Daily Listen by Brian Brock

I can see why people like this.  I don’t hear the words.  He sings very high notes all the time.  I like the sound of the acoustic guitar.  He’s from LaCrosse, Wisconsin - just a couple of hours from where I used to live.  He sounds like he’s a decent fellow.

Mostly these aren’t exactly songs, in that they seem inseparable from his performances.

I don’t hear the words, but I hear him singing the truth.

I would guess that this is Matador Records’s riot squad here, the big smear across the face of the music industry which they hope will place cursors on links and people somewhere within 5 miles of a record store.

What is most pressed into my spirit at this point is the horrible, horrible acoustic guitar sound on Lou Reed’s live track.  Granted, up until this century acoustic guitar was very difficult to amplify, primarily because taking a resonant box and attaching to it pretty much any transducer turned up to eleven is highly susceptible to feedback.  This must be a Lou Reed show from 1986 or something, right?  Twenty years later, actually - well after Taylor Guitars among others drastically improved acoustic guitar pickup technology.

Spirit-impression number two: out of 13 tracks we have the guy from The New Pornographers, Belle and Sebastian, Pavement, Lou Reed, Shearwater, and Mogwai - almost half the disc is bands formed before 2000.  We have reached the age of the indie rock Old Guard, who like Madonna and U2 perpetually fill the space which they made in people’s lives long ago.

Third impression: I like Times New Viking and Jaguar Love.  They write good songs but don’t sound like they’re trying to write good songs.  They sound freaked out and ear splitting without hurting my feelings.

Jennifer O’Connor’s good too.  She could almost have a Richard Buckner thing going on in her voice sometimes.

(via herosquad)