You may have noticed that we've been, for the most part, absent for 2017. SYFFAL is now pretty much just me (Tom) and Joel. Oh...and Tif, but she has the cushy job of going to free shows and taking pictures. Joel is one of those people who has 20 kids and likes to take on a ton of projects at one time. He has been supz busy - no joke and/or exaggeration - dude is an alderman (or as he likes to call it alder-bro), he has his day job selling (legal) drugs, another day job in commercial real estate, he is a bee keeper, just helped put on a summer music fest, a cross fitter and a father.
Me? Well, I'm lazy in comparison. I don't really have an excuse nor do I feel like I'd need to have an excuse. I still love music. I still love boner jokes. I just haven't loved writing lately....so I stopped writing.
I promised to myself that when SYFFAL began to feel like a chore I'd take a break. I didn't want to force writing a review because quality would suffer. It's like taking a poop....the best poops just flow out of you and curl around the drain like soft serve into a cone. Forcing will give you hemorrhoids.
That's not to say music hasn't tingled my dingle this year. In fact there are quite a few albums that I've been playing with some regularity. Below is my 2017 summary in mini-reviews. They are ranked from most favorite to still really good but not quite as good as the album listed above it.
The War On Drugs - A Deeper Understanding
Fuck you, I can put an album at the top of my list before actually hearing it because I'm judging it based off of only 2 pre-released songs. F'real tho, those 2 songs are everything I was hoping to hear. Some days I just play 'Thinking Of A Place', a 10+ minute Hurculean boner of a track which sounds like a continuation of 'Eyes To The Wind', on repeat.
Richard Edwards - Lemon Cotton Candy Sunset
Step 1 - pretend like you didn't read the name of that album title. Step 2 - let Richard Edwards suck you in, capture your soul, play with it like putty and then throw it in the garbage.
I try not to read up on an artist before listening to an album because I don't want biases to taint my taint. Every so often, I'll finish listening to an album and can feel how personal the music is to the writer. I'll know there is some sort of backstory to the lyrics. I wonder: 'what happened to this mother-fucker and why is he hurting so bad?'. This is one of those albums.
And sho nuff, I looked him up and learnt that his life was lived like a country song the year prior to writing Lemon Cotton Candy Sunset. He went through a divorce, lost his house, got diagnosed with a rare stomach infection that lead to severe weight loss, surgery, and then the cancellation of a sold out tour for his band Margot and the Nuclear So So's. This album is the summation of all that shit - it's like tear soaked barf on a page. Pretty, pretty barf.
Slowdive - Slowdive
Did you know there's such a thing as a Gen-X hipster that can out hipster Millennial hipsters? I'll call them alt-hipsters and they say: "Slowdive has been around for YEARS....since the early 90's....and they are one of the creators of the shoe-gaze genre. All these younger bands like Beach House and XX are impostors. IMPOSTORS I TELL YOU! And now all these millennials are like 'ohhhhh I love Slowdive - their sound is frash'. Fuck those trend whores."
Is that old hipster me? No, I don't know who the fuck Slowdive is or was. All I know is that this album blasts me with sound. If I laid my speakers on the ground face up I could lay down and slightly hover over them like air hockey puck.
Temples - Volcano
Yes, Temples sounds more lake Tame Impala than they ever have, but that doesn't matter because Tame Impala is rad, right?
Anyhoo, Volcano fucking rocks the shit out of a 3 legged bull (I think they use that phrase in Texas. I don't know what it means but it sounds cool). Huge, hard hitting sound while somehow remaining trippy and lazy. A perfect mix of uppers and downers. Fuuuuck, even take off the trippy kaleidoscope filter and you'll be left with an album full of great and well written songs....shit that could be performed on The Voice by a clean cut Midwesterner with a big voice who'd get blake to spin around in his seat.
Father John Misty - Pure Comedy
GASP! Father John Misty didn't make my number 1? Yes, I'm a huge fan boy and dangerously devout to his music, but while good, Pure Comedy is an 'in the mood' album for me....not a 'listen to all the time' album. It's the reason I haven't become overly obsessed with it like I was with Fear Fun and Honeybear.
Pure Comedy sounds like Josh Tillman sitting down at a piano singing his journal to incredible arrangements.. It's like a more beautiful, a more melodic, a more interesting and smarter version of Sun Kill Moon. And while that last sentence pin points exactly why Sun Kill Moon blows; it also explains why Josh Tillman is lyrically brilliant. His lyrics alone can carry an album light on hooks, highs/lows, or swings in mood. I could fill up a page by pasting lyrics I love from this album, but I'll just pull one verse because nobody can troll Father John Misty better than he can troll himself...and it got me to look up who Oedipus was:
Mara taunts me 'neath the tree
She's like, "Oh great, that's just what we all need
Another white guy in 2017
Who takes himself so goddamn seriously."
She's not far off, the strange thing is
That's pretty much what I thought when I started this
It took me my whole life to learn to the play the G
But the role of Oedipus was a total breeze
Big Thief - Capacity
I don't know what it is about this album that makes me constantly want to play it on quiet mornings. I'm too lazy to look up the singer's name but holy shit her voice is so delicate; I want to box it up to put in my china cabinet. Overall Big Thief manages to sound like a hundred bands that I love, yet I can't distinctly name - comfortably familiar while remaining somewhat unique with out doing anything overly unique.
I'm warning you. Don't listen to 'Mary' unless you are prepared to be standing in a puddle upon completion.
Phoenix - Ti Amo
I wanted to hate this album before listening. I wanted to hate Del for sending it to me. For some reason I thought I outgrew Phoenix. The only time I listen to them is in the form of samples on Girl Talk's album. (Side thought completely unrelated to this write-up: When the fuck is Girl Talk going to come out with a new album???). However, shortly into Ti Amo I realized that nobody can out grow Phoenix.
The Drums - Abysmal Thoughts
It's been a while since I've listened to The Drums. They've never really been a band head over bunions for. I may have complained that in the past their albums sound like one continuous song with that surf guitar ding ding dingaling all over the tracks. And while Abysmal Thoughts isn't much of a departure from that, The Drums add some sax to this album and for some reason that turned me on. I promised that I'd never use the word 'mature' to describe an album because that word is so lazy and obvious when describing a band's follow up albums. So I won't because I don't want to be basic, but I just implied it. *taps finger to brain and nods smartly*