Friday, September 16, 2011

Daily Listenings 09/16/2011

It's been a while since I threw up one of these casual posts, but I heard a few things yesterday that caught my ear, so I thought I would share.

On the contemporary front this week, I'm powering through Gold Panda's 2010 release Lucky Shiner and The Rural Alberta Advantage's 2011 offering Departing.

Lucky Shiner is decent; easy-on-the-ears electronica with some East Asian accents, a few strong tracks, and a lot of material that just feels par for the course, especially on the album's weaker back half.

Departing, on the other hand, is interesting...not great, but interesting.

I guess you'd call it folk-rock, but for such spare music, it's got some compellingly conflicting elements...a bedroom indie-pop feel here, an almost punk feel there, and throughout, lead singer Nils Edenloff wails like a dead-ringer for Neutral Milk Hotel's frontman Jeff Mangum.

If The King Of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1 off of NMH's In An Aeroplane Over The Sea was your kind of tune, you should definitely give Departing a listen.

Regarding some older releases, was totally digging on Can's 1969 release Monster Movie this morning, their only full release with original lead sing Malcolm Mooney at the helm.  It's much more of a straight up rock album than their later efforts, at least straight up as far as Can goes, but well worth checking out if your an adventurous listener interested in one of the 70's most important underground bands.

Also went back and gave another listen to My Morning Jacket's It Still Moves, and have to say, wasn't a big fan then and heard nothing to change my mind today.  I know a lot of people love this album, and it definitely has its moments, but overall its form of hazy, easy jamming is just a little too hazy and little to easy and way to slow to develop for my tastes.  Now Z, that's another story...one of my favorite albums of the 'Aughts.

Finally, my apologies, but I will be scaling back on the Amazon links I provide to individual tracks.

In a power ploy in this whole online sales tax battle, Amazon has severed all associates contracts for bloggers based in California.  So far, I'm still able to generate full album and mix widgets, but the easy individual track linking features Amazon provides seems to have been shut down.

Oh well, my guess is 99.999999% of you do your downloading from I-Tunes anyway.

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