Twenty albums you should hear (Part IV)

(For historical sake, Parts I, II, and III.)

Slow Club - Yeah So

This album is just fun. There's no other way to describe it. Which is kind of weird considering that once you get past the harmonies, high tempos, and bubbliness, the lyrics are really full of hopelessness and despair. They sound like normal indie falling in love songs, but they're not.

Unfortunately your expectations might be a little much because the first two songs - "When I Go" and "Giving Up On Love" - are probably the two best on the album, but the rest certainly holds its own.

"It Doesn't Have To Be Beautiful" is a frantic it-is-what-it-is tune, while "There Is No Good Way To Say I'm Leaving You" is just a little too slow for my liking.

"Come On Youth" is actually a pretty good song that I think I'd like more on its own, it doesn't really fit with the rest of the album. "Our Most Brilliant Friends" is ten minutes of craziness that serves as a nice closing.

I think if you were to play this for somebody else, with neither of your attention focused completely on the music, you'd think it was an awesome indie album you should really listen to again. Then once you listened to it on your own, you'd realize that the upbeat nature is betrayed by the depressing lyrics, and ignore it for a long long time thereafter.

Go on, give it a try. See if I'm right.

Sunset Rubdown - Random Spirit Lover

It's hard for me to label any album as my favourite, but if I had to pick it just might be this one. Dragonslayer has grown on me a ton since I first heard it, and Shut Up I Am Dreaming has the incomparable "The Men Are Called Horsemen There", but from top to bottom, Random Spirit Lover is simply amazing.

You've got the catchy, Spencer Krug vocal insanity, catchy guitar hook-laden songs like "The Mending Of The Gown" and "Up On Your Leopard, Upon The End Of Your Feral Days" which get people perking up and saying "hey, that's not bad!"

You've got the darker, instrumentally-heavy tracks like "Colt Stands Up, Grows Horns", "Stallion", and "Magic Vs. Midas" which harken back to Shut Up I Am Dreaming only with better vocals and a more epic feel.

You've got the harmonic vocals of "The Courtesan Has Sung" and "Child-Heart Losers" which will be stuck in your head even if they don't really make that much sense.

And you've got the hauntingly amazing back-to-back of "For The Pier (And Dead Shimmer)" and "The Taming Of The Hands That Came Back To Life", two songs which I haven't tired of despite dozens of plays over the last few months.

Add it all up, and it's just a great album. My only real complaint would be - and it's something Spencer Krug is guilty of in everything he does - that each song bleeds into the next, forcing you to either listen to the entire album or wonder 'what was with that last 30 seconds that sounded nothing like the rest of the song?'. But then again, it's not like listening to the entire album is a chore.

The Wave Pictures - If You Leave It Alone

What you intially think Slow Club are, these guys actually are. Maybe not quite as bouncy, but more genuine in their expressions of love and longing. Fun songs that you only need to hear once to remember for months. Neat instrumentation too.

"If You Leave It Alone" provides a bit of a misleading opening - once you're a few minutes into the song, it picks up, but it's a little slower than most of the album.

Something seems weird about the melody of "My Kiss", but it's nonetheless enjoyable. Also enjoyable are the following few songs - "Tiny Craters In The Sand" through "Bye Bye Bumble Belly" is probably my favourite run on the album, and those also happen to be my two favourite songs.

The last three songs are maybe a bit of a step down - at least once I've stopped listening at "Softly You, Softly Me" - but I think that's more a matter of taste, or just me not being able to take too much of this stuff at once.

Good album. Worth your time for sure. Assuming of course that you're into the same pretentious indie music that I am.

Why? - Eskimo Snow

Apparently Why? are classified as a hip hop band, which confuses me to no end as there's practically zero hip hop here. It's slow, brooding, Airborne Toxic Event-style (and they'd have made this list had I started it later, by the way) indie where it's more talking over instruments than singing but still good.

(Confused yet?)

There's not a lot to distinguish these songs from each other, really, although "This Blackest Purse" is my favourite and is the one where everything seems to go on just a little longer than you'd expect.

"Against Me" is another strong recommendation, although like everything on this album it's the instruments, and not the vocals, that clue you in to where the chorus is.

I'm generally not a hip-hop fan, but I'm feeling like Why?'s hip-hop might have a bit more energy to it than Eskimo Snow but not really be what I consider hip-hop, so it's probably worth checking out at some point.

"Berkeley By Hearseback" is another strong song and probably my second-favourite on the album - like Fake Surfers, this is an album which picks up steam as it goes along.

You Say Party! We Say Die! - XXXX

Yeah apparently I'm a few years late on this bandwagon. But then again, I didn't like YSP!WSD!'s early dance punk as much as the more recent and more towards pop stuff.

According to an interview I heard with the band on CBC Radio 3, it's still a little hard for these guys to admit they're singing about love, so 'XXXX' in several song titles (and the album title) is code for 'love'.

It does almost seem like this album was written on a dare - something like 'can you guys actually write songs about love if you wanted? can you even feel love?'. "There Is XXXX (Within My Heart)" answers this question in the opening track.

Some of the other songs - "Glory", "Make XXXX", and "Cosmic Wanship Avengers" come to mind right away - sound like the band enjoyed recording them, and are definitely more pop, more dance, less punk. Probably my favourites.

On the flip side are songs like "Laura Palmer's Prom" and "Heart Of Gold" which almost go too far in the other direction - there's no backbone to them, they're somewhat generic female pop. They're not bad for what they are, but it's kind of jarring considering who's behind them.

And that makes two female-fronted bands in this list of twenty, not counting Slow Club's dual vocalists and plenty of female backups. For me, that's an improvement.

--Ryan


will I gain weight in later life?