Try as I might, this review of the Department of Eagles’ In Ear Park can’t help but also be a review Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimist. An overlap in membership also results in an overlap in sound, and most of what I think about the Department of Eagles is based on what I think about Grizzly Bear.
In particular, Veckatimist was one of the most overrated albums of 2009.
The Department of Eagles consists of singer Daniel Rossen and guitarist Fred Nicolaus. They were a unit before Rossen joined Grizzly Bear and eventually took Nicolaus with him. After Grizzly Bear released Yellow House, Rossen and Nicolaus resumed as the Department of Eagles and recorded In Ear Park.
Rossen’s distinctive voice has since become emblematic of Grizzly Bear, and the eclectic sound of his adopted band spills over into In Ear Park. More than that, actually — this album is what Yellow House should have been. (Yellow House is another album that seems to get better reviews than it should.)
I turned 38 this past weekend. I am now — and have been really for the past three to five years — the target market for reissues and catalog.
When I was young, I had a chip on my shoulder about people who would buy up reissues and special editions. Pfeh. Living in the past. Why don’t you all man up and listen to something new? That was my foolish, youthful thinking.
Then I reached a point where that old Battlestar Galactica proverb reared its head — all this has happened before, and it will happen again.
I program my TiVo to catch this music video program on LOGO called NewNextNow. It’s not a bad survey of what’s bubbling under the floundering hit-making machinery of the media conglomerates. (Although most of the music featured on the show is made by major labels.)
But I’ll listen to these so-called new bands, and I inevitably rattle off comparisons — ah, that’s Echo and the Bunnymen fronted by Ben Gibbard. Oh, look, a guitarist who idolizes the Edge. And those 8-bit blips and bleeps are so post-Kraftwerk, pre-Nick Rhodes.
The new isn’t really new, now that I’m knocking on the door of 40. But here’s the thing about the past — it can be every bit as unexplored territory as the new. And even the familiar sounds different at 38 than 18, let alone 28.
So bring on the reissues and the catalog. I’m a grown-up now.
In my early days of music collecting, Eurythmics was one band I filed under "must-own" — if the duo released an album, I made sure to get it. My enthusiasm for them, however, petered out before the release of We Too Are One in 1989. (Nor did I manage to get the 1984 soundtrack. In the Garden hadn’t been released in the States at that time.)
In reality, Eurythmics was a far better singles band than an album band. Of the vinyl albums I purchased in my youth, only two made the leap to CD — Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) and more recently, Savage.
Savage holds a strange position in the band’s discographic history. They went back to using synthesizers after having made a big effort to ditch them two albums earlier, nor did they tour in support of the album. The singles don’t have the chart-ready catchiness of their previous hits.
Among the pundits contemplating the fate of the recorded music industry, the idea of the economics of scarcity has come under scrutiny. The Internet provides such fast access to content that providing more material sooner is becoming the conventional wisdom for newer artists.
All this talk of business, however, doesn’t factor in a fairly persnickety detail — the muse.
Just because you ought to hose listeners with content, content, content doesn’t mean you should. Or even can.
Sade is the extreme opposite example of such emerging conventional wisdom. Back in the ’80s, it was easy to feel Sade fatigue because she and her band produced prodigiously from 1985 to 1988. The lag set in with 1992’s Love Deluxe, and after that … nada.
Eight years passed before Sade resurfaced with Lovers Rock and another ten before Soldier of Love.
I have a TV blog. It’s dead. The one-two punch of TiVo and the writer’s strike from a few years back killed it.
It didn’t help the shows that came in the wake of the strike’s conclusion sucked — nothing on the level of The West Wing or Gilmore Girls (shut up), Battlestar Galactica and Friday Night Lights not withstanding.
Perhaps the one good thing to come out of the strike was a new album by Wendy & Lisa. The former members of Prince and the Revolution became film and television composers in the late-’90s, and the strike put them out of work when productions shut down.
The duo’s previous album, Girl Bros., was released in 1998, and the decade of work since then greatly expanded the pair’s sonic palette. White Flags of Winter Chimneys bears little resemblance to their post-Prince solo work.
Simply put, it’s the rock album they always had in them.
Onitsuka Chihiro set a pretty high bar with her 2000 debut, Insomnia. Subsequent albums haven’t quite achieved the same level of focus and consistency. (This Armor didn’t even come close.)
So it was easy to assume Insomnia would be the unmovable obstacle, the peak by which everything will be compared and none surpassed.
Well, she just might have done it.
Midway through the decade, Onitsuka sought to free herself from the balladeer confines in which her management — and perhaps her audience (myself included) — wanted to keep her. The first effort of this make-over, 2007’s LAS VEGAS, was more admirable for its effort than for its execution.
DOROTHY, however, finally brings Onitsuka to the point she’s been fighting to reach for the last few years — as an artist of breadth.
I’ve been busy with a project at work, and my usually blogging time has been curtailed as a result. So much for GTD.
I did, however, reach a point on Friday where a bulk of the heavy lifting is done, and everything that comes after is refinement. Well, until I start showing the project to other users. Then the feature requests will come in, and all bets are off.
I do have to say the release year seems to be starting off slower than usual. I’ve acquired only two items released in this year, and it’s already the last third of the first quarter. It looks like things won’t really pick up till Q2.
Cocco may have come out of retirement back in 2005, but the artist who emerged from that hiatus was not the same who entered it. SINGER SONGER, her collaboration with members of Quruli, was breezy but rushed. 2006’s Zansaian attempted to conform to the Cocco template but fell short. The following year’s Kira Kira didn’t even make an attempt.
She managed to keep the birth of her son secret till he sang backup vocals on Kira Kira, and it’s a good guess his birth was responsible for soothing Cocco’s stormy inner world.
Cocco hasn’t released much music since 2007, but she has published more books. Cocco-san no Daidokoro essentially serves as a promotional item for a collection of essays with the same title. Regardless, a bit of the old Cocco surfaces in the new.
No, the wailing rocker chick from the early aughts doesn’t stage a comeback, but the tunefulness and majesty of her grander moments inform "Kinuzure" and "Ai ni Tsuite". "the end of Summer" is so transparent as to waft away, but "Bye Bye Pumpkin Pie" brings her back down to solid aural ground.
Kira Kira had a maverick, unpolished feel that wasn’t as refreshing as it should have been, but that kind of looseness gives Cocco-san no Daidokoro some room to breathe.
Cocco’s voice sounds radiant, her harmonizing the best it’s been in a long time.
Cocco-san no Daidokoro doesn’t overstay its welcome, but it’s also enough to crave for more. She struck a nice balance between her newer, lighter songs and her older, heavier sound. A full album would be nice?
Sometimes, I’m too willing to join the classical cognoscenti and consider every recording I come across in the genre as somehow inherently profound. Taste eventually interferes with that assessment, as it should.
I’m a Duran Duran fan, but that doesn’t mean I have to bow down to the achievements of Red Carpet Massacre and Astronaut. Honestly, both those albums sucked wind.
So too with the classical canon, and more so with works in the past century. Just because I like one guy’s etudes doesn’t mean I’ll like his horn concerto. And some works just downright elude me.
In the wake of Music for the Masses and Violator, Depeche Mode clones came out of the proverbial wood work. First, Camouflage, then Red Flag and eventually, Cause & Effect.
Cause & Effect singer Rob Rowe, like Camouflage’s Marcus Meyn, bore yet another striking timbral resemblance to David Gahan, and those familiar string pads and synth basses thread through the Los Angeles duo’s songs as well.
Guitars were only starting to become a component in Depeche Mode’s music at the time, but they were part of Cause & Effect’s sound from the get-go. The opening track of the band’s self-titled debut album incorporated an acoustic guitar to great effect. The ringing riff that opens "Something New" is more New Order than DM.
Where Camouflage had a spiritual and aesthetic affinity with its England-based counterparts, Cause & Effect were far more willing to spin that sound for its own purposes. In short, they were nowhere near as dour.