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James Blake - Limit To Your Love
SONG OF THE DAY
BEST NEW CD RELEASE OF THE WEEK
Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy) - Heartland
This has been such a busy week that I haven’t had time to adequately review my favorite CD from this week’s new releases. This week saw a new Ringo Starr album which, if you’re into the kitsch of it all is quite fabulous, and a really fantastic record from Vampire Weekend called Contra. Everyone is raving about Contra, but I found Heartland to be the most noteworthy release of the week.
I’ve long been a fan of Owen Pallett whose music (most of it under the band name Final Fantasy which he officially retired late last year) is quite melodic and wandering in that pleasant way. He describes Heartland as an album about nothingness, but it actually comes complete with a clear narrative—he invents a character named Lewis with whom he falls in love and who, it can be gleaned from the track “Lewis Takes Off His Shirt” is quite hot. But even without the narrative, the music builds and strips away tension in just the right formulation. Pallett sways gracefully between melodic string work and electro loops that keeps his heart alternately swooning and beating and what a heart it is!
He will forever be compared to Andrew Bird, but where Bird would spend hours with his nose buried in the latest books of theory, Owen Pallett would spend the time staring straight into a computer screen, multitasking between WoW and facebook.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
SONG OF THE DAY
Laura Veirs - Life is Good Blues
This girl reminds me a bit of Emiliana Torrini meets Laura Barrett without the kalimba. I like this song a lot.
BEST NEW CD RELEASE OF THE WEEK
Ke$ha - Animal
Okay, so it was a close race between crooner Findlay Brown delivering a new CD that is evocative of Antony and the Jonsons meets Roy Orbison at a Folk Implosion party, but this whiskey soaked teenage sex fantasy wins out.
Not a single track on Ke$ha’s hefty 15-track debut CD has anything to do with life beyond drinking, clubbing, fucking, and puking, but aren’t these the things that make life worth living anyway? I can’t think of a single good reason NOT to have an entire CD that reads like a series of dirty diary entries.
Once you get past the autotuning and over-manufactured beats (of which I’m a decided fan), if you listen carefully enough, you will see that the CD is actually painting a vivid picture of the recklessness and invincibility that waltzes hand in hand with sweet youth. Remembering your own teenage indiscretions, you’ll alternately feel young again and also feel really really old. I can’t help but think how much greater my teenage years would have been if I’d had a cell phone.
Edit: It serves to note that while all these songs sound like tracks Britney Spears would have probably left on the shelf, Ke$ha herself co-wrote each track.
