Thursday, August 6, 2009

Coupla new reviews

Boy, did Dusted ever hate Nurses...personally, I kind of liked it, and didn't get so much freak folk as whatever Arcade Fire is...but whatever, in my Blurt review, I said:

“Nurses lavish lush, Beach-Boy aspiring vocals atop brittle minimalist percussion in a bedroom psychedelia that will remind you of Arcade Fire for its exuberance, of Panda Bear for its disheveled artfulness.”
More

“Caterpillar Playground”

And I also reviewed Marmoset's Tea Tornado, which figures on yesterday's mix.

Marmoset started out during the first big lo-fi craze, the mid-1990s days when GBV, Pavement and Sebadoh ruled the earth (or at least college radio). The band - Jorma Whittaker on bass and vocals, Dave Jablonski on guitar and Jason Cavan on drums -- had the loose-knit tuneful-ness of Pollard's band, the tarnished innocence of icons like Beat Happening, the slurred rock fuzziness of the Velvet Underground, yet never really put it over the top. Marmoset achieved a certain amount of acclaim for its 2001 Record in Red and again for 2007's Florist Fired, but these interludes of praise have been widely separated. Tea Tornado appears to be Marmoset's fourth full-length in 14 years. It comes, for better or worse, at the tail end of another lo-fi explosion, one that will most likely do Marmoset as little good as the first one. This is really too bad, since Tea Tornado is a prickly gem of an album, full of slanting slacker grooves and flickering surreal imagery. It slouches along unobtrusively, half-tuned vocals slipping over splayed out strums, unkempt charm glinting through fuzz and hiss.

The rest.

"Peach Cobbler"

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