Best undiscovered album this year
Denis Prieur | 08/27/2008
(5 out of 5 stars)
"It is a mystery why this album, and this band, are not better known. The songs are beautifully crafted, the instrumentation is masterful (especially the layered acoustic guitars), yet the whole piece is infused with spirit and grit. The opening track, "The Lonely Death of Space Avenger," is a little masterpiece of surreal bittersweetness, and the final melancholy song, "Transmissions," is a simple melody with a great guitar lick that belies a rather complex narrative.
The lyrics are dark, often ghoulish, but with a literary bent not often heard in indie rock bands. In the gentle, folkish "Soon When I'm Gone," Brad Armstrong sings "If I cut off all my fingers/Would you take my bleeding hands?/Would you hold them quiet in the dark/Til I could sleep again?" Many songs have a narrative quality, like "Transmission," which relates opposite versions of the same vague but allusive story, with each verse alternating between an obsessive and a cavalier side, each ending with the lines "Sorry that it's come to this/But surely you must've known/It was coming down." Or from the eerie tale of troubled youth, "Soft Houses":
"When the summer comes on us we have nowhere to go
I can hardly hold my head up I've been drinking too long
Brush the hair back from your long and desperate handsome face
I can hardly stand it when I come back to this place
Drive down by the train yards smashing bottles on the tracks
Holding on to each other though it'd like to break our backs
I was sorry to see you go down in your lonesome hole
When we come to see you you don't live there anymore
Why oh why has no major indie label picked up these guys? Apparently they have quite a following in Alabama, and have been putting out records for a while. I hope they keep them coming."
Track Listings (13) - Disc #1