I don’t really like Sunset Rubdown. I figure I should just be straight forward. I was going to open with this elaborate imagining of a dial—like a volume dial—split in half, one side labeled “Annoying” and the other “Acceptable”. Annoying is a gradient, there’s various levels, but Acceptable is totally uniform green, there’s no levels there. Sunset Rubdown records always start, for me, with the arrow just barely on the Acceptable side, and then by track three or four it’s a notch or two over on the Annoying side and by the end of the record I’m no longer paying attention or I’ve turned it off.

I’ve tried really hard for about two years now to like Sunset Rubdown but aside from The Mending of the Gown (which is like the best song ever even though it is kind of annoying too) and the first two tracks off Dragonslayer (of which the second song is two minutes too long and thusly annoying for it) I can’t say that I’m having any success.

Why do I have a hard time? I find Spencer Krug’s voice to be mesmerizing in that it seems almost inhuman (and, oddly enough, it sounds a lot better live than on record and I was really impressed by his vocals in a live setting) but then he’s always got to take it and shake it around until it sounds like cats are dying hidden away in his syllables. On top of that Sunset Rubdown songs tend to run a little long, and for no purpose other than to constantly repeat sections until you’re sick of them, which wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that the sections repeated aren’t memorable or enjoyable to sing along with in the least. They also play with discordance a little bit, in that every song feels a little like it’s slightly off it’s foundation (this might be just the mood I get from the music, filtered through my warped psyche) and we all might die at any moment.

So… Why did I even go to a Sunset Rubdown show?

I was really hoping seeing Sunset Rubdown live would make me go, “Oh! I get it now! They’re so great!” I’ve seen bands live that sounded like shit on the record, and I’ve heard material that felt wanting on record sound fucking amazing live, so I had hope that a Sunset Rubdown show would wow me so much that I’d have no choice but to run home and worship their entire catalog and start off a love affair equivalent to the one I had with Smashing Pumpkins in my Freshman year of high school (I walked around listening to Cupid De Locke for hours, oblivious to the world—I was such a fag).

But… no.

Sunset Rubdown in concert is pretty much exactly the same as Sunset Rubdown on record except that it’s a lot louder and all the instruments aren’t so easy to discern individually, and Spencer Krug’s vocal is frickin’ excellent and merely mesmerizing, not at all annoying—so if you like Sunset Rubdown you will probably love them in concert. Consider this my redundant recommendation: Sunset Rubdown fans should go see them live. (Non-fans should go see them live just to go see them live, satisfaction not guranteed.)

I mostly just enjoyed that they had a percussionist and a drummer, something that doesn’t come across on the albums at all (I’m pretty sure my nose was vibrating, it was weird), and that Camilla Wynne Ingr looked like a librarian who wandered bewilderedly onto the stage. Oh! And Spencer Krug looks pretty much exactly like the kid from The Girl Next Door.

Dirty Projector’s Bitte Orca took me a while to get into. The first time I listened to it, intrigued as I was by opener Cannibal Resource, all the good will that track built in me was dispelled immediately by Temecula Sunrise‘s endless repetitions and time signature changes which I found to be nothing short of headache inducing the first five or so times I heard it. The rest of the album from there didn’t do me much better.

It wasn’t until my fourth or fifth listen to the album (which were over the course of a month in which I spent more time than necessary wondering if I should just give up, stop listening to it, and chalk it up as a casualty of art-damage) that I started to finally get it. I had a similar experience with this year’s Grizzly Bear, so maybe I knew this was going to happen. By my eighth listen I was pretty much in love with the majority of the album.

I was excited to see them live. The opening riff to Cannibal Resource makes me want to jizz in my pants every time I hear it. Not even counting that, the album as a whole is a technical masterpiece, with all sorts of weird starts and stops, vocal hiccups and warbles between precise notes, time signature changes… I mean, come on, Dirty Projectors have to be absolutely stupendous live, right?

It sounds like I am gearing up to tear them apart, and I kind of am. Maybe it had something to do with playing two shows about two hours apart, or it was Halloween, or Dave Longstreth’s silly costume (Yosemite Sam, maybe?) with his giant cowboy hat, but dang did Longstreth’s guitar playing not measure up to the record at all.

The biggest offense was that Cannibal Resource‘s opening riff was basically non-existent. The crowd was cheering a little bit, which was enough throughout the show to completely wash out the ability to hear the band at the Jensen Rec Center, but even through that what he played sounded nothing like that distinctive (forgive me) “twang twang twang chkkkkwaaahhhHHHH twang twang twang”.

I was sad. Earlier in the day my sister—who’s married, has two kids, voted for McCain, and is in love with Coldplay and seems to know nothing else about music aside from the name Coldplay—was talking to me about how great Coldplay is live and how “unlike most bands they’re actually better live than they are on the album.” I was taken aback by this statement, because I couldn’t remember the last time I saw a band live who weren’t better than their album. Maybe I only go to good shows, but most acts are better live, aren’t they? Isn’t the live show the most important moment for a band to show off their goods? Who’s going to waste that opportunity by being shitty?

I’m not trying to say Dirty Projectors were shitty live—merely that Longstreth’s guitar playing seems to benefit a lot from containment within a studio. Everything else about the show was pretty much excellent. The trio of female vocalists were absolutely flawless, their voices combining with, or in some cases, contrasting against, each other. They played everything I wanted to hear, and my girlfriend enjoyed the show quite a bit.

Maybe I wasn’t listening with the right ears, but it seems that the only weak link in the Dirty Projectors’ live performance on Halloween was front-man Dave Longstreth himself, who seemed to have a hard time with his guitar and, rarely but still on occasion, with his voice. Perhaps he is merely a victim of his own genius, unable to live up to the high standard he set for himself on the record.

It was still an enjoyable show, but I wouldn’t recommend seeing them live to a non-fan. There’s nothing Dirty Projectors can possibly do live to make you understand their music more than just listening to Bitte Orca ten or so times will do for you.

Also, watching a little white girl belt out Stillness is the Move was pretty much awesome. That chick has some serious pipes on her.

I really don’t like to write about things that I already feel people have probably already read about elsewhere all over the internet. Dead Man’s Bones is one of these recent things that I’m sure has exploded all over the place like 80 tiny Asian penises all over a tiny Asian girl’s face in some bizarre alien themed bukkake film.

But who can blame the internet? Ryan Gosling is in this band, and he’s an attractive celebrity with serious acting chops. The music itself sounds like Arcade Fire were commissioned to write an album inspired by Disney’s Haunted Mansion, and both those things are ridiculously awesome. You combine those two things with this year’s favorite trend—children’s choirs—and how could you not end up with a winning combination?

As noted lovingly by Pitchfork in their review (which I wont link to because who needs to link to Pitchfork anyway?) the album isn’t flawless. There’s a glut of ideas here and not all of them are genius. Some of the songs drag (I could do without “Buried in Water”, if only for the fact that “buried in water” sounds pretty stupid, ignoring that the song itself is pretty feh overall) and the pacing is pretty uneven, but when Gosling and Co. get it right, they really get it right.

No song is perfect due to aforementioned glut of ideas usually throwing some sort of sour note into each one (Pa Pa Power comes as close to perfection as anything on the record, marred only by it’s incomprehensible lyrics), but the album as a whole is a fantastic listen and a must have for any spooky girl to furtively fuck to while her parents are out of the house.

It’s not often that I get to cover something that seems to be virtually ignored but today I get to cover two such albums, both uncovered by Pitchfork (earlier it was Stellastarr*). I found a review of this album that repeatedly compares this band to The Postal Service. I’m going to say that this reviewer doesn’t have any clue what he’s talking about.

Plushgun doesn’t sound like The Postal Service so much as it sounds like… something else… that isn’t like—OK, you know what, when a band like Owl City can so thoroughly ape The Postal Service’s sound and get away with it just fine, you’re just an asshole for comparing anything else to The Postal Service. It’s just not possible for a band to sound more like The Postal Service than Owl City, so let’s just forget that anyone ever compared Plushgun to The Postal Service because they’re not at all alike. Now that I’ve said “The Postal Service” six times I’ll just move on.

Plushgun came to me much in the same way Kyle Andrews did, handed to me by my girlfriend who picked up the album on the cheap based on cute album art. Much like that Kyle Andrews album, Plushgun’s suffers from having one standout track that is so good it overshadows most of the others, and that track is, yes, you guessed it, you might be listening to it right now, Just Impolite which begs comparisons to The Postal Servi—OH FUCK, I just did it myself.

Whatever.

This is one of those songs that feels immediately familiar. I like it a bit, but not enough to fall in love with the rest of the album. If you like this song A LOT then you’ll probably love the album. Check it out, fall in love with it, and then promote it to all your Pitchfork reading friends who missed out on it because Pitchfork doesn’t seem to review albums that merely strike the lukewarm chords. Stupid Pitchfork.

From what I read about Stellastarr* on the internet they didn’t start off sounding the way they do on their latest album, Civilized. Pitchfork compares their first album to Interpol, who released their first around the same time Stellastarr* did. This album, to me, sounds nothing like anything like a Joy Division knock-off band, and more like… I don’t know… generic pop rock? Generic pop punk? Generic anthemic emo pop rock? Something else generic?

I know that using the word “generic” to describe a band’s output isn’t really complimentary, but with Stellastarr* it works out OK. This album isn’t perfect, and sometimes it’s annoying (especially on track 2, Freak Out when singer Shawn Christensen says “Come on you’re on fire!” in a voice that reminds me of Revenge of the Nerds and I can’t help but walk around going “Come on you’re on fire!” in the most annoying nasally whiny pre-pubescent voice I can muster) but for the most part this album is solid fun the whole way through.

The lyrics are much the same as Christensen’s sometimes spotty vocal choices, with great lines being stuck into shitty verses at times, but again, and I don’t want to sound like a broken record, this album seems to be more about fun than anything else. Freak Out‘s lyrics seems to sum up what they’re trying to do: “…we’ll reverse the drought
and bring another kind of people to our show.”

I hope it works out for them, ’cause this is stupid-fun music.

I’m trying something new today. I’ve recently started using the music service Lala. Since I’m such a Pitchfork fan, it’s surprising that it wasn’t until a Twitter user suggested that I check it out that I fell in love with it. I’ve been a devotee off Amazon MP3 for quite some time but Lala’s perks are numerous: complete (undownloadable) ‘cloud’ held collection of all your music (even that which they don’t have themselves) and cheaper prices for non-DRMed MP3s. Also their interface is slick and easy to use.

So, perhaps instead of embedding the tracks myself and going through the work and possible legal hassles involved, I’m going to use Lala embedded tracks. The only thing this should subtract from the site is the ability to listen multiple times. Lala only allows you to listen to the complete track once… but that’s all you need, right? Without further ado…

My girlfriend, before she was my girlfriend again and after she wasn’t my girlfriend anymore, picked up this Kyle Andrews CD for cheap at some record sale in LA. She bought it ’cause the cover art was pretty, and just luckily the music inside it is fairly awesome. Most awesome of all is the first track, Sushi, which makes me want to fall in love with everything. I listened to it over 10 times on Friday.

Sushi is almost a shame, because it’s so good that it easily overshadows the rest of the record, which is also pretty good. The second track, Naked in New York, gets heavy, you can even head bang to it. Maybe it’s telling that I’ve listened to the album several times and all I can really remember are the first two tracks. Hmm.

Regardless, this Sushi song is amazing. Dig it.