VIRB

Happy jumpy music which I've been listening to lately:

The Dodos
Flight of the Conchords
Weezer - The Red Album

There are great things to be said about each of these new releases. The Dodos are exhilarating; acoustic guitar, piano and frantic drums married to worryingly catchy melodies. What can I say about FoTC which has not been said before? "It is the distant future, the year 2000". And Weezer seem to be back in great form - "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived" brings back to rock music the playfulness, polyharmonies and bombast of the Beatles and the Beach Boys. Yum.

Not so happy music, but good nevertheless, is "Narrow Stairs" by Death Cab for Cutie. It's a bit like "This Is Hardcore" by Pulp: a band reaching its creative peak on a few tracks of an album, and then just muddling through the others. 'Bixby Canyon Bridge' grows and grows, until it becomes an all-out guitar freakout which wouldn't be amiss on "The Fragile" by NIN (it resembles one instrumental track from there, actually). Then there is the 8-minute single "I Will Possess Your Heart", which settles comfortably in its groove and breaks out into luminous vocals. "No Sunlight" is a catchy, vintage Death Cab song. By the time I reached it, I told myself 'this album will be brilliant'. But then it started going downhill, and while the rest of the songs are pleasant to listen to, they by no means reach the melodic hooks of "Plans". There are endearing tape sounds (as when the piano comes in on the second track) and some nice backwards piano on the chorus of "Your New Twin Sized Bed", but it all peters out and fades into the background. The album also sounds comfortable with its textures, like In Rainbows, layering subtle tones, but unfortunately the don't have Radiohead's songs to put them behind. I was also disappointed because of deceived expectations: this was supposed to be "bloody", "dissonant", "darker" - and it's not. Sure, an album with some shards of brilliance is better than a thoroughly mediocre one, but they could have tried harder.