The Rapture - Pieces Of The People We Love [MP3][320]

Pieces Of The People We Love

Label: Universal Motown

Format: CD

Country: US

Released: 2006

Genre: Electronic, Rock

Style: Indie Rock, Disco, Electroindie








It's been three years since The Rapture's full-length debut, Echoes, arrived on the tail end of the early aughts dance-punk mini-craze, seeming to bridge a gap between that now defunct genre's more electronic sound and the emerging guitar-based indie rock. Now, along with LCD Soundsystem and !!!, The Rapture stand at the top of this strangely wonderful hybrid of clubby dance music and a catchy bar band indie stomp. Pieces Of The People We Love consolidates this cross-pollination, deepening both of the influences, usually to good effect. Certainly, the album's best cuts, like "Don Gon Do It" and "Whoo! Alright-Yeah…Uh-Huh", find just the right balance between nervous, Talking Headsy indie-funk-pop workouts and dancefloor-filling, DJ-pleasing, hip-shaking dance tracks. A few songs seem to ride off on tangents, keeping the disc from being excellent. Still, Pieces Of The People We Love is a great record and will keep your body moving without making you feel like you're giving your brain the day off. Now that's a nifty trick.

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Alexi Murdoch - Time Without Consequence [MP3][320]

Time Without Consequence

Label: Zero Summer Records

Format: CD

Country: UK

Released: 2009

Genre: Rock

Style: Folk Rock, Acoustic, Indie, Folk

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The poetry of this album is groundbreaking. This guy's ability with words are genius-like. Specially Shine, All My Days and All My Days helped me alot when I was sad or thinking too much. Hope you like this, and that you become a better person :)

I dare to say he is a modern Nick Drake.

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Here, after long anticipation from those fans (along with, of course, some more discerning listeners), he releases his first LP, Time Without Consequence. Luckily, it moves him beyond the pop sentimentality of “Orange Sky,” into the more interesting realm of indie folk. 

His voice has an easy appeal, and begs for comparison to Nick Drake, with its melancholic, lazy delivery and vaguely U.K. accent, and it lends itself well to these songs of loneliness, romance, and mortality. The album opens with the slow crescendo of a nicely accessible acoustic guitar line in “All of My Days.” We sense that things may not be headed in entirely the right direction, however, when in the last verse of this tale of a search for love, he finds it. Um, are you sure you’re a folk singer, buddy? It harkens back a bit to the OC, and has the smell lyrics designed to appeal to sixteen-year-old girls. We almost wonder if it was part of the original song. 

Murdoch hits his stride well with the chords, hammer-ons and pull-offs of successfully catchy, creative folk guitar, at times layering acoustic and electric, slide playing and fingerstyle, along with some appropriate bass/drum accompaniment, such as in “Song for You” and “Blue Mind.” He even pulls off some more adventuresome feedback and harmonics on the more jam-oriented “Home.” He best displays his versatility when he throws in some slides and quarter-note bends to create the blues hooks and mood of “Dream of Flying,” probably the strongest effort on the album. 

The musicality does, however, meander at times. On “Breathe,” the muted chords and obvious metaphor for mortality make us wonder a bit if he’s deliberately “trying out a Dave Matthews thing.” “12” is enjoyable, but the outro finds him moaning over some stratospheric slide playing with distortion and effects that come almost uncomfortably close to being a Coldplay song. 

As for the writing, while Murdoch has a knack for phrasings that catch one’s ear for the romantic, he sometimes stretches a bit to use those phrases. In “All of My Days,” he starts with the line “I have been searching for all of my days,” and continues to use “all of my days” as the refrain at the end of each line, which eventually finds him awkwardly singing, “Many a night I’ve found myself with no friends standing near - all of my days.” His repetition of “love you more than anyone” in “Love You More” finds him struggling for rhymes, as in “love you more than time to come.” 

Alexi Murdoch is very talented guitarist with good writing ideas, and the album is more often palatable than not.. His next challenge will be to hone his style into something uniquely his own while keeping up the variety, and working out some of the kinks in the flow of his writing. But neither of these things is unreasonable for a young musician to overcome, and it seems likely that as Alexi Murdoch matures, he will grow into an even more enjoyable folk singer.

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Field Music - Tones of Town [MP3][320]

Tones of Town

Label: Memphis Industries

Format: CD

Country: England

Released: 2007

Genre: Rock

Style: Indie Rock, Pop Rock

Try listening to this album while you cook or go to college, it's funny. If you take the train, it's nice listening to them in that nostalgic cold of the morning.

MP3 files compressed from pure FLAC.

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Field Music's gorgeous, audacious 2005 debut wound up eclipsed by the jerky pop success of north-east comrades Futureheads and Maxïmo Park. Following last year's backstory comp Write Your Own History, their second album proper takes them ahead of the pack.

Emboldened by a year on the road, they're now a glorious band – supple as a jazz trio, punctual as a chamber troupe – and TOT plays to their new strengths, augmenting tricky prettiness with bold vigour. Simultaneously more pop (“A House Is Not A Home”) and more extreme (“Give It Lose It Take It”) than their debut, it sets the benchmark for – what shall we call it? British Prog Pop? - in 2007.

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Oren Lavie - The Opposite Side of the Sea [MP3][320]

The Opposite Side of the Sea

Label: A Quarter Past Wonderful

Format: CD

Country: US

Released: 2008

Genre: Folk, Indie

Style: New Age, Vocal

This is one of my favorite albums ever. It's sweet, easy-listening, peaceful. It exercises your brain for you to become a better person inside and out. It's like a therapy. This is one of a really few albums that create images on your brain, it's like reading a book.
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Yes, another discovery through TV ad music: Oren Lavie, one of the coolest, most talented but understated artists on the indie scene. No lack of writing talent here - there's poetry in every lyric, not to mention the throaty, intimate (maybe even sexy?) delivery of those words into silky, very male, odes of expression. Rounding out the package are playful and original musical arrangements of the folk/rock genre that keep your ears at attention no matter how relaxing the voice. Luckily, the good taste and strong effort is sustained throughout the album - filler material is just not part of this opus.

A very edgy, forward use of Lavie's music, but oh how lovingly poetic in a boomer father-daughter kind of way, is in a car ad promoting safety throughout the young life of said daughter. You can find the video of the Chevy Malibu commercial at YouTube, featuring a part of the "Her Morning Elegance" track (slightly modified). You can see it here.

The most succinct summary of Oren Lavie's bio is at Artistdirect (below); the funniest is the self-written one at Myspace; the most extensive, at tuition-music. His flash-based official site (orenlavie.com) is very complete and quite original in that it opens its own browser window with a virtual booklet like you find in the CD case. You even hear the paper page turning when you drag the corner of a page with the mouse pointer.

Review by QuietGeek

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