Continuing my in-blog discovery of Courtney Barnett’s debut studio album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, Sometimes I Just Sit, we arrive at track #2, ‘Pedestrian at Best.’
I was unsure about this song during the first verse but it won me over halfway through the second. It’s similar to yesterday’s track in its sound and approach, and again I get an Elvis Costello vibe. I think it’s the intellectual word salad mixed with the punk-lite music.
Over the years I’ve chronicled a couple of albums in full (Frank Sinatra’s Watertown and Ben Folds Five’s self-titled debut), both records I adore and know by heart.
Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to try something different (and potentially dangerous). I’m going to post a new album, song by song, experiencing it for the first time as I write about it. If it turns out to be a turkey, we could all be in for a dreary 11 days. But I’m optimistic that it will go better than that.
The Head and the Heart are a band I expected would become a favorite of mine based on the first few songs I heard. Maybe they still will.
The Seattle indie band’s sophomore album, Let’s Be Still, has a great acoustic sound in the same vein as Mumford & Sons and Fleet Foxes — that whole hipster folk rock throwback thing. These days that feels a little obvious, but it’s still a great sound.
Despite Maroon 5’s bevy of hit singles since Adam Levine took to his red chair on The Voice, I don’t believe they’ve ever topped their debut album.
2002’s Songs About Jane is alternately jazzy and muscular, a sleek and sexy song cycle that delivers from its first note to its last.
The band’s recent music is no less catchy but perhaps a bit too polished. Levine and company have become master pop craftsmen — there’s little doubt that a new Maroon 5 song will stick both in your head and on the charts — but their music lacks the sense of adventure that typified this record.
Here’s another indie artist courtesy of a recent episode of Filmspotting. Colleen Green is an L.A.-based artist whose third album, I Want to Grow Up, was released this February.
Based on the two songs I’ve heard of hers, including today’s SOTD, she plays the sort of minimalist pop rock that made Liz Phair a sensation more than 20 years ago.
Meet Me In Montauk 