low effort posting: in effect

So here’s a little exper­i­ment. I’ll put all of the recent albums I haven’t written about yet on random and write some­thing about the first five tracks that come up. Here goes!

Brand New — “Hand­cuffs” — The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me (pre-order)
Starts off with plain­tive guitar strum­ming and lyrics drip­ping with emotions–regret, sorrow, longing, etc etc. Some fairly impres­sive pro­duc­tion tricks that sound, hon­estly, pretty great on these head­phones, but where is this song going? Where… where… where? Midtempo mid­tac­ular, that’s where. I guess as an outro to a record that’s accept­able, but while this album is pretty shock­ingly good at times, this song isn’t its best foot for­ward in an out­standing single kind of way.

Exploding Hearts — “Shat­tered (You Left Me) (alt. ver­sion)” — Shat­tered (buy)
As with every other Exploding Hearts song, this one mainly leaves me wishing they’d stuck around so we could have really seen what they were capable of. “Shat­tered” is right in line with most of Guitar Romantic–grimy, greasy, catchy as fuck.

*Deer­hoof — “The Per­fect Me” — Friend Oppor­tu­nity (can’t pre-order yet, but look here)
Some­times when I think about Deer­hoof (and, let’s face it, that’s a pretty rare some­times) I wonder if they’d be any­thing worth lis­tening to without their over-the-top-cute-sounding Japanese singer. “The Per­fect Me” and the rest of its album pretty much nail down “no” as my answer. With her, though, they’re absolutely wonderful.

(*Kill Rock Stars asked us to take this song down, but we should have an autho­rized mp3 up in a week or two.)

Pulp — “Duck Diving” — Peel Ses­sions (buy)
It’s hard to get away from Pulp around here these days, what with me posting about reis­sues and Niina posting about Jarv’s solo wankery. This song comes from the recently released Peel Ses­sions double disc col­lec­tion. It was pre­vi­ously unre­leased, but it’s nothing really new in the Pulp canon–a lounge-y groove for Jarvis to spin a yarn over in his dis­tinc­tively, well, British manner. This time it’s about diving in a pond, of all things. Not much to speak of musi­cally, or nar­ra­tively for that matter, but somehow it still works.