Daytrotter Notes, Jan 6-Jan 10

January 6 - Lone Wolf

Piano on the first track sounds really cool. I don't know if it's how it was recorded (hot and peaking all over the place), or if it's some sort of synth sounding like a piano and a harpsichord sounding at once. Whatever it is, the effect is really neat and is definitely a compliment to rest of the sad-but-still-jaunty-and-catchy song. That fake, long, hyphenated word describes the session pretty well. The other three songs in the session are all played on guitar, where pretty, driving, fingerpicked melodies compliment the strong, soulful (?) vocal really well. This was nice.

Notable track(s): 15 Letters

January 6 - Active Child

Legitimately pretty songs, maybe even ones that accomplish something beyond sounding pretty. It is pretty obviously the striking voices, somewhere between Andrew Bird and Shearwater's Jonathan Meiburg, are responsible for a vast majority of it, but the sparse, airy strings don't hurt.

Notable track(s): Wilderness

RIYL: Shearwater

January 7 - Happy Birthday

The first song, 'Evergreen', was a pretty, slow, pleasant sounding song that probably reminds you over a dozen others, but in an ok way. I liked the little bass line that is mostly tucked away beneath the guitar. The other three songs really took a turn, devolving into a messy sounding, raucous distorted, still twee-ish thing. The sort of music that might be fun live but doesn't really interest me on record too much.

January 8 - We Are Country Mice

Words thought of: southern rock, classic rock, psych-rock, the 60s, the 70s. We Are Country Mice sound like all of those things, for better or worse. I am probably not well-versed enough in any of those topics to name names, but the band definitely spends a lot of time sounding like something you've probably heard before. The final track, "Close Behind", caught my attention more than the others, staying fairly minimal and spacey (and staying sounding a lot like Pink Floyd (ooops, a name), until the thing explodes in its 90 seconds. Crunchy, echoey guitars.

January 9 - Wartime Blues

The riff-driven "California Winter" draws heavily from the same sonic palate Modest Mouse (which I'll be careful to not call "theirs" (see: a few sentences down)) has drawn from on several slower songs, while the rollicking "Grain Belt" would, musically, easily fit in somewhere on Bright Eyes' LIFTED. I hate that I can't do more than say "sort of sounds like Modest Mouse!" or "sort of makes me think of Bright Eyes!" when it comes to things that can be described at a high level as some combination of indie/folk/rock. But it is those comparisons are the ones that are easiest and most apparent for me.

I can talk about things that beep and boop a lot better than ones that twang.

January 10 - OK Go

Inoffensive, if not genetic indie rock/power pop stuff. All of the reverb on "White Knuckles" surprised me (I really like reverb, guys), but really all it does is drag out each sound of what is, more or less, to me anyway, completely ineffectual music.