Built to Spill's latest album There is No Enemy is being released today, and includes their typical guitar-heavy melodies and Doug Martsch meanderings and while I can't say they approach their golden era of Perfect From Now On and Keep it Like a Secret, they have put out a solid new album that I'm definitely glad to hear. Standout tracks for me include the opener "Aisle 13", the superbly sublime "Nowhere Lullaby" and the lengthy lullaby "Things Fall Apart." Like Yo La Tengo or Sonic Youth, it's good to hear that they're still jamming after all these years.
Sufjan Stevens' movie soundtrack to the film he made The BQE is still two weeks from release, but in the meantime, he's got another album out today -- a re-imagining of his second album, the instrumental techno-tinged Enjoy Your Rabbit, by the string quartet Osso, who have contributed to Sufjan's efforts in the past, including on Illinois. The result is the album Run Rabbit Run, and it turns songs that I didn't particularly care for (Enjoy Your Rabbit is the one Sufjan release that I didn't love) into some beautiful, masterful pieces of music. Sounds a lot like the Dirty Three, probably because there aren't many rock bands that feature strings, and Dirty Three are it. But these are some wonderful songs.
I mentioned Dan Mangan last week, but I didn't have any information about him. Turns out he is Canadian, as I suspected, and he released his second album Nice, Nice, Very Nice this August in Canada. I can't find where or whether the release is available in the U.S. (it's not on Amazon or iTunes or Emusic, so I'm guessing not), but I can't get "Robots" out of my head and the other songs I downloaded from him are equally good. Hopefully, we get to hear him in the States soon, but for now I know the Vancouver singer/songwriter is going to be an indie rock star very soon. He just won the Verge XM Award for Canadian artist of the year, so that's pretty damned impressive.
Sunny Day Real Estate have re-released their debut album Diary on Sub Pop, with re-mastered tracks and an accompanying reunion tour that included them playing on Jimmy Fallon Live last week. I missed it. I missed everything about this reunion, even though Diary was almost definitely one of my top 10 favorite albums of the '90s. SDRE followed it with the untitled pink cover album that has generally been named LP2, an almost equally great album, then promptly broke up. They left in their wake a wave of music that eventually got the sad moniker "emo," supposedly to represent rock that wears its emotions on its sleeves, but I never really got how SDRE fit into that, they just made incredible music. They reunited in 1998 with How It Feels to Be Something On, which was, in retrospect, not so much a dabble into prog music, but a straightforward attempt to make a prog album. I loved it at the time, I loved that SDRE were back, and I even loved the live album released a year later that included many of the same tracks. But by the time 2000 release The Rising Tide came out, they'd gone way too proggy for my tastes, and they got abandoned by me in the rising tide of indie rock in 2001. The band broke up again, singer Jeremy Enigk got super-religious again (that is largely the reason given for the first break up), and then he came out with a new band The Fire Theft, played all prog rock, and they've released a couple albums (or more?) that are not any good, at least to my ear. But the band is back, and were on Fallon, and I didn't hear it, but I remember seeing them on Jon Stewart's old MTV show circa 1994 or 95 and their performance of "Seven" was and still remains the greatest televised performance of any band I've ever seen. I don't know if it was the acoustics at Stewart's show or just the brilliance of the song, but I've never heard anyone sound better.
Animal Collective have remixed a Phoenix track to the point where it sounds like an Animal Collective track. And that's a good thing. And I don't know why I'm channeling Martha Stewart, but just enjoy.
Here's something new from Thom Yorke of Radiohead:
And from the Volcano Choir:
I am really digging the new Built to Spill.
I think it's their best work in quite a while!
Posted by: Wayne | October 06, 2009 at 06:13 PM
Very good release. "Things Fall Apart" is awesome.
Posted by: Glen | October 07, 2009 at 06:51 PM