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Mitch Park
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This is so damn good. They had me from the “Seven Wonders” sample that opens this thing.
This interview makes me want to finally hear a quality rip of this album even more than I did before, which was already a lot.
“That comparison stems directly from the ’80s-inspired, falsetto-infused “Tap Out,” a song that trumps anything on Bankrupt! . . . ”
Everything on Bankrupt!, except, “Entertainment,” “SOS in Bel Air,” “Trying to Be Cool,” “Bankrupt!,” “Drakkar Noir,” “Chloroform,” and “Bourgeois.”
Those are the five songs, exactly.
My residual love for the Cars even makes me somewhat sympathetic towards “Two Kinds of Happiness.”
I didn’t get the Angles hate. I legitimately loved half of the tracks on that album.
This will be a commercial and critical trainwreck. Just a mess of an album.
“All the Time” and “Welcome to Japan” are both quite good though.
Or even on the list, period.
“A lot of Biggie’s classics, however, like “Juicy” and “Hypnotize,” did not. Both are crucial to his career, but that doesn’t make them the best.”
What a load of silly contrarianism.
Its seems like the Postal Service were shoehorned into this piece out of nowhere. With a few minor rhetorical substitutions, the exact same thing could have been written at this time last year when James Mercer put out a new Shins album. Or two years ago when the Strokes came back.
People bring up CYHSY because they were the first post-Arcade Fire P4K bubble band. I don’t think people are ridiculing them, so much as the 2k5-2k6 internet mindset that created them.
Transatlanticism is a better album. We don’t remember that though, because the Postal Service didn’t stay around long enough to record lackluster or bad follow-ups during a gradual drift towards the middle.
Yorke would have to put out like seven albums in the next three years to earn the Soderbergh comparison.
Also, he could promise to retire by age fifty. One of those two things.
I’m not sure I follow the logic that leads from Beach Fossils to Phoenix, but having read Ian’s reviews for “Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming,” “Gossamer,” and “Confess,” I don’t think the sound of this single is far off from things he has recently praised.
This is an incredibly good track, even for Kurt’s high standards.
You’re missing my point to some extent. I am simply saying that, for the most part, everyone in “indie culture” (for lack of a better term) are familiar with Mumford and the Mumford clones. It’s totally ubiquitous, no matter how far gone any of us may be in our own little pockets of indiedom. I’m just arguing that many of us have heard Mumford, said “yeah, no thanks,” and have moved the fuck on. This isn’t 2003. Indie culture isn’t missing out on great pop singles anymore. Just as importantly, mass culture isn’t missing out on much of our good shit these days, either.
My objection with your piece is that it makes martyrs out of a band that most of us neither care about nor particularly hate (and who, by the way, are conquering the world anyway). I also think you are assuming that the band’s critics are playing an us v. them game that doesn’t exist any more. I’m all for pop music and mass culture when they succeed. But the best arguments you give for Mumford seems to be a) they are popular, and therefore people should perhaps get over themselves and enjoy their formulaic 4/4 songs that end in big climaxes, and b) Zep and AC/DC were once slagged by the critics, too, even though we think they’re awesome now. That’s not an argument, it’s a provocation. And a lot of indie-centric news and criticism I am reading these days falls along these lines: the new hippest thing is to obsess over and scribble about the most universally popular music imaginable.
My point is that for most of us, Mumford are an irrelevancy. They aren’t constantly invoked in conversations as “what’s wrong with pop.” They aren’t a punchline. They’re just stupid bullshit that plays the mainstage while most of us are in the tents at festivals. But If you put up a neon sign that says “people who hate Mumford, please congregate here,” don’t be surprised if people show up.
My point is that it is ridiculous that the indie press has taken to writing about stuff like Mumford, and Beyonce, and say, what Grimes thinks of them. We’re aware mass culture exists, because, you know, it’s mass culture. No one needs to defend it.
Trending indie publication strategy: show your enlightened, post-critical appreciation for the world by writing think pieces praising the most massively popular bullshit imaginable. Sub-strategy: set up straw man that said popular bullshit is taking a Nickleback-like drubbing everywhere.
This was actually a really good list.
“Message of Love”
/thread
“Dig for Fire”
Also, “Monkey Gone to Heaven” and “Gouge Away” are the “My Girls” and “Fireworks” of this list.
“Shut Up and Play the Hits”?
I love Wowee Zowee. Fucking love it. Bryan Charles nailed everything great about it in his 33 1/3 book. A total leftfield masterpiece that deserves all of the accolades it gets today, as well as an album that rightly deserves a vigorous defense in light of how misunderstood it was in its own time.
That said, you really have to be consciously overthinking things to ever get to the point where you actually put it on after Slanted and Enchanted or Crooked Rain and go, “yeah, Wowee Zowee is better than those.”
After one listen, this is an incredible album. It will deserve all the accolades that it gets in the dinosaur music press.
The lead single was classic misdirection: this is some dark stuff. Bob outdoes Tom Waits at his own game on some of these tracks. And the band is ace — just a great sounding record.
This list smacks of “legit AnCo fans don’t dig the two or three songs that are more widely known outside of the AnCo cult.”
“Fragments of Time” is my favorite thing on the album. They started with what “Digital Love” winked at and simply went all in this time.