electronica

Record #185: The Flaming Lips – The Terror (2013)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Economics teaches us that the more abundant something is, the less appealing we will find it. For example, if you eat one cookie, it will be delicious, but if you eat 30 cookies, you will soon be sick of cookies. For another example, the Flaming Lips released their last record in 2009. Since then, they have released a song-for-song remake of The Dark Side of the Moon, a split with Neon Indian, a USB exclusive track available only inside of a marijuana flavored gummy skull, a 70 minute, 13 track collection of collaborations with everyone imaginable, covers of songs by Madonna, The Beatles, and more, a compilation of their first several records (along with those same vinyl reissues), a URL-exclusive twenty-four hour long psych-freakout track, twelve YouTube videos meant to be played simultaneously, live performances of The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi in full, assorted car commercial singles, Wayne Coyne’s constant twitter feed, and on and on and on and on and on…

So, economically speaking, The Terror should simply fade in to the constant barrage of nonsense that Wayne Coyne & Co. is constantly spouting out.

But I guess The Flaming Lips don’t understand economics very well.

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Record #181: Atoms for Peace – Amok (2013)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

We interrupt your regularly scheduled Fugazi post for tonight’s purchase.

Any new Radiohead-related release is always treated with a heavily stirred mix of eagerness and dread. One the one hand, Radiohead (or Thom solo) has never released anything that was anything less than stunning (Pablo Honey excepting, and I’ll still fight anyone who knocks Hail to the Thief). But every time they release any new material, pressing play is always preceded by a moment of, “what if this is it? What if their talent has run out? What if this is the one where Thom gets too out there?” And given that two of my favorite releases of the two past years were the creeping, skittering King of Limbs and Nigel Godrich’s moody, grooving Ultraísta, my hopes for Amok were high. So high in fact that I purchased the record without being fully convinced that it was worth the money beforehand.

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Record #174: Animal Collective – Sung Tongs (2004)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

For a while, I held the assumption that everything Animal Collective did before Strawberry Jam was impenetrably avant garde, stomping along like some pagan ritual that had more to do with hollering through synth noises than making anything concerned with the traditional definition of music, let alone pop music. Then, it came to my attention that they had at one point made an acoustic album, and curiosity bade me to seek it out.

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Record #135: Dntel – Dumb Luck (2007)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Four years before Dumb Luck, Jimmy Tamborello found massive success as one half of indietronic darlings the Postal Service (the other half, of course, being Death Cab For Cutie’s Benjamin Gibbard).

And when I heard that the other guy from the Postal Service was releasing a record, I promise you that I wasn’t the only person who bought it without hearing anything he had done on his own before.

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Record #115: The Antlers – Undersea (2012)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Pete Silberman, frontman and former soloman of the Antlers made his releasing cathartic folk wrapped in ambient textures. Hospice, the project’s breakthrough, was heart wrenching, concept heavy, whisper quiet, and sonically (minus the track Bear) and lyrically devastating. Last year’s Burst Apart, however, saw him, following the addition of another multi-instrumentalist and drummer, shifting from that lyric-heavy catharsis and more fully into the ambience.

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