Other Musings

I've been to Other Music about four times within the past two weeks because I am an idiot who dislikes money and would prefer it to fall out of his pocket to anything else and if that doesn't happen he'd be okay with just wasting it on music.

Fortunately, Other Music likes to give things away. When I purchased Be He Me by Annuals I recieved a cute and tiny version of a 12" vinyl, I believe the cute and tiny vendor called it a forty...five? Pish posh. Who ever heard of such a thing? Tiny records. Next they'll be making DVD's with only music on them!

A side: Brother

The first track on Be He Me and definitely my favorite on the album. It's an unfortunate thing that the album starts to turn into a big brown ball of play-doh towards the middle, Annuals have a good thing going for a couple of songs. This one in particular is a pretty little pastoral walk through violins and crunchy falltime until it turns into, wow! an open meadow filled with guitar n' roll. I love this song.

B side: Ease My mind

This starts as a strummed acoustic into Adam Baker's vocals for a few rounds about the versey tree, then a splash down into the sequencers. It ends with a repeated harmony about Gods or making gods or something and turns into an outright hoedown up until the end. My biggest complaint about this b-side, although its better than a lot of the Dorm-steps strummed garabage in the middle of the album, is its song structure is exactly the same as all of the songs they've written. It seems like they're trying to pull a fasty on us by telling us they have non-linear song structures.

Its true that instruments and melodies will poke their heads through the window to say hi, but most of the time its the same instruments at the same time in every song. The Unicorns did the non-linear thing better. Animal Collective who, for some reason I cannot decipher at all (other than the general lack of ingenuity that most reviewers have) are compared to this band left and right, but their genius when it comes to destructure of music blows these guys into The Arcade Fire territory. I suppose thats not a bad territory for some bands to be in, but I'm not going to flip over backwards like one of those little mechanical doggies for ya.

Expect their next album to flop or be as big as The Arcade Fire. Right now they're in between and still reveling in their beginner's luck, but as soon as they begin to be noticed by anyone but music critics there will be hell to pay. No more fountain of youth and beauty brigade.



Regardless, this is the handsome packaging the tiny 12" came in:


I also purchased tickets to the Junior Boys show in Brooklyn on December 6th! If you're going hit me up with an email or something and we'll all be one big happy family!

Also: I'm posting on this blog these days. Check my YouTube reviews out under Cap'n Guthrie.