"Katie's Conscious" is a perfect statement: it feels exactly like the rush you hear when a friend has woken up, it's like a door opening over you as you're lying on the floor journaling about a sadness like the grains in the wood. It's punk, but with the distortion down and a few more melodies on top, maybe pandering to indie acessibility, or maybe moving punk's sonic roughness into some acoustic noodling in favor of a purer tone. It's still optimistic, kindly-old-badass-grandfather-vegan, and tight as hell.
Rory McIntyre - "Au Revoir Les Elefants"
Thematically, it tries to summon all of the pictures it can of childhood that it can and sidestep it slightly and humorously: enfants to elefants, cheerios and cheerio, snow soup and stone soup, puppet show to muppet show. How do we say goodbye, how do we reminisce? An experimental rock/ambient record seems to be a not-too-bad place to do it, but I'm never totally satisfied after finishing a listen. Individual tunes are nice, "Elefants" and "Clec" especially. Fucking daliks yo.
Skygreen Leopards - "Gorgeous Johnny"
Inviting, in the sense that it's fun to sit down at a piano and jam along too. Fun like an inside joke. The whole Johnny thing feels like a red herring, though, never actually gets you anywhere as a concept. "Dixie Cups" is nice, but the storytelling isn't that great. Good party music.
Ascended Essence - "The Grand Unification"
Benefit of the doubt can only take you so far with a rap record about epistimelogical metaphysical models joining relativistic physics with stock Eastern philosophy: it sounds like an idea that broke your consciousness while stoned. I was very, very turned off on my first listen, but the album isn't just one man's blown-up zeitgeist. There's too much trade-off between rappers, too many catchy lyrics, too many welcome and different facets to their argument. Maybe they dumb their rhymes down to reach the public, maybe the cartoonishness of the culture they're countering bleeds into them, maybe I'm too unfamiliar in the territory of pop rap to really "get it." But the beats are really nice, and the rhymes range from subpar to pretty sweet; that's not so bad, right?
Deerhoof - "Green Cosmos"
Twee bullshit is more accessible for me in indie rock records, I guess. But there's so much brilliant contrast! Slight touches of broken tempo, chord changes that don't feel quite right, really gross bass and that gorgeous voice. It works because the band can pick up anywhere and go with it, and with that skill and versatility decides to push the limits of any conventionality they were trained in. See above. Byun byun byun.
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