SOUNDTRACK: MONEEN-The World That I Want to Leave Behind (2010).
I’ve liked Moneen’s discs; they played an interesting mix of grungey noisey rock and incredibly poppy emo. And their song titles were really long and often funny (“The Frightening Reality Of The Fact That We Will All Have To Grow Up And Settle Down One Day,” “There Are A Million Reasons For Why This May Not Work… And Just One Good One For Why It Will”).
The first sign that The World I Want to Leave Behind is different is that their song titles are all really short. The longest one is the title of the album–which is the shortest song: a 2 minute quiet intro that features some noisy guitars at the end. The rest are 1-3 words long. Now, perhaps you can’t judge a band by that; however, their music, like thier song titles, has eschewed complexity and embraced pop. (“Believe,” “Waterfalls,” “Lighters”).
Okay Moneen always had this component to it. So it’s not like suddenly the band is all pop. Take “Are We Really Happy with Who We are Right Now?” from the album of the same name . The song is all emo vocals (including harmonies) but the music is punky and noisy. It’s also got a lot of dissonance. Similarly, “The Start to this May be the End to Another” (from their debut), opens with really blasting noise and then turns into a heavy emo track with loud and quiet sections. They are certainly poppy, but there’s at least nods to noise.
This album removes all of that noise and chaos and settles into to some tried and true emo. If you hate emo, you will hate this album. There’s virtually no dissonance on the disc at all.
Okay, that’s not entirely true. The second song, “Hold That Sound” opens with some noiy aggressive guitars (and interesting noisy effects) and “The Long Count” has some noisy heavy opening chords which propel through the track. But unlike earlier records, the noise gets pushed to the background pretty quickly. “The Monument” also shows some remnants of heaviness–there’s even screaming vocals at one point.
And yet, the aforementioned “Wateralls” and “Lighters” sound like Guster-lite (and I like Guster quit a bit).
The final song, “The Glasshouse” does rock pretty hard (although the harmonies are all still there and the emo certainly seeps in by the end with a piano break and the final 2 minutes being all gang vocals).
Okay so in fairnes to the band, they haven’t smoothed off all the rough edged, but the polished bits are really polished now. The thing is, I kind of like emo, so despite my tone, I don’t really dislike this record. I’m always diasppointed when a band moves more commerical, especially if they cut off their more interesting bits, but Moneen make good emo (if you allow that such a thing exists). I don’t like all emo bands, but there’s still enough interesting stuff here to keep me coming back to it. In fact, for all of its poppiness, “Believe” is a really fantastically catchy alt rock song which should be in heavy rotation somewhere, if it’s not already.
[READ: February 13, 2011] A Place So Foreign and 8 More
When I saw that Cory Doctorow had a book of short stories out, I was intrigued. I’ve enjoyed two of his books quite a bit, so what could he do with short fiction?
This is some of his earliest work and I found it a mixed bag.
The first story “Craphound” was great (and the origin of his website name). It concerns going to flea markets and buying all kinds of crap. When you do it a lot, you become a craphound. But when you take a fellow craphound’s crap of choice for yourself, you break the unwritten rule. That’s all well and good. But in this story one of the craphounds is an alien, like from another planet. And what he trades for his crap is pretty wild. But why would he break the unwritten rule? The story is a fun look at what happens when extra-terrestrials are a part of your life.
“A Place So Foreign” was my absolute favorite story in the book, and one of my favorite short stories in quite some time. I’m happy to say that I read it last, so it totally ended the book on a high note. Despite the cover picture with an “alien” hand holding a suitcase, the story has nothing to do with that at all. (more…)
SOUNDTRACK: GUSTER-Lost and Gone Forever (1999) & Keep It Together (2003).
Lost and Gone Forever: Guster’s third album is an unreasonably good one. The songs are all tight and catchy, the production is really warm and inviting, and the choruses just make you want to sing along to every one. Major highlights include: “Barrel of a Gun,” “Fa Fa,” “All the Way Up to Heaven,” and “Two Points for Honesty.” And the rest of the record is just as strong. 
SOUNDTRACK: GUSTER-Parachute (1995) & Goldfly (1997).
Parachute: A really great debut, that, in retrospect, sounds almost nothing like the Guster we know and love. This sounds a bit more like the Indigo Boys. Solid harmonies over a very acoustic sounding record. Over the years, Guster have written fantastic melodies and lyrics. And this album is no exception. It’s really the production that sounds so unusual here. Very sparse and almost cool, as opposed to the warmth that they bring to their later albums. The songs are top notch, though.
Goldfly: “Airport Song” is such a fantastic single, and such a great precursor of what’s to come from Guster, that it tends to overshadow the rest of the album. Goldfly starts Guster down the road of what we’ve come to 
I Just Read About That... 