathy dirges and folky love songs to generating re-imagined pop rejects from the 70's and 80's as sung by someone who sings in a breathy, folksy voice. There's a term for that: horrendous. There's something to be said for mixing genre's and expanding, but, there are also limits to that-- you don't have T-Pain sing opera, for instance. You don't have Rivers Cuomo sing duets. Kanye should never actually, ya know, sing. Rap, yes. Sing, no. I think this album is solid confirmation that Sam Beam should never sing 70's and 80's pop rejects.
A telling quote: (From SPIN)
“It’s more of a focused pop record. It sounds like the music people heard in their parent’s car growing up… that early-to-mid-’70s FM, radio-friendly music."
Dear Sam,
Please understand that the majority of people listening to your music were either not alive in the 70's--let along the early 70's-- or they were too young to remember the music being played then. Also, early 70's pop was terrible music. It was a rejection of late 60's experimentation rock and folk, and therefore very boring and square (to avoid the hippie, anti-war smear) or it was bad copy-cat artists who thought they were the Beatles. Why would you want to resurrect that?! The mid-80's and the late 90's/early aughts are equally terrible, homogenized periods in music and you don't see anyone (but major labels who made BANK during those periods) lining up to repeat the aural mistakes of those years.
Let's bury this album and pretend it never existed.
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