The Best Records of 2008

2008 was a year where my musical age really started to pop up like the number of grey hairs around the temple region of my head. Still there was plenty of good music to be had, even if finding them meant sifting through hundreds of records to find an album  that didn’t sound like one hundred other bands who would be forgotten about by the end of the year.

These are the ones who rose to the top, my most listened to records of the year, more or less.

1. The Drive By Truckers – Brighter than Creation’s Dark

Expectations were high on this one. Would they be able to live up to the consistency they’ve maintained over the years? What effect would the departure of guitarist/songwriter Jason Isobel have on the rest of the band?

A double album? Aren’t those usually affairs where the strongest stuff could be distilled down to one record?

Well all questions were answered on the first go around. And there were two not-so-good-songs, “Bob”, and “You and Your Crystal Meth.” Bassist Shonna Tucker pens two tracks, the stellar exercise in heartbreak, and a true story based loosely, I think, on her divorce from former band-member Jason Isobel, “I’m sorry Houston” and “Home field Advantage” Patterson Hood continued to create masterworks, centerpieces that showcase his ever expanding musical palate.

Cooley on the other hand, really gives the rest of the band a run for their money by writing some of his best songs ever. Is there a better country song out there then “Checkout time in Vegas”? I don’t think so.Legendary lap steel player Spooner Oldham plays on almost every track on here, and seeing him live really added a sturdy sense of intrigue to every track.

It took months to really hear all the nooks and crannies on this set, but it remained a highlight throughout the year, and their live show, well, I don’t know of another performer who is happier with performing on stage than Patterson Hood and his Drive by Truckers

2. The Hold Steady – Stay Positive

 

I saw both The Hold Steady and the Drive by Truckers on their package tour, and while no one  brings it on home live better than the ‘Truckers (OK, maybe My Morning Jacket), The Hold Steady sure did a fine job of gunning for the top spot. Craig Finn had honed his writing skills on the interim between “Boys and Girls in America” and “Stay Positive”, creating these rhyming couplets that absolutely get lodged up in the listener’s brain like an obsessive thought, a loose tooth, a fingernail you absolutely have to pull off. 

“Second dates and lipstick tissues, New York is pretty heavy, girl I hope it doesn’t crush you.” The way the words rhyme in a way that tells the story and matches perfectly with the line before it, “Magazines and daddy issues, I guess your pretty pissed, I hope you still let me kiss you” 

The songs on Stay Positive were more song oriented, and less story telling was involved, but there was a sense on “Stay Positive”, that the level of momentum from their previous efforts was cresting on a wave of “Born to Run” inspired rock coupled with one of Rock’s most gifted songwriters.

3. Deerhunter – Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.

I didn’t care for Deerhunter’s first record, and did not expect this one to take hold with the sheer ferocity that this double album did.  I still prefer the comfortable blanket of fuzz that seems to be cloaked over every song on “Microcastle”, and while it brings to mind the shoe-gazing era of My Bloody Valentine, its shot through with enough of the wide eyed optimism, or maybe drugs, to pull the whole thing off. It takes a few listens, but “Microcastle”, and “Weird Era Cont.”, because I heard them as one album straight through, even in the age of I-tunes, it was hard for me to separate the two, and I prefered the porterhouse meal of fuzz and druggy rock found within both albums, among the ones and zeros of these some twenty five mp3s.

 4. Ryan Adams and Cardinals – Cardinology 

 

Ignore the cop-out album title, ignore the fact that Ryan Adams’s image is more tarnished than that of the acting career of Mickey Rourke, forget the tabloid-chasing singer and his compulsive desire to release every song and album he seems to record on a monthly basis, the fact that cannot be ignored is that Ryan Adams has refined his writing skills to a much finer point that before, and the results are nothing more than sparkling.

Within each song there is the soul of someone who has rebuilt their entire life, so as listeners we get the opportunity to see into his new self, and look at the demons that crop up, the band gels so well together on “Go Easy” and “Sink Ships” that instead of a Ryan Adams solo record, it sounds more like the cohesive sound of a band in full control of its powers, who has walked through hell to bring out these songs, these timeless songs, that stayed with me longer than any other record released in 2008. Even for a die-hard Ryan Adams fan like myself, there is relief and joy to be found in the clarity that Ryan Adams has found. Long may he run.  

5. Conor Oberst – Conor Oberst

Its no coincidence that this year was more “adult” than any other. I was dealing with first time fatherhood and maybe for the first time in my life, actually feeling like an adult, and coming to terms with all the neurosis that comes along with it. Because of this, my listening habits became more streamlined, and my need for structure and stability led me directly to this record. It’s not enough to say that Conor Oberst is in full command of his talent, so instead of his lines and singing coming across as overwrought, or sounding like he is trying to break the record for number of words in one song, he instead uses his talents and writes in a language that is clear, strong and wrought with symbols, without the structure weighing down the songs.

It’s effortless and timeless and rocks like a monkey, if a monkey could, or would, rock.

6. The Felice Brothers – The Felice Brothers

 

7. Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes

8. R.E.M. – Accelerate

Where one of the 90’s finest bands come back and genuinely, without irony, put their rock foot triumphantly into the pool.

9. Elf Power – In a Cave

 

10. My Morning Jacket – Evil Urges

 

Honorable Mention: 

1. TV on the Radio – Dear Science
2. Lambchop – (Oh) Ohio
3. French Kicks
4. Spiritualized – Songs in A&E
5. Nada Surf – Lucky
6. Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend
7. M83-Saturdays = Youth

Review: Aimee Mann – @#%&*! Smilers

This review was originally published on Mog.com on 06/26/08
http://mog.com/Kronski/blog/169566

    The very nature of this record, its’ essence, the spaces where the edges of songs come together, demands the listener to question their own expectations of pop music. That is whether or not it is the job of pop music in general to provide a catchy melody with which to sing along in the car to or should it be used as a device to shine a light on man’s deepest desires and faults?

    Such is the dilemma on Aimee Mann’s sixth record, an attempt at bridging her compelling, some might say novelistic character sketches and pairing it with catchy sing- along choruses.

    Not to get into an argument of the nature of pop music, or to suggest that artistic integrity is mutually exclusive with catchy melodies, but on Smilers she once again captures the bleak landscape of her characters as well as she did on her last two projects, The Forgotten Arm and Bachelor Number Two, as heavily sampled in the film Magnolia.

   I say bleak landscapes, because for her inspiration this time around, Aimee found an online newsgroup entitled, and I swear to god someone better write a novel about this, Alt. Bitter, and on this newsgroup she found a jewel of a posting that referred to happy people in general as ‘@#%&! Smilers’.

   And as difficult as that was to transcribe, it does work as an effective frame with which to hang the narratives of these thirteen down and out souls. We can view her songs as a complete narrative similar to 2005’s The Forgotten Arm or as thirteen separate disparate threads that together  make up a record.

   And once again, Aimee Mann has the ability to precisely find that spot in a character’s head that makes them different from everyone else. So in a refrain like “get up, you’re borrowing time” we get to pilot the freewill of someone who is sitting idly by and watching life fly past them, or the emotional distance in a relationship where one wants the other but thinks that “I want you, but you’re a poltergeist” and we see how often the theme of alienation falls under her microscope, “I got high on the Ferris Wheel, realized got what made me feel so alone. ”

    Drugs are a way to describe alienation, as they have been on the last few records, and one image I can’t help but get out of my mind, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film, “Magnolia” is when the woman turned cocaine addict meeting and falling for the cop, and both of them unable to grab hold of life long enough to make it work, all while Aimee Mann’s Bachelor No. 2 played in the background. It was a perfect pairing, because the characters in Aimee Mann’s songs always seem to be reaching for something, something profound, a lack of answers or closure.

    All of the characters on @#%&! Smilers face specific problems, and while on The Forgotten Arm she spun a wide yarn of a boxer and his girlfriends as they roamed the country in search of heroin and redemption, on Smilers, the problems don’t have a specific place, but reveal those innermost problems we all have.

    And therein lies the rub. While thanks to Mann’s insightful lyrics that pinpoint the frailty, the addiction or neuroticism, there’s this vague cloud cast over the remaining characteristics on the rest of the person she is describing, so we feel left out, more than we did before. And even though we only see this person for one song, we are left wanting to know more about this person, and their surroundings, but instead we move onto the next song, the next character.

    Perhaps it’s a sign when an album as strong as Smilers, where the melodies really grab you, but compared to the three pronged attack of The Forgotten Arm, -with a full narrative, more interesting arrangements, and a storyline that could easily be translated into a film -we can’t help but come up a bit short.

    Maybe Mann is just returning to writing songs, without a novelistic or cinematic arc. Maybe it’s my fault, for needing the narrative in the first place.

   “Maybe you’ll wake up in jail alone and hold the handle of the one pay phone.” She sings on Medicine Wheel, and I can’t help but see the actions recorded in the song put to life by the cast of Six Feet Under, a Bukowski poem, or Raymond Carver Short Story, lost souls in Los Angeles, wandering across the great sprawl of city, in search of their next fix.

   I suppose that this dilemma is my own cross to bear, but I’ll gladly go back and construct an arc for these songs, time and again.

Review: M83 – Saturdays = Youth

This review was originally published on Mog.com on 04/30/08
http://mog.com/Kronski/blog/159416

M83’s latest, Saturdays=Youth, takes the listener on an imaginary time warp, one where seemingly dissimilar musical blends and memories meld, where Cocteau Twins era dream nostalgia merges with old techno styles to create a hermetically sealed world, imagined through the eyes and ears of various High School students, including you, dear reader.

This record is so well put together its like scenes unfolding in a film, all working together, to define us, then and now, each end of each song a smooth transition into the next one, so it’s the night out and the morning after, from puberty to prom night, the third wine cooler and the sick feeling next morning.

It starts off with a simple piano etching out the skies. Then the synthesizers come in, reminding us where we are, placing us there, on the morning of the day that changed your life, maybe it was the morning after the prom, the first letdown in a lifetime of letdowns. Then the vocals bleed in from other tracks, spindled memories from college radio, from the back seats of cars, passing a whiskey bottle nicked from the parents sadly ignored liquor cabinet. Burning down the road, the music on so loud, you can barely make out the sound of the wind over the synths and voices that come in.

After the introduction of “You Appearing”, next up is the immediate ear candy, of “Kim & Jessie” and you’d be hard pressed to find a more lovely a fitting tribute to the decade of cocaine and synthesizers, with its lilting chorus that nicely scuffs up your Trapper Keeper. Early Human League is a reference point, as is OMD, China Crisis, maybe even Flock of Seagulls, all filtered through the haze of a cold high school morning. Sonically its all there, from the sublime guitars part that sound like My Bloody Valentine, the birds chirping backwards sound, the chorus, of “Somebody loves you shadows”, whispered across the halls of our imagined high school like a rumor floating from the quads to the commons.

And my god is the sequence on this record perfect, for just as the sweet airy chorus of “Kim &Jessie” hits us, after a brief return to instrumental vintage electronic music, “Graveyard Girl” comes next with an opening not unlike New Order’s “Ceremony”. With a strident drum sound giving way to the opening of one of the best melodies of the year, the guitars, synthesizers, and the bucolic vocals talk about high school and seems to control the plot, who told what to whom and how the are all connected by this “Graveyard Girl.”

“Graveyard Girl” is all told through the canvas of a really great Echo and the Bunnymen song smoked through an ethereal filter, the synthesizers overlapping into guitars, driving home the dreamy days and nights, when the sky seemed as tall and endless as the person you chose to sit next to until long after dark.Then the narrative switches, and we hear this Graveyard Girl actually step out and reveal herself.

“I’m going to jump the walls and run… I won’t miss them… I’ll read poetry to the stars… waiting for someone to love me… I’m fifteen years old and already I feel like its already too late to live… don’t you?”

That moment in particular captures the cant wait to grow up, cant wait to get out of here feeling of adolescence, of loving everything too much until it hurts. It all makes for one of the best songs of the year, wrapped in my own memories of High School, the sounds all tumbled together, with the alienation of rejection in a disappointing prom night, barely graduating, the t-shirts and haircuts, promises and lies, all of my youth heavy and traumatic served up in delicate layers of froth and steam, electronics and breathy vocals. From there we venture into instrumental territory, a fizzy tribute to New Order in “Coloures”.

And in this scene we could be at the Prom, the haircuts refined and defined by Flock of Seagulls, the punks in the corner with mohawks, chains and those skeleton Misfits logos running up their arms.“Up” gives us a glimpse, a come down in the form of a lost 80s FM radio classic.“We own the sky” is a kind of overly ambitious anthem where droning keyboards show the cars lined up at the impromptu park party, the one where the cops brought out the police spotlight across cars where teenagers crouch on the ground and sip beer out of red cups.“7AM, dusty road, I’m going to drive until it burns my bones” Declares the narrator at the start of “Highway of Endless Dreams” the voice sounds like our Graveyard Girl, after she’s moved past the graveyard, and wants escape so badly she can feel it in the way the song creeps up and folds over it self, perpetuating motion, as we can see the suburban landscapes giving way to mountain ranges, receding ice packs, state borders, highway patrol cars and shimmering coastlines.

All of this is meant to accompany a listener’s interpretation of the 1980s, and how each year the music changed, and sometimes it brought you closer to someone, and sometimes the songs were like a kegger, the voices and faces and personalities blurring together to the endless techno beat blotted out by kegs of Natural Light. And as the eighties looked out over the precipice into the nineties, to the Acid House movement, we feel like we’re right in that pocket, watching the sun go down. “Dark Moves of Love” with its rising chorus out of a cloud of guitar and keyboard tells our imaginary high school that its not too late, because they like just broke up like yesterday, calling our hero to action to traipse across the campus to where she is, over to the art room, and maybe when he goes through the circular tube that is the entrance to the print room.

And she was in there, her face framed by the half waterfall of blonde hair, head cocked back just so, and this was falling in love for the first time. Because being sixteen, seventeen its like you’ve already missed your chance. With the teacher far away, it was just her and him and being alive then meant living forever and he is you and you had to settle for the red lights and the image of you two coming up under the fixer in the photo room.

An image taken last Saturday at the park, where she leaned onto your shoulder, and the synthesizers kicked in slowly like they do in the final song “Midnight Souls Still Remain”. In this song, memories of High School fade in a long slow dissolve (11 minutes) to the present, looking back at who we were then, an older image, one in the bottom of your drawer. a photo you made in that dark room that day, an image burned into photo paper clinging to the bottom of the fixer tray.

Review: Sun Kil Moon – April

This review was originally published on Mog.com on 04/09/08

http://mog.com/Kronski/blog/155249

There’s something about Oregon Winters, how bleak the days can be, the afternoons lazily going by, and getting used to the endless variety of cloud cover, be it white or cream-colored, that makes me think about Sun Kil Moon.

There is something in the voice of Sun Kil Moon lead singer Mark Kozelek that seems to hit me with a stormy sense of arrival, the way it washes over my ears, and how sometimes his voice seems almost comically one-dimensional, and others it hits the way that you feel, just nails it, and you have thoughts in your head since you last got out of that Leonard Cohen phase. And there are whole corners of people in the world that never listen to this stuff, because it’s too melancholic?

The first few times I put the record on, it seemed too much for me to judge in one sitting. I wanted time with this. The second time I put the record on, it didn’t fare well. The sun was out, maybe for the first time this year, a lick of warmth of Summer in a cold Spring, but then that guitar on “The Light” hit me, and there I was, the two of us, in bed, right before it happened, and next thing I knew I was taken off to a better place.

The next time I only thought about it as an entity, how sound waves reverberating off of a wall constitute one hell of a thing, and this record was now becoming a challenge to review. The truth was I couldn’t find anything to call it, anything to compare it to, but this huge empty white canvas on my computer monitor and the words that couldn’t describe the sounds being wrung from this disc with my heavy hands.

Part of the blame lies on the creator Mark Kozelek, as he doesn’t write typical songs. You listen to Mark Kozelek for where he takes you, the atmosphere. There are common markers for the faithful: sunny days take a back seat to gray ones, there are gusts of wind in his songs, and torrents of sea spray abound.

His last record under the Sun Kil Moon moniker, 2003’s “Ghosts of a Great Highway” was a flight through the stratosphere, where time unfolded slowly with great effort and focus, as we waited for one thing that was slowly revealed musically, and whether it was a turn of phrase, a melody or swelling guitar solo, it made the listening so rewarding that it made it well worth the wait. So his new album, “April” then, deals in similar atmospherics to its predecessor, and it often feels like music that one could surrender to completely, as one surrenders to the voice of a favorite author or a mad proclivity.

For this record Kozelek slows down a bit, letting many of the songs luxuriate into the seven minute mark, which makes it even easer to block out all other senses and just listen and wait for a slow realization to hit. Maybe at the time I’m falling in or out of love, maybe I’m watching someone I love suffer greatly. It might be too late to save my marriage, your marriage, but during one listen we will be transcended, disappointed, inspired, dispirited, taken in on a very personal journey. For this is music to have epiphanies to, music for reflective times, as Sun Kil Moon, really just Kozelek, set up atmospheres where you will want to linger in for multiple listens. You may not always be in the mood for it, but if the timing is right, and you are in the coast of your mind with waves crashing and your whole landscape continually changing, you will be rewarded.

Sometimes when I listened, I wanted to warn all of you. “Reader take heed.” I wanted to say. For just as too much naval gazing can cause self-obsession, you might find that time spent with this record is akin to time spent too focused on one painful event, as the record at times does, and you get swept up in the undertow. Much of the record goes by slowly, with the clouds forming into a fine sketch of someone’s face, like a forgotten moment in third grade pulled out of a memory and digested.

The record then picks up speed with Crazy Horse-inspired “Tonight the Sky”. This shuffling, catapulting rocker holds us down to earth as the storm pulls on our kite, the lightening and thunder in his voice guiding us through the storm, leaving us soaking wet and compelled. Mark Kozelek has taken great care to construct the cliffs that overlook the hill, places meticulously drawn out of his breath that immediately wraps the listener into this world. The feeling that it was all too much faded as I stretched out into “Tonight in Bilbao.” For these songs are like viewpoints on cliffs and I am in these places on the cliffs, watching the clouds go by, watching all of this nature swim up around me. And I feel like I am truly living inside of these songs.

Bonnie Prince Billy makes an appearance on a few tracks, and both of their voices when taken together, while hymn-ally hypnotic, occasionally act as too much filler, more dumpling than broth, and threaten to bloat what is by most accounts a perfect cement to bury these corpses of American legends. For this is a grand album, one not capable of fully figuring out in one sitting, but two weeks later when the record had already hit stores, and people were waiting for the review, and in six months time this will all make sense to me, my bearings complete and comfortable in their newfound chaos. It will be fully enjoyed at a time where you either fell in our out of love, or just want a comfortable spot to watch the wreckage slide into the ocean. Because in the end this record sets up for me a Mount Rushmore of melancholy, with Mark Eitzel from American Music Club, Mark Kozelek from Sun Kil Moon and Bonnie Prince Billy chiseled out and perched over the crashing waves of Big Sur, just to let that be an example for the rest of us.

Review: The Felice Brothers – The Felice Brothers

This review was originally published on Mog.com on 02/24/08

http://mog.com/Kronski/blog/146207

When you first hear an artist, the first dozen or so times you spin the record, or hit that big pillow of a play button in I-Tunes, or press the metallic gun metal grey button on your old cassette boom box, and you hear the gears engage, the tape sliding across that little tab of felt, the first few notes for a new band are always crucial.

All the piles and gigabytes of music that sit un-listened to, if there’s one wrong note, it’s judged once and then tossed aside.So this first time that I listened to the Felice Brothers’ second album, Tonight at the Arizona, it was through thirty-second sound samples where I tried to figure out what the rest of the record sounded like.

The record cover had all five of them, but I only heard one, and my brain had to piece together what else might come up after the thirty seconds ended. What sort of burst of notes clustered together as melody might rise to the surface like some sort of bruise? And what came out to me, almost instantly, was Bob Dylan.Not the imitation Bob Dylan, not an actor in that Todd Haynes film, but someone going to that area around upstate NY, or the Catskills, someone very close to him just before the motorcycle crash, the time before John Wesley Harding and New Morning, his voice bringing the spirit of The Band and Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and The Pogues, all of this murky water turned up for me in bite sized thirty second clips.And while some of the songs crept up in my dreams, it took seeing them live to really bring home that it was a family at work.

I had this on my mind when I walked into the Roseland Theater here in Portland the other night, and was surprised at not seeing one guy on stage, but five. The first one I noticed was the drummer, who introduced the band the way an older brother would, with a bit of a mocking tone, and ready to fight if needed. He introduced the singer who didn’t look like Dylan, didn’t have that harmonica welded onto his chest. The singer looked like he was about twelve and one of those runaway scamps from the Beat Generation. There was another brother who played a Hammond organ, well not a real Hammond organ, but a modern keyboard set to the setting of a Hammond organ.

They are all in their early twenties, these guys, all of them real-life brothers, and they remind me of the kind of guys that hung out in the photo lab at my university until long after dark, smelling of incense and the funny fixer or developer fluid that sticks to your skin for hours afterwards. The more the songs sat with me, the more I realized that this was the music of hobos, street people, transients, vagrants, the big bally-hooed travelers on the back of a pick up criss-crossing the country with Keruoac narrating. With their lungs dipped in whiskey, the brothers brought the house down in my mind as together arm in arm, they swung around the loose work of the Pogues ala If I Should fall from Grace with God. And the whole time that Hammond organ going, creating a spine around the music.

For the songs on The Felice Brothers are brave songs, with wide brush strokes, wide in the mind because they hold the kernels of the American Revolution, from the Carpetbaggers and Beats to the Anarchists. Because in their voices are the voices of artists and poets and they know that by singing these songs in this register they are digging up the tenth grade literary canon. From Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, to the lazy way Walt Whitman smoked a cigarette on the last day of Spring, they capture that new found wonder and enlightenment. It made me think of the teenage kicks of Jack and Neal Cassidy burning down the road, of Dean Moriarity’s bandages coming loose and stained with dirt and nicotine and the never ending ribbon of road and that bulge of raw land.

A band that’s willing to create splashes of song, pocketed in between rousing choruses of death and eternity and when they do break out into song on stage as they do on this, their third album, they sound like five people standing in a dark alley, dancing and drinking, on a hot afternoon, and pretty soon everyone in the neighborhood is singing along, and the melody gets loud and strong, and the bleeding gums of Dixieland comes up, and it all happens so succinctly, and none of it is overdone. Because on this self-entitled album we get a taste of all their styles, the vaudevillian melodies, the stories of dead junkies, old flophouses, heroin reference dropped in as casually as the sound of empty whiskey bottles hitting the floor.

Each of them have their own style, one bringing in the W.C. Fields charismatic drunk act, another brother, the one who sings on “Don’t Wake the Scarecrow,” plays it straight, offering up a doomed street romance cut short by heroin.For this is a record to live in, to try on, inhabit like the walls of an old house, and there’s always that one hallway that’s empty for most of the afternoon, but come night there is a party, and we bear witness to the enormity of it, and later there’ll be one person left, sitting on the front steps listening to the silence and tasting all that forgotten perfume.“The Murder of Mistletoe” relies just as much on negative space, the sound of a piano in an empty hall, or maybe a street corner, this is music that takes time to fully reach you, as you have to row out to it, and each time you visit you hear something else bubble up to the surface.They are all singers, and at least two of them are songwriters, and whenever one of them sings, I think it’s the drummer singer, I swear, he pronounces words the same as Dylan, the way Dylan pronounced War in “Masters of War,” letting out the raw “aw” sound and catching back in the throat like a boomerang, and in so doing, uncovers the journeys Guthrie and Dylan did, passing the torch from one to another, walking together at dusk in the Catskills on a railroad track. “Love Me Tenderly” has the echo back draft of jazz filtered through Dylan, Miles, and Monk, until we can see thirty years of the musical notation blur under the influence of their pond. By the end of the record, we are introduced to all of the brothers, so it all feels like one big introduction.

For on The Felice Brothers, they all sit down on the rails, take their shoes off, and fall into the School Bus they live in, travel in and record in. There’s a picture I’ve seen of the younger brother singing into the microphone on a stand in the bus, their recording studio and their home. It’s covered in graffiti and never swept. I can imagine that outside of the picture’s frame, there’s probably old Olympia pop tops in there, wind up clocks, and cigarette butts, old suits, and we can hear the one inch reel to reel tape flapping when the song finishes.

And that last song probably sounds like Tom Waits having more whiskey with Shane McGowan, and overhead Dylan is in the night sky, looking down on the proceedings sent from whatever abandoned old baseball stadium he plays in on his never ending tour. And the brothers Felice are tired after listening to the playback, and they finish the last of the mulligan stew, put out the fire, climb back into the van, sleep close to the guitars and wash boards. And when the record’s done they hope the people that will listen to it will feel the way they do now, that underneath the stars in some nowhere town in the American Southwest, a long way away from home and all of it’s twisted Americana, is the sound of a family making music. “Radio Songs” sounds like that, an epitaph that brings in Zydeco influences on this barnstorming sing along that acts as a mediation on the power of family and loved ones, albeit one enjoyed in a I-hope-tonight-never-ends-sort-of-way.

“Please don’t you ever die, you ever die, you ever die, moved me all of my life, all of my life, all of my life, all my radio songs, radio songs, radio songs.”

And after that who wouldn’t want to turn around and watch it all unfold all over again from track one? Like the best moments in life, the songs on The Felice Brothers are like fourteen different snapshots of time in a person’s life, sometimes it’s you and sometimes it’s not, but it’s always sad and beautiful and mischievous and alive.

Candid

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Best Five

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Portraits

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My Neighborhood

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Landscapes

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