I remember the first time I ever heard White Winter Hymnal. Someone had posted the creeping, stop motion video online, and I was spellbound. I gobbled up everything of Fleet Foxes I could–the record, radio performances, their Judee Still cover on Black Cab Sessions, everything. When I returned to college that fall, I spread White Winter Hymnal like gospel (along with Bon Iver, who broke through that same summer). Their mix of Beach Boy harmonies and mountain folk filtered through Seattle sensibilities was at once fresh and familiar. Just how familiar was revealed to me when my roommate responded to the album with “that was Fleet Foxes? I thought you were listening to James Taylor.”
Month: January 2013
Record #167: Fleet Foxes – Sun Giant (2007)
The phrase “arrived with their sound fully formed” gets thrown around so much that if music critique had their own annual list of banned phrases, it would surely appear in multiple editions. But when confronting Sun Giant, the debut EP by Seattle indie folk giants Fleet Foxes, there’s little else to say.
Record #166: The Flaming Lips – Embryonic (2009)
As I mentioned earlier, Embryonic was the first Lips record I ever heard. Admittedly, it’s hardly the most conventional place to start with their expansive discography–far removed from Yoshimi’s space folk and The Soft Bulletin’s wide eyed optimism, and even further from the trippy drug punk from the earliest days.
Record #165: The Flaming Lips – Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002)
Like The Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots could do with some decontextualizing.
Even a decade after its release, it seems this record is everywhere.
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Record #164: The Flaming Lips – The Soft Bulletin (1999)
Too often, The Soft Bulletin’s significance is attributed to the creative leap forward it was for the Flaming Lips. It marked the moment the acid-dropping punks decided to get serious and make some seriously beautiful pop music.
And while that’s true, it discounts the strength the album holds on its own…
Personally, the first Lips record I ever heard was 2009’s Embryonic, which played more like the psychedelic soundtrack to a 1950’s sci-fi horror movie than anything the Flaming Lips would have turned out.
And that, along with “Do You Realize,” “She Don’t Use Jelly,” and the Postal Service’s cover of “Suddenly Everything has Changed” were my context for hearing this record.
And I instantly loved it.
The urgent, overdriven drums, the synth strings, the sprinkling harp, the extended instrumental passages, and Wayne Coyne’s shaking, wild-eyed voice that ties everything together. It’s an album of unveiled optimism, young love, friendship, and occasionally drugs (this is the Flaming Lips, isn’t it?) that begs the listener to live and be alive, even in the face of hopelessness.
And fourteen years later, there hasn’t been much to rival moments like the opening strains of “The Race for the Prize” or the instrumental groove in “The Spark that Bled” or the closing crescendo of “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate.” It’s an absolute classic, regardless of its context in the Flaming Lips’ or anyone else’s discography.
Record #163: The Faint – Danse Macabre (2001)
If you’re unfamiliar, the Faint makes the sort of gloomy, anti-corporate-America, synth-heavy post-punk revival that you’d expect from labelmates of Conor Oberst (who was a founding member, though he was no longer in the band at the time of this record). Sometimes, it’s exactly what I want.
Record #162: Explosions in the Sky – All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone
Not everyone likes Explosions in the Sky, but no one who dislikes them does so because they don’t make beautiful music.
Simplified restatement: Explosions in the Sky makes beautiful music and no denies this.
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