I have a soft spot in the hallow place in my chest where my heart should be for the 90's. This song has an even softer spot within that spot. A spot of ultimate softness, if you will.
I was watching one of those VH1 specials where they get a bunch of C-list pseudo-celebrities to talk about songs as if they have any idea what they are talking about---and these things just get sadder as time goes on, because you end up with people on the show talking about songs from an era they weren't even alive during---"borrowed nostalgia..." and all that---and some woman said this about "Cannonball": "One of the best songs about tantric sex ever."
Except that this song isn't about tantric sex. It's hardly about anything. Back in 1996 Kim Deal was interviewed by a Phoenix newspaper, the New Times, and she had this to say about "Cannonball"...
Kim Deal: I've just never connected music with books. Wait, that's not entirely true. "Cannonball" was inspired by the writings of Marquis de Sade.
New Times: What? "I'll be the bong in your reggae song" was inspired by Marquis de Sade?
KD: Well, not that line specifically. But the message of the song as a whole was making fun of Sade and his libertarian views that if he was better off than someone, then they were just fodder for him. Playthings. It was saying, "Come on, life's not a contest."
NT: So you're pretty much anti-Sade.
KD: Well, I don't know. Later on I found out he used to suck the snot out of people's noses, and I thought that pretty much ruled.
In all my experience of writing 0 songs so far, I have to say that I am getting the feeling that a lot of songwriting---the poetic Bob Dylan nonsense style of songwriting anyway---is finding a small nugget of inspiration and then utterly raping all of the potential ambiguous meanings out of it.
Yesterday I picked up a fuzzy little caterpillar on a leaf because he was in the parking lot and I didn't want him to get ran over. When I tried to pick up him up on the leaf I put the leaf under his head first, and instead of crawling on it he just started eating it so fast. I was like, "No no no little fuzzy caterpillar, this is your lift, not your dinner!" and swooped him up from behind and tossed him in the ivy. Then I got to thinking: what would a song from the perspective of that caterpillar sound like? How would you write it so that your common music listening prole doesn't know what it's being sung by a caterpillar?
I was lounging hungry on some hot pavement Then you came along and fed me Took it away & turned my world upside down With yr blonde hair and yr blue eyes And now I'm lost in the tall grass.
I won't go hungry and I'll never know who you were But I won't be lonely I'll just be wonderin' where you are
I am not a caterpillar, I ain't too good at holding things up But I've put you on a pedestal
Alright, now you guys take it from there. Also, figure out how to sing it. And put music to it. I'm sleepy.
Sometimes Pitchfork lays on the hyperbole a little thick. Admittedly, I do too, but when they say things like how Black Tambourine are on the precipice of being considered legends in indie circles just because they sound a little bit like some of the horrible twee fuzz-pop bullshit that they, Pitchfork, are currently promoting the fuck out of it, well, it annoys me. (The echo chamber, it echoes.)
For one thing, Black Tambourine sounds a lot more like the era they came from (the 90s) than they do anything else that's going on here. The guitars? Straight from the rigs of Th' Faith Healers. AllMusic declares that Black Tambourine are "among the truly seminal American indie pop bands of the 1980s", which is funny because Black Tambourine weren't even active in the 1980s.
They go onto say that Black Tambourine "pre-dates shoegaze" which also isn't anywhere close to being true, considering My Bloody Valentine's "Isn't Anything" came out 3 years before Black Tambourine, and Ride's "Nowhere" came out in 1990 (a year before Black Tambourine put out their first EP). Even back to Th' Faith Healers, who released two full albums of excellent grungy shoegaze-y female vocal alt rock and broke up before Black Tambourine managed to release two EPs.
I don't mean to establish that Black Tambourine isn't good---out of the epic barely-an-album 12 songs they recorded over four years, there are at least three decently good songs---but that I'm a little confused as to how some unknown and unloved bands get huge amounts of hype thrown behind their expired careers. Is it because of some guy, just like me, sitting behind a desk somewhere at a important music critic job who carries a torch for them?
In 20 years, will I be sitting in an important position somewhere and I will be able to say things like, "The Angry Orts are one of the seminal pop rock groups of the early 2000s, and clearly, today, in the 2030s, their influence remains strong!" and everyone will fall all over themselves, re-issuing Angry Orts records and conducting interviews with the confused former members about the profound impact they have had on modern 2030s music?
Maybe that's all it takes for a band to go down in history as important. It seems to me that if it wasn't for a couple loud voices, who would even know who Black Tambourine is? Two low-fi EPs and a slow fade into obscurity later, it seems unlikely that anyone would even remember their name, but here I am, discussing them on my blog.
Music history is a funny thing. It'll be interesting to look back on the 2000s and the 2010s and see what lessons we take from them. Who will we really remember? Will the 2000s be remembered as the decade of Coldplay and Britney Spears? Or will we remember it as the decade of Arcade Fire and insert the name of some other popular indie band? Or, like according to this mostly bullshit list will we remember the 2000s for acts like The Strokes (who'd the Strokes influence? Interpol? "Let's release one great album like The Strokes and then never make another good record ever again, just like the Strokes!"), The Danielson Famile (Seriously, who?), and Sufjan Stevens (who seemed like he'd be really influential until he was never able to actually release another album*)?
Maybe that's the trick to being influential? You release one good album and, ideally, fade away. If you're unlucky like The Strokes, you hang all your credibility and influence on bad albums...
I don't know. I guess we'll see. If I have anything to do with it, we'll remember the 2000s and the 2010s as decades where hundreds of bands no one has ever heard of were supremely influential upon the future of music. Everything I listen to, it's important, and you better jump on it now or else in 20 years you're going to be really confused. Everyone will be talkin' about me---I mean, the bands I post. Not me, just the bands.
Well, maybe a little about me, and how cool I was back in the day for listening to all this stuff. Maybe there will be a statue. A statue of me. Hmm... the future might be pretty cool...
* In defense of Sufjan Stevens, he is releasing a new album this year. I'm sure regardless of whether it is good or not people will masturbate furiously to it all over the internet. So much for The 50 States. (Edit: Hey, look, the new Sufjan Stevens leaked today, and everyone is already going on about how good it is... apparently he says "fuck" repeatedly on one song! How novel and exciting! People in the early 1970's won't know what to do with themselves.)
I lay on the snark pretty thick, but it's done with love, I swear.
I've never really been able to get into TV on the Radio. I liked the first album, Desperate Youth etc, alright, but it just got old on me. Eventually "Staring At The Sun" would come on and I couldn't help but skip it. I think the general problem I have with TVOTR is that they're always right on the precipice of something you can feel good moving to, but then they draw back and throw in something weird, something emotionally discordant, so you never really settle into a comfortable place with them.
Maybe I'm wrong. You should tell me if I am.
Maximum Balloon is basically TV on the Radio in full dance mode. It's not even just dance mode, it's "We're going to move together, baby, and either it's going to be via dance, or via fucking like crazy. It's your choice. Whatever you want. I'll just stand here making eyes at you until you choose one" mode.
Every song on this album slinks and slithers, bounces and grooves. It's a celebration of movement, of love, of life! How's that for hyperbole? I'm actually drawing a blank on this one. Sometimes something is just good, and there are no words for it beyond that: this is a good collection of dance music. It's not thin---the synthesizers, the beats, they're all meticulous---and it's not insincere: it's one of those albums that feels like it was willed into existence exactly as it stands, like you couldn't fit a playing card in between the beats because there's just no need or room for anything else.
I'm seeing Cloud Cult tonight at The Roxy in LA. I tried to listen to their new album, "Light Chasers", but I just haven't been in a Cloud Cult kind of mood. As far as I can tell the album sounds like Cloud Cult, which is to lightly backhand them for making an album that sounds like their last two albums. I mean no offense, but I like it when bands evolve and develop into new directions.
I guess I should say: when I am listening to a new album by a band I love, the last thing I want is for it to sound familiar. When I start to feel like I've heard this before, it just makes me wonder why should I bother investing the time into falling in love with this record, when I'm already in love with and enjoy the other ones?
You're on notice, bands that I have written about. Let's see those next albums take you in a new exciting direction. Stick with your main characteristics, your little quirks that make you awesome, but branch out. If you normally sound like Grizzly Bear, make yourself sound like Bear In Heaven. If you normally sound like No Doubt, make yourself sound like some other band with the word No or Doubt in their name, like, Doubting Thomas, or... I really can't think of any other bands that have "No" in the name. That's it, I'm naming my band No. "We are No!"
If you see someone tonight at the Cloud Cult show who looks like this, but less blocky, say hello. I always say this, never expecting anyone to say hello, but maybe someday someone will take a wild guess and say hello to me and I'll be like "WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU? WEBSITE? I DON'T EVEN OWN A COMPUTER, WEIRDO DIPSHIT. What the fuck are THOSE? Capris? You're man. Men don't wear capris. Mary Tyler Moore does. Go the fuck home and take those off right now, you're embarrassing yourself so thoroughly that I feel embarrassed just to be standing next to you. It's just sad. Really, it's one thing to have no respect for yourself, but everyone else? We have to look at you."
Now, maybe I'm out of my league here, talking about this band, but if I were to sum up Out Hud as easily as possible I'd say: Imagine The Blow, but subtract all of the YACHT from it, and then you have something like Out Hud. To get to closer, subtract all of The Blow's really clever, sexy songwriting, then you pretty much have Out Hud. Which is to say Out Hud isn't really anything like The Blow or YACHT, but that they have beats and you can dance (slowly?) to all their songs.
I discovered this band because they are said to be similar to LCD Soundsystem on a popular music trading website. They aren't similar. LCD Soundsystem marries the verse-chorus-verse rock'n'roll song structure to dance beats and live drums, bringing that sort of pop/rock attitude to music you can dance to for hours. Out Hud sounds like electronic music: the vocals aren't there to carry the song, they're just there, useless, like a penis that can't get erect, like balls rendered sterile and deformed by repeated accidental dosings of radiation.
I don't want to sound like I am being down on Out Hud, because this is a decent album to listen to when there is nothing else around that could be better (refer to all the other band names I have mentioned in this post), but when I landed on All Music Guide, back in 2005 they said, "Out Hud have, in a roundabout way, developed into the most original dance band on the planet." I'm not really sure how that is.
Maybe it depends on how you define "original". Maybe "original" isn't actually a compliment. I mean, I could start a dance group and all the samples could be recordered directly from my flatulent asshole. Yes, recordered, as in recorded through a recorder stuck in my ass. That would be original. Hell, that would probably make me the most original dance artist in the world, at least until Lady Gaga decided to wear a dress made entirely out of farts and then I'd just be old news. Old, sad news, like a penis unab... oh I've used that one already. Like a vagina, dry, dusty, and alone!
I drank a lot of coffee this morning. I don't normally drink anything resembling coffee---I think it's been two years since I have drank coffee in the morning, and I already feel like I am about to bounce out of my skin. This is opposed to Out Hud, who don't make me want to bounce out of my skin so much as they make me want to simmer slowly in it, which isn't a bad thing I swear.
God, this went terribly awry. I'm supposed to be convincing you to listen to Out Hud.
There's this saying that goes something like you alway hurt the ones you love. As far as I can tell, this is true. I tend to avoid criticism on this site unless something is really terrible (Best Coast) or if it's really disappointing (Mike Doughty). The former is a lot more rare than the latter, since it seems like some artists have this unfortunate knack for spiraling downward into mediocrity and that just makes me feel kind of sad and I have to say something about it.
The Black Angels seem to be falling into some sort of nostalgia fueled death spiral. Maybe it was the fact that Directions To See A Ghost was a massive droning mess from which it was hard to identify individual songs, and they decided it was safer to just start over as if that album hadn't happened and move in some new direction. That new direction is pretty clean sounding songs that sound, to me, one step removed from The Black Crowes playbook.
If you winced when I said The Black Crowes, you should. I don't have a lot of patience for masturbatory classic rock nostalgia baiting, and I like classic blues rock even less, so when I listened to this new Black Angels album, Phosphene Dream, and it ended up being one Doors-y blues rocky almost entirely inconsequential track after another, I was sad. I was really sad. All I could tweet was, "The new Black Angels album is pretty thin. They're starting to sound a bit Black Crowes-y with all the shameless, useless nostalgia."
Earlier this year there was a pretty sublime song on the new UNKLE album featuring The Black Angels and it was a damn good, fun track. Not only did it feature an awesome melody with pretty awesome lyrics, but the whole thing sounded so fun and fresh. It was The Black Angels' dark psychedelic sound meshed with a solid dance-able beat. It sounded almost perfect, like you could have given me an entire album worth of that stuff and I would have felt great.
But the Angels took nothing from that collaboration. There's not a memorable lyric anywhere to be found. There's nothing you can dance to, unless you count jerkily swaying around like a half drunk hippie "dancing". To make a long story short, most things on this album are not memorable---no hooks, no good beats, if there's a clever lyric somewhere I don't know where it is.
I can't recommend this one. Go listen to their debut album instead.
I made a terrible mistake the other day. I called this album "good". Now, I'm going to posture completely dishonestly here and say that it's not at all like me to make mistakes (it is) and that it's even less like me to cop to them (it isn't) but today things are going to be different. Today, I'm going to set things right.
This album isn't good.
It's not even great.
It's pretty much totally fucking awesome.
I started off the post for their song "The Body Without Any Eyes" with one of the many unfortunate things you can encounter in music, and another is an occupational hazard: sometimes there just isn't enough time to listen to an album as many times as it takes to fall in love with it. I wonder sometimes how many albums were just one or two more listens away from becoming awesome, it has to be a lot.
The Harvey Girls struck my ear last week and since then I haven't been able to shake it. When I'm faced with silence and I need music, my immediate reaction is: put on that Harvey Girls album. It's been working great as background music to my endless hours of Minecrafting. It's awesome in the car, when I'm stoned, when I'm sober, at work, when I'm sad or when I'm happy. A song like "Puss" soothes the soul. "A Letter To Bees" is pensive and driving while still feeling lose and lovely---with a lyrical hook that sounds like something I wish a woman, any woman, would have told me throughout my life, "Stop thinking and start saying..." (I always worry I am getting the lyrics wrong when I write them out on here, like Pitchfork fucking up the "Lisztomania" lyrics.)
But it's "Monster", which I played on repeat about six times in a row yesterday, that really floors me. I can't decipher the entirety of the lyrics, which might make it even better, but it seems to be a song about missing someone. I'm pretty sure I could listen to any song these days and feel like it's about missing someone, because my head is just in that place, but listen to those chord changes, the flow of the music, and don't tell me it doesn't sound like you're swimming in nostalgic, optimistic woe. This is one of those songs where I feel kind of like it was written just for my head, like the husband and wife duo behind The Harvey Girls thought "What is the best way we can worm our way into Stuy Parker's head? Let's write this song about monsters..."
And it was good. Really good. So good they get two posts in less than a week so that I can correct the terrible mistake I made in writing so few words before. This album is great through and through (well, actually, to be honest, that last track is pretty dreadful and totally harshes my mellow and I wish it didn't exist but luckily the rest of the album is so good it's possible to completely forget about that 9 minute mental sludge at the end of if like I just did). Listen to it!
DO IT NOW.
Don't be like me. Don't risk overlooking greatness. You're not me, so you don't have to listen to something new every single day otherwise you start to feel like you suck and you're not doing your job, which is strictly volunteer work, but still feels like a job because you love it so much that you feel like you have to do it. Wait, maybe you should be like me. Having a hobby kicks ass!
Yesterday a reddit thread made me realize something I knew deep down but hadn't ever realized before: I don't have any good memories of my parents. When it comes to my mother, it's as simple as that: I can't recall a time when she appeared to be genuinely happy, and I can't really think of any times where I actually had fun with her, as a child. Neither can I remember any occasion in which my mother really made me happy---unless it was when she gave me something she bought for me, which was often and in retrospect didn't really make me all that happy.
With my dad, however, it's not just that I don't have any good memories, it's that I seem to have a cache of bad memories. It started on reddit when I made a comment about how my parents are pin traders at Disneyland and I said that they have nothing else in their life. Someone replied that "if you feel that way about your parents maybe you should spend some time with them."
I was shot back: Nah. My parents didn't spend any time with me as a kid, so as far as I'm concerned they can go fuck themselves. Story time! One of my earliest and most vivid memories of my father is when I came up to him with a fist full of Ninja Turtles action figures. "Daddy," I said. "Play ninja turtles with me?" He responded: "Sorry kid, but I don't have any imagination," changing the channel on the TV and ignoring me.
From there I started scrolling through other memories of my father: when I was young we three (mom, dad, & me) walked up the street to get ice cream. On the way back, a stray dog started to follow us. I, of course, wanted to take the doggy home. My dad, on the other hand, didn't, and started clapping and shouting at it. We were just on a sidewalk right next to a busy street, so finally when my dad startled the dog enough, it ran out in to the street into the path of an oncoming car. It didn't even get killed by the car, right in front of me, no. Its back half got crushed---as my dad forced me to walk away as if nothing happened, I watched over my shoulder as the dog drug itself by its front legs to the other side of the street where a hopefully much nicer person was.
I remember countless nights I couldn't fall asleep for elementary school the night before because my dad got his feelings hurt and decided to hold "family meetings" in which he would scream at my mother and my two sisters for hours. I was never really involved, I just got to peer around the furniture into the living room and see him red faced. I don't remember what any of those were ever about, but the one I do remember makes me even more angry at him.
Around the time I was about to graduate from elementary school my father had started snoring very loudly. It was so loud that my mother couldn't sleep next to him because she would just keep waking up. She'd even put in ear plugs and it didn't work. So eventually she started sleeping in my bed, across the house, next to me, or in one of the other beds in the house. Apparently this was too psychologically damaging for my father, so he held a "family meeting" that consisted entirely of him screaming at my mother about how awful it is to "have a wife who won't even sleep next to you". Nevermind the fact that it was for a totally justifiable reason---and even if it wasn't, I wouldn't have wanted to sleep next to my dad anyway because of what a raging prick he is.
I remember getting into the minivan in the mornings before class and asking my mom why she doesn't just leave him. She couldn't really give me an answer back then (I was maybe 10 after all) but I realize now it was probably because she hadn't worked a job in 20 years and couldn't imagine going back to a life that didn't revolve around being alone all day doing laundry and watching soap operas.
Stray dogs aren't the only thing my dad kills in my memory. Used to have a black dog named Bandit, and to take him to the vet my dad wouldn't just let him ride in the cab of the truck, he was a dog, so he had to be tied into the back of the truck. My little kid self always thought this was terrifyingly dangerous, so I'd always ride with my dad the short 5 minute drive to the vet, turned around, eyes pressed to the glass, anxiously waiting for my dog to yank the rope loose and jump out of the back of the truck. I felt like as long as I was there nothing bad could happen.
Of course, I got a bit older, and one day I decided that I'd rather hang out with my friends than monitor my dog's life. My dad leaves for the vet and an hour later I get a phone call: my dog is dead. On the way to the vet, it jumped out of the back of the truck and, while hanging from the side of the truck by the rope around its neck, was hit by another truck passing by. My dad tried to console me as I looked at my dog, dead in the back of the truck, with blood coming out of its eyes, by telling me the vet said that he probably broke his neck when he jumped from the truck and didn't feel the truck hitting him. Then my dad went and buried the dog in the backyard, right outside my bedroom window. I put Bandit's tennis ball on top of his grave, where it stayed, until my dad threw it out while clearing weeds.
I remember going to my elementary school on the weekend with my dad, with the bikes in the back. We rode on the pavement and the grass in the back of the school---this was back before all the schools in the area became caged in with 7 foot high iron fences and you could, say, play soccer on the fields when school wasn't in session. I played on the swings a little bit while my dad rode around, and thinking it would be funny I jumped off the swing and then laid in the grass playing dead. I expected my dad to come over and go "oh no!" and I'd be playing dead it'd be funny. You know, kid stuff.
I laid there, eyes half closed, squinting at my dad waiting for him to come over, but he didn't. Instead I saw him get off his bike, march (literally march with that angry determination that you can always identify as "my dad is pissed off" from miles away) over to my bike, pick it up, throw it and his into the back of the truck, and drive off. I sat there in the grass for a couple minutes wondering if he'd come back.
He didn't.
I walked home, watching for my dad's truck to swing around and pick me up the whole time but it never did. The truck was parked in front of our house, my dad was nowhere to be seen, so I pulled my bike out of the back. He'd thrown it in there so hard that it had bent my handlebars. I still, to this day, don't know why. I guess he didn't appreciate his son lying in the grass for no reason?
I don't want to sound like I am bemoaning my childhood too much: these are just the facts. Of course it could have been worse. My dad never hit me, not that I can remember, not at least until I was 15 and my desire to go see "Requiem for a Dream" with some internet people was such an enraging thought that he felt it necessary to choke me---signalling the end of my youth, which seemed to go out the same window I did but took off in the opposite direction. I went to live somewhere else, and the small amount of youth I ever had went and got fucked with a knife to death in a gutter somewhere I assume.
People who meet my father think he's just a funny and slightly weird old man. Age does that to men, it seems, it erodes away their hard edges so that the things that used to be scary about them merely become bad memories we have, but those edges still exist. When I hear my dad start to get annoyed, when his voice rises a little bit, all the hairs on my body stand on end just waiting for the screaming to begin. I'll never forget what it was like to cower in the dark under my blankets on the floor while my dad screamed at me about how horrible I am for making my mother call him at work and have him come home so he can scream at me for some reason.
So, there is is. Here's to you dad. Here's to the many memories I have of you...
It's unfortunate that sometimes a band may get overlooked because they named themselves something that doesn't sound at all like what they are. The Harvey Girls are one of those bands. Maybe it's because I live under a rock, but when I looked at "The Harvey Girls" the first thought that came to my head was: oh, this is probably some horrible poppy girl-group bullshit (like, say, The Dum Dum Girls, no offense to dum girls). Then I saw the album title: I've Been Watching A Lot Of Horror Movies Lately, which also sounds like something a group of obnoxious woo-girls would name an album. Like, "Ya know, I've been watching a lot of horror movies lately, heee!" It just sounds like that, to me, all of it.
So imagine my surprise when I put on the album and instead I found some moody and creative folky jams in the vein of early Akron/Family. In fact, now that I've made that comparison, this album sounds a lot like the first Akron/Family album with a little dash of These Were The Earlies. It's almost like this album comes from a different time---through time, perhaps, from a date somewhere around the time those albums came out---through the eons this album has traveled, the five long years since 2005, and now here it is, in 2010.
And it's good stuff. I don't have much else to say besides that it's good, and it sounds like Akron/Family at their least noisiest. Check it out.
P.S. I am getting into the bad habit of telling bands that email me that I'll go ahead and post one of their songs, and then I never get around to it. If you're one of those bands and you're reading this wondering where your music is: I'm sorry. I can only motivate myself to write about things I feel a connection to and for some reason 85% of the music that is emailed to me I just can't get fired up about. I'm still trying to listen to your material and eek out some words or inspiration but you just can't force this kind of thing. Well, you could, but then I'd just be a big fake and whatever I said about your music wouldn't mean a damn thing and then I'd probably stop sleeping so good at night because I'd be kept up by all the terrifying thoughts that there is someone out there, right now, listening to bad music because I recommended something I didn't have my heart in. I'm sure you understand, or at least if you hit the bottom of this giant paragraph you may have some sort of idea, or at least you're just annoyed.
I don't know what happened to us, E. It didn't used to be like this. You'd release an album every two years or so and they were great. Your Blinking Lights is one of the finest albums I'm sure I've ever heard. I spent the day it came out travelling between record stores trying to find it, until I gave up and I went to Target and they were the only place that had it---evidence against the usefulness of independent record stores, for sure, and that was five years ago. I was twenty and that album held my hand through what was, at the time, the most devastating heart break I had ever experienced.
But now you, you're breaking my heart. Hombre Lobo was one thing, because at times it sounded like you were revisiting the sounds of Souljacker and I appreciated that, but the rest of the album was uneven, listening like it was an outtake jukebox from all your different eras. It had a few good songs, but overall it just wasn't an album I cared to listen to. When you announced that you were going to release two more albums in the next year I was floored: you're increasing your discography by 50% in such a short time, this will be totally rad.
But then I didn't even write about End Times. It was just too depressing and there was nothing on it that made me feel like I'd ever want to listen to it again after the first time. For someone who always made sadness sound like it was something to be happy about, you released the first album that sounded like you were sad about being sad, and it all seemed so resigned. I couldn't stomach it.
Initial reviews from fans of Tomorrow Morning suggested that this was a return to form in some way. I wondered briefly if you churned out two shitty outtake albums so you could fulfill your contract to Vagrant so you could then release another Blinking Lights-style masterpiece on your own (you do sing "My record label hates me" on this album). I became a little excited: this really might just be awesome.
But it's not. In some ways it's just Hombre Lobo Pt. 2. It starts off so strong, too. "I Am A Hummingbird" is one of the most unique songs you've ever made, and it's almost shocking how beautiful it is. The near-subconscious string flourishes in the background on "What I Have To Offer" take a so-so song and turn it into something lovely and uplifting.
But then there's songs like "My Baby Loves Me" which seems to borrow from Blinking Lights' play book, the same loud and awkward place "Going Fetal" came from. "The Man" could be an Eels parody song, with the lyric "ask the birds singin' I am the man". These sorts of things were cute at one time, but now they just seem kind of tired. With the exception of "This Is Where It Gets Good" and "I Am A Hummingbird" I feel like I've heard all these songs before.
It doesn't really stop there either. I can't hear "After The Earthquake" without waiting for your voice to come in singing "if you see Natalie..." because I swear it's the same song. "Spectacular Girl" might as well just be the same song as "Sweet Little Thing" even if they're not that similar, it's the same damn song.
I'm just hurt, you know, E. I don't think it's too much for me to expect from you another album that is on par with Blinking Lights. Tomorrow Morning isn't disappointing so much because the songs aren't good---they're Eels songs, after all, and you are my favorite band---but because it all sounds so rehashed and mashed together. This isn't an album, and neither were the other two. These are just collections of songs loosely united under a common theme, and it seems like there is only one album of really good songs between all three.
