My new candidate for album of the year!

[Brutus_the_Red]

Chevelle - This Type of Thinking (Could Do Us In)

Just came out today. Wow. I honestly can't think of any adjectives to explain the awesomeness of this album.

Favorite Track currently: Breach Birth

Anyone else pick it up yet?

[pedro]

The Holdy Steady

Separation Sunday

http://theholdsteady.com/

The Hold Steady
Separation Sunday
[Frenchkiss; 2005]
Rating: 8.7




Craig Finn isn't a singer. His voice is a harsh, nasal, confused, emphatic bleat, clamping down on certain words and rolling tricky internal rhymes around in his mouth until they come out all broken. He sounds more like the sketchy drunk guy yelling in your ear at a show, asking if you know where to buy drugs, than like the frontman of the band onstage. Finn's voice may be difficult, but don't let it be a deal-breaker.

Finn may not be Art Garfunkel up in this piece, but he uses his adenoidal rasp to blurt twisted, dense shards of squalid back-alley imagery and bruised druggy lamentations, broken teeth and broken bottles, and tattered hotel-room Bibles and hidden knives. He's the poet laureate of the loading dock behind the mall where the runaway kids get together to sniff cheap coke at 5 a.m.

The Hold Steady's first album, last year's ...Almost Killed Me, was a tangled mess of damaged character sketches and triumphant bar-rock thump-- Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle reimagined as an epic of Russian literature. But Separation Sunday is something more, the elegiac Biblical lost-innocence junkie odyssey that Denis Johnson never wrote.

Like Fiestas & Fiascos, the final album from Finn's former Minneapolis post-punk band Lifter Puller, it's an album-length story that forces us to pull bits of narrative from Finn's tangles of words. In Separation Sunday, a confused Catholic girl named Hallelujah hooks up with a motley assortment of shady characters, does a gang of drugs, gets born again when some guy with a nitrous tank dunks her in a river, wakes up in a confession booth, and maybe dies and maybe comes back from death. But the real story is in Finn's virtuoso evocations of menace ("When they say great white sharks/ They mean the kind in big black cars/ When they say killer whales/ They mean they whaled on him till they killed him up in Penetration Park"), hedonism ("You came into the ER drinking gin from a jam jar/ And the nurse is making jokes about the ER being like an after-bar"), and brief shining moments of lucidity ("Youth services always find a way to get their bloody cross into your druggy little messed-up teenage life").

None of this would work if Finn didn't have an expert rock band backing him up. Finn's songs wheel precariously from one unhinged lyrical idea to the next, almost never stopping for choruses or going out of their way to fit into any sort of structure, but the band plays these songs like long-lost fist-in-the-air classic rock anthems. It's well-schooled in every bar-rock cliché, and executes these moves with joy and conviction: the pick-slide before the climax, the weeping Hammond organ on the bridge, the pregnant pause before the big riff kicks back in. Since ...Almost Killed Me, the band has beefed up its sound with the help of Rocket From the Crypt producer Dave Gardner and keyboard player Franz Nickolay, and its Meat Loaf pianos, greasy George Thorogood blooz choogle, and wheedling Journey guitar carry more heft and authority than they had on the last album. This stuff would sound great behind just about any garage-rock hack, but it turns Finn's dirtbag chronicles into something epic and huge and molten and beautiful.

-Tom Breihan, May 5, 2005

[Cedric]

I like the Seperation Sunday album a lot. My favorite album of the year is clap your hands say yeah. I also have the advance copy of Nada Surf's new album. It's a tremendous record. Too bad they are known for that stupid popular song, because they are an awesome band.

[pedro]

Cool Cedric. I like that as we've had disagreements in other areas. It really shows how there is a lot of common ground here, even outside the Reds, and despite our differences.
RZ has some cool folks.

[RosieRed]

Originally Posted by Brutus_the_Red

Chevelle - This Type of Thinking (Could Do Us In)

Just came out today. Wow. I honestly can't think of any adjectives to explain the awesomeness of this album.

Favorite Track currently: Breach Birth

Anyone else pick it up yet?

I don't have the album yet but I've heard some of the songs. Not bad at all.

I saw Chevelle three times this summer. Well, sort of. They were at three concerts I went to, but I never got to see their entire set. I did have a pretty long conversation with Pete though, in Cincinnati after the show. Talked a lot about crime in Cincinnati, for some reason. I guess a friend of his lives in or near Clifton.

My candidate: "A Beautiful Lie," by 30 Seconds to Mars. Comes out Aug. 30, but you can hear the whole thing here.

(Y'all knew I was going to say it. : )

[Johnny Footstool]

I love Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's music, but I can't get past the nasal, reedy, Jonathan Richman/David Byrne-style vocals.

[RosieRed]

Originally Posted by Johnny Footstool

I love Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's music, but I can't get past the nasal, reedy, Jonathan Richman/David Byrne-style vocals.

I can get past it most of the time, but it can be tiresome.

I listened to Black Rebel Motorcyle Club's new album the other day; pretty good stuff. Anyone else listen to them?

[westofyou]

Originally Posted by Johnny Footstool

I can't get past the nasal, reedy, Jonathan Richman/David Byrne-style vocals.

Look, I had to call up and say, I want to take his place.
See he's stoned, hippie Johnny.
Now get this, I'm straight and I want to take his place.
Now look, I like him too, I like hippie Johnny.
But I'm straight
and I want to take his place.

[Cedric]

It can be difficult, I agree.

[The Baumer]

John Vanderslice - Pixel Revolt
Exodus Damage mp3
Trance Manual mp3

and


The National - Alligator
Full album stream

The National are actually touring with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah as we speak. I've heard bits and pieces of their cd and wasn't too impressed with it, but they are definitely a buzz band at the moment.

[The Baumer]

Add Devendra Banhart's Cripple Crow and Sigur Ros' Takk to the list.

[wheels]

I got nothing so far.

Perhaps I am getting old, and curmudgeonly.

Nahhh....I've just been digging through too many old albums lately.

Waitaminnit!

Please people! I emplore in the name of things good and un-holy......

Pick up the Pony's "Celebration Castle" tomorrow. Or, I'd bet you can downloaded onto one of those little e pod doohickies tonight.

Do it!

Or pick up their first record "Laced with Romance".

Richard Hell meets whatever cool stuff you like.

Trust me.

[missionhockey21]

^^^Word. Man, wheels your music taste just rocks. I also highly recommend The Ponys.

Anyway, I have probably listened to more music than I ever have lately (and that's saying something) but it's all been in one big blur with a busy past few months. I'll need to take the time to come up with a top 5 list later this week.