Category: Listened Things

Blueberry Boat

A new favorite!

blueberryboatI’d stayed away from The Fiery Furnaces because of the mixed reviews and “challenging” label that people tend to give them. But my music taste seems to have been veering a little to the strange side lately, so I thought I’d give Bluebuerry Boat, their 2004 rock opera, a try. On first listen, the theatricality wore me out a little, but before long, I had completely gotten on the boat. I bought the album two days ago, and I have listened to nothing else since. I kind of can’t stop.

Five of the 13 tracks are over seven minutes long, but among those are some of my favorites, composed of mini songs—some jazzy, some classic rock—mixed with sung dialog. Unusual rhymes and nonsense phrases abound; Lewis Carroll would probably approve. The album as a whole doesn’t have a story per se, but it’s about a lot of things, including seafaring, teleconferencing, and fratricide. But ultimately, it’s about the most fun with music and words that I’ve experienced in a long time.

Not for everyone, but probably for more people than it gets credit for.

New Animal Collective

merriweather
Animal Collective has a new album just out, Merriweather Post Pavilion. After listening to it a few times, my thoughts are that it’s very good, but not their best for me. I really liked the frenetic energy of 2007’s Strawberry Jam and the gorgeously complex sound of their older albums. Merriweather Post Pavilion is a bit more easy and domesticated, and the lyrics are much more understandable than in previous albums, which for me is actually a bit of a drawback. It doesn’t leave so much up to the imagination, if that makes sense.

But MPP seems like Animal Collective’s most accessible album to date, so it’s probably a great introduction to their music if you’re not already a fan.

If you are already a fan, here is some other music from 2008 that you might have missed and may like:

Visiter by The Dodos
I love the way they combine simple acoustic sound with fun complex rhythms.

Ice Cream Spiritual by Ponytail
It took me a while to be ready for the heavy guitars and high-pitched growling, but at one point I just got it, and really liked it. (The son of the president of the company I work for plays in the band, in the interest of full disclosure.)

The Evening Descends by Evangelicals
A little psychedelic, and different enough to hold my attention. Also, they’re from my home state of Oklahoma!

Highballs for All

I seem to be on a ’90s music kick lately. Well, here’s one more. But this time it’s new to me!

coctailsThe Coctails made playful lounge-y music in Chicago in the early ’90s, which I discovered recently when I should have been working or maybe sleeping. The collection of their early works contained on the Early Hi-Ball Years album is actually an eclectic mix of sounds from different genres and eras throughout the 20th century—it’s mostly light on vocals and heavy on vibraphone and sax, but there are some exceptions. One of my favorite exceptions is “Jobless,” a very catchy little song that stops abruptly after 58 seconds.

Later in the ’90s, the Coctails changed their sound to more closely resemble something like Pavement, which is fine, but less interesting to me than their earlier groove.

Sweet Memories

I was browsing through iTunes the other day and came across a mention of Matthew Sweet’s 1995 album 100% Fun, which happened to be one of the first CDs I bought as a teenager. To my frustration, I no longer seemed to have the album anywhere, but I really wanted to hear it again, so I broke down and bought the digital copy after a few days of vacillating. It’s so great!

matthewsweetThe “power pop” sound of this album didn’t really fit in with the alterna-grunge vibe of the mid-’90s, and that might be one reason that I didn’t give it the credit it deserved at the time, and it didn’t make the cut of CDs to take with me when I went to college a few years later. But the classic, super-catchy tunes of 100% Fun are even better than I remember as I listen to them 13 years later, even though I’m finding again that this album doesn’t really fit in with the music that fills most of my life (this time, indies, experimental rock, folk, and other oddities). The first track, “Sick of Myself,” has quickly become a rediscovered favorite, for its bittersweet lyrics over a memorable melody.

It makes me a little sad to think about how Matthew Sweet has never became a huge name, even though his sound is perfectly suited for mainstream mega-hits. At the same time, there’s no way that he’ll ever go away. (And I hear that “Girlfriend,” from his earlier breakout album, is on Guitar Hero II, so there’s that.)

iTunes to the Rescue

My favorite person this week is Ryan, a support person for the iTunes Store. He helped me re-download all the music I’d ever purchased from them and lost when my hard drive crashed last month. That’s a ton of music!

itunes
I have 99 songs (5.8 hours worth) with the word “love” in the title!

It’s funny, I get emails pretty frequently from people who have lost patterns they downloaded from my shop, and I’m always happy to send the patterns to them again. But it hadn’t occurred to me that Apple would do the same for their customers. They do!

After contacting their support via this page, I got a detailed email from Ryan explaining how I could download my music again. Then he followed up again the next day just to make sure I understood how to do it. It was easy and very fast. Thank you Ryan! (In case Ryan isn’t an avid reader of my blog, I also sent him an email thanking him.)

Neutral Milk Hotel, Revisited

I found out yesterday that my unhappy hard drive, which was being tinkered with by the second set of professionals, is not recoverable after all, and I’ve lost about a year’s worth of data. Fun!

It’s fine really—when I finally accessed what I actually lost, there’s little that cannot be replaced or forgotten about. I now have my computer back with a new hard drive, and one of the first things did was go back through my old CDs so that I could have something to listen to after three music-less weeks.

intheaeroplaneGoing through my college-era albums, I realized that I hadn’t had Neutral Milk Hotel on my computer in a long time. Remember them? If you kind of do, it’s a good time for a re-listen. And if you don’t remember them, you should get the CD (or download from iTunes and back it up for goodness’ sake). In The Aeroplane Over the Sea is a beautiful listen, with trumpets, lo-fi noise, and references to The Diary of Anne Frank. Hearing it now makes me think of it as a precursor to some of The Decemberists’ better songs—it’s thoroughly situated in the late 1990s (Neutral Milk Hotel was part of the Elephant Six collective), but the sad and touching images it evokes are from an earlier era.

I’m not the first person to revisit In the Aeroplane Over the Sea this year—Taylor Clark wrote about Jeff Magnum in a Slate article on the 10th anniversary of the album back in February. Clark wrote about how Magnum bowed out of the music scene after releasing Aeroplane, with no signs of returning. All the more reason to appreciate this album.

Oh! AU

New music! Verbs is the just-released album by the Portland group AU, and it’s pretty delightful.

auverbsThe album is a nice mix of big, high-energy orchestrations and quieter songs, with equal weight given to vocals and instruments. I’d say the sound of Verbs lands somewhere between Sufjan Stevens and Animal Collective, which is just fine by me.

You can hear a happy song from the album, “rr. Vs. D” on the Aagoo Records website.

Copy That

I usually seem to catch up with new music about 1-2 years after it’s released, so I’m happy to have found a great album a mere two months after its debut.

cutcopy
Listening to Cut Copy’s new album In Ghost Colours feels kind of like cheating, it’s so listenable. It makes me think of a tree somewhere that grows songs, and Cut Copy just went and picked their favorites before anyone else got to them.

If you, like so many of us, are a sucker for the retro 80s vibe, you should pick this one up. That is, if you haven’t already in the past two months.