The Factual Opinion

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 15

Vampire Weekend
Vampire Weekend

Here is a list of pretentious/annoying words or phrases in the order they appear on Vampire Weekend’s debut album:  Mansard roof, salty message, eaves, “The Argentines collapse in defeat,” admiralty, remnants, nautically-mapped sheet, Oxford comma, English drama, “diction dripping with disdain,” dharamsala, lama, Lil’ Jon, “Know your butler,” United Nations, Johanna, Hudson River, His Honor’s finger, lilywhite, Sloan-Kettering, exotica, Pueblo huts, New Mexico, turquoise harmonicas, Washington Heights, Louis Vuitton, reggaeton, linens, Peter Gabriel, Bennetton, factory line, Pollination yellow cab, French kids, “See the Buddha on the second floor,” Coronation rickshaw grab, racist dreams, callous, bleeding madras, Khyber pass, Jackson Crowter, arch of glass, “Spilled kefir on your keffiyah,” “Ion displacement won’t work in the basement,” heartland, westerly motion, Kansas-born beetle, Occident, English Breakfast, Darjeeling, Blake, Old San Juan, Spanish brownstone, “chairs of leather,” cryptographs, collegiate grief, dowdy, “Absolute horror!,” “You’ve been checking on my facts/ And I admit I have been lax,” double-screening, protocol, Cape Cod, Mystic Seaport, Bottleneck, Hyannisport, The Lobster’s Claw, The Holy Roman Empire, Wellfleet, Provincetown, devastating backstroke, cufflinks, shirtsleeved, pure Egyptian Cotton.

You don’t have to work very hard to find something off-putting about Vampire Weekend.  Everything they say about the band is true:  They ARE hyper-pretentious, boat shoe-wearing, pink alligator shirt collar-popping, Columbia University preps who crib African music styles with impunity.  Furthermore, they appear to play up those very aspects of themselves for “image” purposes.  They fumble with lyrics that may secretly mean nothing to them.  They write flimsy pop songs about obscure forms of punctuation. They play rhythms that sound like ska, for Christ’s sake.

So fucking what.  Vampire Weekend brims over with life, ideas and enthusiasm—which is much more than we’ve seen from a start-up indie rock band in quite some time.  They bring a fresh set of musical ideas to each song, refusing to repeat a single one.  “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” instigates slow hip shaking with a falsetto yelp of “Do you want to/Like you know I do?”  “M79” rocks a string quartet playing something resembling a jig.  2008 was a great year for drummers, with Vampire Weekend’s versatile Chris Tomson standing up with The Dodo’s Logan Kroeber and The Walkmen’s Matt Barrick as one of the best, giving an arena-ready (or at least outdoor festival-ready) pomp to otherwise laid-back tunes. Lyricist/Vocalist Ezra Koenig (who, if you’re searching for credibility, used to play saxophone for The Dirty Projectors) writes with a fascination for language, more interested in consonance and assonance than meaning—his vocabulary just happens to be nicked from a history major’s textbooks.  He applies each of those pretentious/annoying words and phrases to the most gorgeous collection of rock melodies on any album this year. 

Most of all, Vampire Weekend simply sounds excited to be making music, and each of their songs radiates joy in both its creation and execution.  That may be a turn-off for some, but no matter.  Whether you’re hip to it or not, Vampire Weekend reminds you what a rare quality excitement truly is.  Perhaps that’s what makes them so beguilingly divisive.  An overtly pretentious band that doesn’t take itself too seriously—what the fuck are we supposed to do with that?

-Martin Brown, 2008

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 16

The Drive-By Truckers
Brighter Than Creation's Dark

In that fantasy world where good turns are rewarded, where the corrupt meet their recompense, Drive-By Truckers are the soundtrack to the red and the blue meeting and agreeing to repair the schism between them hate created.  Where the god-fearing and the atheist come together, acknowledge that they said a lot of things that they didn't mean, and they won't do it again.  Where people admit that killing the hell out of each other isn't something that anybody should have to do.  Where the government doesn't troll around in the small towns abandoned by the local factory so they can take the teenagers off to die in the fucking sand.  Where the arguing slows down enough so that people can realize it's time to look after the pregnant girl before she throws her baby in a dumpster and everyone shows up to condemn her to the fiery pits.  A place where the taste of bigotry doesn't haunt the minds of the scared, of the stupid, of the ashamed.  A world where you don't slice off a portion of the population that grows up in the backwoods of nowheresville, where you don't shit down their throats with failing school systems, smother their attempts to unionize Wal-Mart in the cradle, where asshole liberals don't ridicule them for listening to Garth Brooks and not keeping up with the local hairstyle trends, where you offer them a grocery store that stocks something healthy before you point and laugh at their weight, where you give a mother a chance at cheap, affordable daycare before you tell her she's a lousy fucking parent, where you don't turn on the television to see the heroes that we made out of trust fund cocksuckers, where shit. can. be. fair.

That day will not come.  That day can not come.  Barack Obama and a Democratic majority can't give it to you, neither can Bono or the Gates Foundation, and anger, and hope, and rage, and a protest, and a love-in, and smoking pot, and getting tore up on Jager--no, you can't have it.  No, you won't have it.  No, it isn't going to be okay for everybody, and yes, you're going to die, and the best you can hope for is it to be at a time when you have someone there to hold your hand.

Doom and gloom and hate and sadness and fury and incontinence all around, the Truckers don't like it when you call them Southern Rock, but that is what they are--the South that Faulkner loved and hated, the one he called the Garden of Eden that slavery destroyed, it's the mythical South, it's the South of people so goddamn poor, so goddamn lost, so goddamn unimportant to anyone but themselves that they had to figure out a way to keep breathing and loving and dancing and singing and fucking their brains out, because they knew that you weren't coming down here again God, they knew you'd left them behind the second they opened those boats and put those chains on their brothers and sisters, they knew they'd fucked up forever, and even when they were supposed to put those chains away, they were too set in their ways, they were too goddamn prideful to admit how wrong they'd been, too goddamn lonely and angry, and they knew what was coming--they knew they'd have to pay that price and that price just looked and felt too goddamn high.  They were right, and they got what they deserved, the Good Lord and justice wreaked it's wrath, and you gave them schools that weren't any good, and you gave them the fucking Klan, and you gave them their sound, their drawl that stood as a joke, as a mark of cain, as a way to turn their women into cartoon whores for the Yankee to laugh at and leave behind--but when it passed, and all that was left was a burned down house with nothing left inside but those fucking peaches and cotton, they had to figure out a way to live again.  There'd be some still angry, there'd be plenty still full of hate, but the rest, the rest had to find a way to keep going.

Took some time.

It's a passion for storytelling that keeps it alive now.  A love of that old time telling about what it looks like down here when you walk away from the airport and you see how they tore apart another swamp and built another strip mall, no matter that the old Richway is still abandoned.  Another neighborhood of houses that cost too much and don't last long enough, another vinyl sided lie that would tell them they'd moved ahead.  Where you get paid minimum wage, and that'll have to do because it's the best available, where the love you feel is the same as the love anyone feels, but you know that you'll never be able to give her the things she sees everybody else getting, because you've got nothing coming, you used it up when you were 18 and nobody else could throw like you.  Where your best was only good enough to get you out of the house, but it couldn't take you further than that.  Where you looked around and realized that the farthest the bootstraps went was the edge of town, no matter how many side gigs you took, no matter how many times you got those pants patched up, where the only way to get out was to leave who you were and who your people were behind and become something else, a liar everyday.

The Truckers stand there still, they travel around the world and have to stand there everyday, standing out there and looking at that chart and saying that I ain't changing my name, but I am changing what my name means, and I don't want nothing to do with what my people did back in those days, back in those bad old days where they looked at their brothers and took their brothers down, I don't want it, but if you're gonna lay that shit on me anyway, I'm gonna find some way to make you see I'm something else besides my kin, my name, my past, my town, my house.  I'm not going to walk away from it, I'm not going to lie about my people, no, I'm gonna show you something about me that's true, and I'm gonna show you a taste of what got thrown away when we broke this land and broke our Creator's heart.

Most people that listen to these guys will tell you that they're the same kind of liar that Bob Dylan is, that his made-up stories about working as an engineer are on the same level of bullshit that it is when Patterson Hood tells the story of an alcoholic dad and a man who can't let go of what he did over there for the Army.  They'll tell you that the Truckers are a spectacle, and that they like the charade but the charade ain't real, and then they'll talk about the triple axe attack.  They'll sing along with a song that tells you that the only thing that matters is loving your wife and your tow-headed kids, and then they'll go home and tell you how it's "cool."  They'll tell you that, and that's fine.  That's a Yankee for you.  Just smile and tell them thank you.

We know better anyway. 

-Tucker Stone, 2008

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 17

Girl Talk
Feed The Animals

I hate to do this, but if you're looking for a real review of Feed The Animals, why not just stick with the one Martin Brown wrote for The Factual Opinion a few months back?  After all, what you're getting here isn't going to be as clever, and it's going to be laced with personal storytelling, and if personal storytelling was your bag, you'd be somewhere else most of the time.

I've spent more time over the last six months--Feed The Animals dropped for pay-what-you-will on the Internet back in June--being placed in the unlovely position of having to "defend" this album then I have in my entire life with every other artistic object combined.  (The only thing that comes close is Michael Almereyda's take on Hamlet, which I may be the only person on the planet to have enjoyed.)  In the case of Feed The Animals, it's a little different--unlike Marty, I find it difficult to be a passionate defender for Girl Talk, or, for that matter, the entire mash-up genre.  No matter how seamless they get, and Girl Talk is probably the cleanest of them all, mash-up music requires a certain level of crazy to get into--it's more demanding of attention then noise rock is, for starters.  Feed The Animals is so frenetic, so unwilling to embrace a climactic squall, or any ending for that matter, that the overall experience of a start-to-finish listen is, even with a psychotic embrace of caffeine, an exhausting experience--constantly building, constantly accelerating, forcing the listener to deal with the multiple reference points of distinctive samples that reach into the brain and force acknowledgment; this is "Footloose" by Kenny Loggins, the bass is from the Beastie Boy's "So Whatcha Want" and it's all building to Salt tut-tutting you with a "that's not it!"  Cue Cat Stevens and 50 Cent, together.  Even when one reaches the point where they know what's coming--The Police, Beastie, Phil Collins, Queen and vocals by Busta Rhymes, I fucking got this one--there's never a point where this is an easy, relaxing experience.  It's tough to handle, and when you play it for those who wouldn't choose it--like the way that I, again and again, chose to play it over the company speakers at my office--the response can be a virulent one, and that's when you end up in the position where someone asks "Why do you like this?"

The simple answer is because it's well-made crazy, but the truth is that it is an acquired taste, and it's an acquired taste mostly for people who already have enough of an obsessive personality that the prospect of skeletal anaylsis in music is an attractive one.  Girl Talk, no matter what a DJ might choose to do, isn't very good dance music--it's far too unrelenting, never slowing down for more than seconds at a time, and, as we previously mentioned, it never ends, it just stops when it's over.  That's a problem for many mash-up artists, but Girl Talk takes it even farther than a problem, he embraces it as an inescapable one, and therefore one he can use to build a structure of song-suites around.  Sure, this thing is broken up into tracks--fourteen of them--but what he's actually done is a sort of logical extreme of what the Fabriclive series of DJ curated mix albums play with.  He's made a massive, suite of stuff that you'll spend the first--and probably more--times playing the "what was that, I know that" game that it won't take much to figure out if this is for you.  The cheap way to go is to say that it's "love it or hate it," but that's a statement that doesn't really apply to as many things as people think.  You can be impressed by Feed The Animals, you can even go past impressed and crave the sound, all while still not finding yourself experiencing anything that could be described as "love."

So why, you may ask, should it be here on a list of what's purported to be "top albums"?  Shouldn't everything on a best of list be something that the listener, the writer and the team involved in the construction feels a deep, undying passion for?  Shouldn't everything that's on there not just be well-crafted, but also serve as some kind of palette for enjoyment?

Of course not.  At least this one can't.  See, passion--passion is sort of a feeling, it's not a quantifiable commodity, it's--like all feelings are--too fluid of a thing to build arguments on.  Building a best foods of all time, well, what would you operate from?  Would it be whatever gets you off in a hedonistic fashion, or would you throw on the weird healthy bland shit that you're into, like a good old block of frozen spinach?  Can't a list--shouldn't a list--include the stuff that fascinates you, that interests you, the stuff that speaks to the year of "stuff on lists" but may not find its way to your heart?  Part of keeping up with music is always going to be like that--the struggle to explore the new when the comfort of the familiar remains accessible, all while the review mirror is filled in with all of its untouched classics.  The desire--the feeling--that you'd probably find more pleasure in replaying the Goblin soundtrack to Dawn of the Dead then you will in checking out Detroit noise rock--that isn't a fanciful one.  It's wholly accurate.  Listening to the loved and familiar is comforting--the choice has already been made, the ground has already been marked.  But art shouldn't be a static enterprise, it shouldn't spend all its time rearranging the deck chairs.  And when something like Girl Talk comes along--something that demands the question "Is this music, this combination of a thousand familiar beats," it's a question that's worth the time spent, and one that's worth the arguments that ensue.  That's what makes Feed The Animals so valuable--because unlike everything else on this list, both above and below it, it's the only one that got to stand in 2008 and ask that question.  Whether the answer you find is yes or no, there's only one way to decide.

Listen.

-Tucker Stone, 2008

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 18

Kelley Polar
I Need You To Hold On While The Sky Is Falling

There's a sort of graphic immediacy to Polar's 2008 album, his second.  It's not the sort of immediacy that a listener finds in the speed-metal shotgun blast that Meshuggah put out this year--this is an easily described dance album, make no mistake--but there's still an aspect of Sky Is Falling that's just as insanely over-the-top, that jumps out even in the first track "A Feeling Of The All Thing."  That opener...well, it's a veritable diagnostic check for prospective listeners:  vocoder vocals of Polar constantly repeating stuff like "There's a special sensation" and "You can feel the earth moving underneath your feet", while a twanging bass line pulled from a 70's blaxplotiation film and then jacked up as heavy as your woofer can handle, layered over a choir of (female? probably Polar) voices start tuning up, probably to sing about God or something, we never find out;  all of this, only to introduce you to excruciatingly defined synth pops and Midi-sounding keyboards while Polar gets ready to show off his Julliard-trained violist skills.  This, this right here:  are you ready for this?  This is what it's going to be like--every big, massive part of music (with the exception of an opera singer) is going to come into play, but it's going to be in the service of an album that doesn't want you to do much more than fantasize about world-building New Age type philosophizing while dancing your way into chlamydia.  Songs like the bald-faced "Chrysanthemum", an ode to nonsense in the form of a bass soundtrack to the thrusting of an erect penis--this is stuff that doesn't pull any punches.  The production values of cleaning and refining the synthesized tones are so far crystallized into sharp edged blades designed to re-make the listener into little more than a vehicle for movement:  Polar isn't interested in whether you can dance, whether you want to, or even if you like what he's doing--he's trying to make your brain respond on a level beyond your control.

One of the stand out tracks on the album, "Entropy Reigns (In The Celestial City)," might serve as the closest indication of what Polar wants to do--at an almost five minute run-time, it's a bit long for a single, even more so when you notice how little space he leaves between his vocal duet with Clare de Lune.  There's no room for breathing here, no time to stop and wonder why your head hurts or what it was you just took--it's a frantic, overstuffed piece of 2008 disco that doesn't have time for the listener's petty concerns.  Spiraling into fade-out on the flight of Polar's string work and the sound of him and de Lune's chanting "over and over again", the song is one of an artist who is clearly interested in the same sort of landscape song construction that artists like M83 created this year, he's just not willing to let go of his obsession with making sure that the dance freaks of the 21st still know what it feels like to be John Travolta as well.

It's a difficult construct, sure--the music is so graphic, so lacking in subtlety, that at times it's a shout out to something that might have come out of the bedroom of a precocious 15-year-old boy--but that doesn't make it any less magnificent.  Odd, yes.  But there was very little music this year that remembered the age-old truism that most artist aren't very good, and certainly aren't smart enough, to pull off educating the populace on changing the world.  Often, the solipsism of the modern artist--the inherent selfishness required to navigate the torturous scope of business-based marketing that their industry has become--is best served when a guy just decides he's going to make music for junkies to play while they fuck each others sweaty bodies.  Whether that's what Kelley wanted or not, that's what he created:  something to play that will get you ready to cover yourself in oil before taking a slippery cock into your mouth.  If it doesn't sound like something that came from a Crotian born, elite school trained violist, well--it isn't supposed to.  It's supposed to sound like you're trying not to cum.  Every once in awhile, that can be the best part.

-Tucker Stone, 2008

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 19

The Knux
Remind Me In 3 Days

How often does an album pull off using heavy guitar work along with rap?  Usually it's a bad sample, or it's just aggro-oddity--think that weird, not quite good, still somewhat entertaining "Just About Over" on Goodie Mob's Still Standing--not really rock, not really rap, but more of an amalgamation than the if-you-bring-it-up-again-i'll-start-crying "Walk This Way" ever was.  It's not that they couldn't work, but they usually don't--for every second that a band like Dalek can pull off metal-ing up their sound, there's way too many minutes where Jay-Z is sounding like a goof while Linkin Park attempts to avoid using proper nouns.  The Knux--a couple of nerds displaced by Hurricane Katrina--do more to fit a heavy metal sound alongside their De La Soul style rapping, and while it doesn't hit the mark every time, it, like most solid rap debut albums, is still full enough of "new kids trying to make a name" ideas for there not to be quite a bit of enjoyment found.  Too many late-career hip-hop artists are currently either trying to hard to seem "innovative"--see Kanye and the weirdo choices he's making when he isn't busy threatening to break his computer--or they're trying to use the Obama climate as the opportunity to push the soapbox farther than their understanding of geopolitik allow--Hey Nas!  The spot for "this shit is just straight banging" was left wide open, and while joke hacks like The Cool Kidz tried to fill it, The Knux pretty much (if you ignore Wale) won the title easily.  It's not too say that The Knux is only good by default, that by comparison it isn't as good as previous masterworks, but to acknowledge that yes, it's official, even your mom knows by now:  rap is hip-hop, hip-hop is music, and now that the sales and the merch have built the credentials that will keep a lot of people wealthy, the days when everything had a dash of new-ness to it is pretty much gone.  Hip-hop--by weight of exposure and income--isn't the new kid on the scene anymore, it's the standard.  Whereas other fields of study keep building--the growing attraction prominent musicians have for the experimental supergroup, the obsessive release digital schedules of underground savants and growing awareness of dubstep, dubstep, dubstep--rap can't claim anymore to be the unloved stepchild of the music scene anymore.  The debate--a stupid fucking one that never should have gotten so much play--ended years ago, and now that all those "you should just listen to the blues and the blues alone, this ain't music" folk have finally started diving into their graves--see you in hell, Strom Thurmond--the scene has the opportunity for its masters to really start exploring what they can do with the rest of their music cousins.  While The Knux idea--"we're going to churn out a lot of tracks, all with easily quotable lyrics and line it up with Red Hot Chili Pepper guitars and Clint Mansell style electronica (the PWEI stuff, not the movie scores)"--isn't a particularly new one, it's the ease with which they pull it off that makes Remind Me In 3 Days such a worthwhile adventure.  While 2008 wasn't a year with major boundary pushing albums in the same way that 2007 was with Busdriver and Dalek, it was a year where rap took old ideas, cleaned them up, and made them work.  When that happens, it's best to remember that it isn't always about being first.  It's about being right.

-Tucker Stone, 2008

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 20

Boris
Smile

“Flower, Sun, Rain” begins with an ominous couple of chords followed by a swelling mess of feedback before an archaic-sounding drum beat leads it into a Japanese folk-like hymn.  Swaths of screeching undercut the pastoral nature of the singing, and slowly they build into a guitar solo built out of scraps and noise.  Those opening moments of Smile exemplify Boris’s bait-and-switch approach rather well—the album is a series of clashes between relentless moments and gentle moments.  Shortly after the solo, the gentle voice kicks back in, this time accompanied by a naggingly slow drum beat.  The screeching begins to warble like the sound of a UFO touching down in an old science fiction movie.  Another guitar solo flies over the vocals, now repeating the lyrics of what would be the chorus if the solo hadn’t taken center stage.  But it has, and as the song draws to a close amidst the solo’s tremulous squall, it’s clear that the entire song has been built for this moment.  Boris have no shortage of ideas, but what makes Smile so special is the way they spiral into one another—instead dividing each song along traditional lines of verse * verse * chorus * verse * chorus * solo *, Boris begin setting up for the solo early in the verse.  The final song is so satisfying because the solo is then not only its obvious and ideal conclusion, but also its central focus—even when it’s nowhere in sight.

Of course, there are enough ferocious speed punk workouts to earn Boris the psychedelic metal tag they’re branded with. “Buzz-IN” and “Lazer Beam” both kick off with skater-metal riffs, big and dumb.  While “Buzz-IN” takes the approach of a typical punk song (albeit one with some monster drum rolls), “Lazer Beam” pulls a reverse of “Flower, Sun, Rain.”  “Lazer Beam” starts with the potential to be a level eight Guitar Hero track, but drives toward a soft landing, when the guitar thrashing subsides and a persistent arena rock drum thud gives way to acoustic guitar.  By the time “You Were Holding An Umbrella” opens as a rudimentary drum machine underplaying a power ballad, you know what’s coming: unfuckwithable metal fury.  Yet, Boris sustain the balladry for a good half of the 9 minute song.  Then, they plug in.  Immediately, feedback surges through “You Were Holding An Umbrella” as if the entire album were starting again.  When Boris lets loose, they do it within the framework of the ballad, creating a kind of metal-fringed shoegaze.  Hearing Boris slide effortlessly from one genre to another, hearing them bend handfuls of guitar styles to their own sound, hearing them wail on their instruments with disciplined abandon, it surprises at each turn.  Every time Smile seems to define itself, it veers into another direction, making it one of the slipperiest and most elusive releases of 2008.

-Martin Brown, 2008

*This review refers to the American Southern Lord release of Smile

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 22-21

22.  Snorkel – Glass Darkly

21.  Quiet Village – Silent Movie

The idea of ambient music, defined by Brian Eno in the liner notes for 1978’s Music For Airports, required that “it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”  For purveyors of ambient music of ambient music in 2008, that maxim should probably be reversed: Ambient music should be as interesting as it is ignorable.  While Eno undoubtedly changed the way rock musicians think about music, he also inspired thousands of musicians to lean hard on ignorable qualities, chasing after the idea of ambient music.  Unfortunately, uninteresting music is exactly that.  Ironically, the thrill in listening to ambient music is often the danger within it:  How much does the artist have to do before he tips over into music that needs to be heard?  How little does he have to do to make someone listen?  How much does he have to do to make someone listen just a little bit?  If you put “interesting” on the x-axis of a graph and “ignorable” on the y-axis, it would be pretty easy to chart most bands.  Two artists this year exploded that entire idea, creating albums that can’t decide how much they’d actually like to be heard.  Snorkel’s Glass Darkly and Quiet Village’s Silent Movie both ask the question, “What happens when background music fights to become foreground music?”  They answer with two albums full of music that rails against its own instincts to fade into periphery.

A collective of six pedigreed and versatile London-based musicians, Snorkel builds its songs on foundations of simple grooves—often with only two or three notes—and improvisation.  Each foundation carries a series of genre-explorations.  “Rub Attractor/My Elephant” takes a turn toward mariachi.  “Bubble Black” rides on fantastic, jazzy drum-skittering.  Dub, post-rock and afro-beat all get put through their paces, as do long-forgotten genres like, say, glitch.  Sometimes the guitars use heavy metal chord patterns.  Frequently, the horns don’t quite fulfill the melodies they promise.  Industrial noises, computer garble, and flights of laughter reach up through the music.  The overall effect of Glass Darkly is bursts of interesting held steady by a bassline of ignorable.

Quiet Village takes a far different approach—one stylistically closer to Girl Talk, of all people.  Joel Martin (Zeus) and Matt Edwards (Radio Slave) take liberal samples from sources considered tragically unhip—we’re talking Janis Ian and The Alan Parsons Project—and weave them into strangely compelling grooves.  Unafraid of approaching easy-listening territory, Quiet Village (named after a classic Martin Denny track) seem absolutely fascinated by schmaltz.  That preoccupation dominates Silent Movie.  Then, the album’s highlights blow up the formula:  On “Circus of Horrors,” a psychedelic guitar riff creates the rhythm while syrupy sounds—flutes and TV theme music—frollick underneath.  Sirens get dropped into the mix, but even they sound as breezy as a gust of wind off low tide.  “Too High To Move” transforms the spoken story from Captain n’ Tenille’s “Never Make Your Move Too Soon” into Isaac Hayes’ “By the Time I Get To Phoenix” for the Starbucks jazz effecianado.

Though they approach the music from two wildly disparate angles, both Quiet Village and Snorkel come up with conceptually familiar albums.  Glass Darkly’s improvisatory spirit and Silent Movie’s recontextualized elevator music both result in intricate, idea-based jams posing as background music—both elusive and deceptively simple; both indelibly funky in spite of themselves.

-Martin Brown, 2008

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 23

The Sea & Cake
Car Alarm

The only band to have made it onto one of these lists for two years running, The Sea & Cake can't be criticized for not having done as much to change up their sound--while Car Alarm doesn't sound like it was recorded in the same studio as last year's Everybody, there's no mistaking the sound of Sam Prekop's voice, always on the edge of a whisper, always escaping inside the throbbing bass guitar when you turn it up to hear what he's singing--but it's still a direct shot from the heart of one of last years quietest, and most aesthetically gorgeous, pieces of music from a band consumed with how to do so much at such a low tone.  The struggle to define Sea & Cake's sound can actually be said to have gotten even harder--losing so much of Everybody's keyboard work makes it harder and harder to find the jazz connection that the first three albums of their career are most known for.  Here, on their eigthh studio album, Prekop and crew have taken what they first began last year and toned it even farther down, bringing out an album that's a quiet, almost ethereal study in pop.  With the exception of the closing track "Mirrors," the sort of garage house sound experiment probably only familiar to people who listen to musique concrete, each song is brief (all twelve tracks add up to around roughly 38 minutes) experiment in seeing how much languid pleasure can be wrangled out of Prekop's distinct vocals, his baldly simple lyrics, and a bunch of guitars played with a delicate touch.  It's always going to be tempting to read too much into music from Sea & Cake--the bands prolific work outside of their music work paints them as being far too intelligent to not be doing more--but that's also going to be a disservice to work that is so blatantly designed to be enjoyed.  While a lot of musicians build their careers out of creating music to serve as life's soundtrack, these men are choosing instead, to try and capture beauty--then they just ask if you wouldn't prefer that instead.

-Tucker Stone, 2008