Monthly Archives: August 2010

Take Cover: A Family of Trees Wanting To Be Haunted

Posted by on August 10th 2010 0


The Ooks of Hazzard, “Kids” (MGMT)

Aside from the obvious great things about this cover– like the fact that all these ukelele fiends found each other to begin with, and that they can all sing so well in harmony, and that they picked this song of all songs, and of course the sound itself, which is really nicely done and well orchestrated and better than MGMT’s second album, actually– aside from all these cool things, the best part about this cover is by far the realization I’ve just reached, that this band lineup looks exactly like a game of Guess Who. Is your person wearing a hat? Does your person have facial hair? What about sunglasses? Regular eyeglasses? Is your person a girl? Does your person have a lengthy solo? Do they have a beard? Does your person keep time with their feet? Are they wearing shoes? Are they wearing a plaid shirt? Can they play the ukelele? (Duh.)

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Review: Band of Horses, Infinite Arms

Posted by on August 9th 2010 0

by Scott Lensing

4.0 out of 10 disappointed fans

There it was, on display at the Whole Foods register, double-teamed by Jack Johnson and Michael Bublé: Infinite Arms, the latest release from Band of Horses. “Bwah?” No one around me would have known it, but I was immediately ashamed. How did my beloved band find themselves in the snoozer company of adult-contemporary all-stars who rhapsodize about banana pancakes (delicious, no doubt) and impersonate Frank Sinatra? Read More »

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Synesthesia: Eat, Pray, Love

Posted by on August 9th 2010 0

by Fiona Hanly

I don’t know how anyone could have missed Elizabeth Gilbert‘s memoir Eat Pray Love when it came out in 2006––literally every single person (female) I knew on Earth had read it by the end of summer 2007, myself included, and half of those people again had made vows to attempt a similar experiment–to throwing the shackles off! A quick summary of the memoir’s plot: “[Eat, Pray, Love] chronicles [Gilbert's] trip around the world after her divorce and what she discovered during her travels.” Let me jump in and give away the ending: she discovers herself, and how to be happy. Classic plot twist! It took the movie industry exactly three seconds to capitalize on the book’s unprecedented success and make a movie adaptation. Read More »

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Review: Blitzen Trapper, Destroyer of the Void

Posted by on August 9th 2010 0

Blitzen Trapper
Destroyer of the Void
A-

On long family car rides, before the advent of portable MP3 players with headphones, we used to listen to classic rock and oldies stations on the radio. My dad would inevitably start a game to channel our frustration about being crammed in the backseat away from each other and towards something marginally constructive. Every time a song would come on, he’d call out “Who plays this?!” and badger us (“No, not Lenny Kravitz. What decade were you guys born in? This is classic!”) until we got it right. In the interest of keeping our sanity, we learned to match certain sounds, riffs and vocal styles to bands very quickly. Listening to Destroyer of the Void, the newest release from Oregon beard rockers Blitzen Trapper, it felt a bit like my dad should pop up every 30 seconds or so with his trademark question.
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Play What? Play This Playlist: The Dog Days of Summer

Posted by on August 6th 2010 0

The dog days of summer are, quite literally, a drag, and they have officially Arrived. If July was the joyful carefree summer of your youth, then August is a half-life of bided time and listless suspension, caught apathetically between enjoying the last few weeks of summer sun and ushering it along to something new and possibly better and ultimately not really giving a damn either way whether time slows down or speeds up, because if the augustine humidity indicates one thing it is that nothing moves, nothing changes, nothing rushes or sweats or jumps or feels anything, really, for about the last three weeks of the month. It’s that feeling cued up quite perfectly by Jessica Lea Mayfield’s disinterested bargain in “Kiss Me Again,” the same one that accompanies the fade towards the end of a relationship: “You got me where you want me, but I ain’t all there.” And again, later: “You can touch me if you want to, I don’t really care.” Read More »

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Our Top 30 Albums of the Week

Posted by on August 5th 2010 0

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Review: The Drums, The Drums

Posted by on August 5th 2010 0

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If The Strokes, The Cure, The Smiths, and the Beach Boys all got together had a baby (science is close!), they would name it The Drums. Well, actually, first they’d name it Goat Explosion, and then change their minds to Elkland, before finally settling on The Drums. Despite their apparent indecision in the name department, the band now known as The Drums consciously borrowed elements from several new-wave indie pop giants and beach bums of yore to spawn a band that looks and sounds like a little bit of all of them.

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Review: Arcade Fire, The Suburbs (With Album Stream)

Posted by on August 4th 2010 1

by Caroline Klibanoff

The literary accompaniment to The Suburbs is found almost too perfectly in William Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which he declared the state of youth in the union: “There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: when will I be blown up?”

The Montreal-based septuplet similarly poses the difficult questions of the age on their latest release, sometimes ironically and sometimes earnestly. Thematically organized around the threat of suburban sprawl and the replacement of one culture with another, the band manages to avoid the inevitable downer-type sensibility associated with suburban sprawl and instead replace it with total searching exuberance. Like Faulkner, they simply “decline to accept the end of man,” a challenge made immediately clear from Win Butler’s first declaration on the album amid friendly, pleasant piano plinks: “The suburbs are a lonely drive / and you told me we’d never survive / grab your mother’s keys, we’re leaving.”

This is the album Arcade Fire have been waiting their whole career to make. People are going to go under this album and not come out until they’re old and grey. If folks got excited about Funeral and Neon Bible, both of which teetered around 46 minutes of orchestral art-rock, then they should probably sit down for this one, because there’s far more being said here. Where Funeral built tunnels and made connections, The Suburbs shirks any peacemaking or coming-to-terms; instead, it shouts desperately for any sign of real life, of hearts beating real blood, echoing Springsteen’s query: “Is there anybody alive out there?”

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