New music round-up!

(Well, new to me anyway.)

The Wedding Present- George Best Plus (bought from Amazon.com)- There may be no sound in pop music I love more than a speedily strummed electric guitar, especially when the guitarist seems to be just repeatedly playing one or two chords. I like a bendy and squealy solo plenty, but I love some speedy strumming. The last minute or two of the Velvet Underground's "What Goes On" is a pretty prime example. Or more recently, Clap Your Hand Say Yeah's "The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth." Anyway, I ramble about this because The Wedding Present, at least on this, their debut album (appended with some early eps, I believe) is all about the speedy strumming. So much so that even I get a bit sick of it by track 10 or so. Still, individually, just about every song here is good. David Gedge doesn't have a ton of vocal charisma, but the band has a lot of energy. A definitely worthy purchase.

Cloud Cult - Feel Good Ghosts (Tea Partying Through Tornadoes) (bought from Amazon.com)- Last winter or fall or whenever, I took up Paste Magazine's "pay what you want" subscription offer (I think I paid five dollars, so yeah, I'm a chump). It's a decent magazine, if not a bit too NPR (i.e, boring) at times. The promotion CD's that accompany each issue are frankly pretty boring too, filled up with pretty blah singer-songwriter stuff and mid-tempo acoustics, though there's usually a good track or two that I dig enough to make the whole thing worthwhile. First, it was Bon Iver (admittedly, a mid-tempo acoustic singer-songwriter, but still so good!), then the other day, I was so struck by Cloud Cult's "When Water Comes to Life" I prompty went on Amazon and ordered a copy (along with The Wedding Present, and Something Else by the Kinks, which aside from a perfectunory run through "Waterloo Sunset" I've not yet listened to). Anyway, a paragraph in and now I'm at the album- its good, occasionally gorgeous, and occasionally irritatingly precious (like the grating Kimya Dawson songs on the Juno soundtrack). Album's like this tend to be growers for me, though, or rather, I like them fine until I happen to listen to them at just the right moment (often on a long lonely car ride up to visit family in Pennsylvania), and they absolutely wreck me. I can definitely see that happening with this one. On the downside, this has some HORRIBLE cover art. Seriously, I was embarrassed to have it sitting around my apartment.

Evangelicals- The Evening Descends (snagged from my best-friend Carlos)- Sometimes I feel like I go through so much new music because I'm always looking for that one album that just grabs you and hits perfectly, and its this one for me right now. Holy shit, its good. Seriously, "Midnight Vignette," "Skeleton Man," and "Party Crashin'" have become the soundtrack to my spring, and the rest of the album is solid too (especially the unintelligble, shouted chorus of "Paperback Suicide"). The weird, haunted house sound effects (I love the crazy-loud buzzing simulating heart palpitators on "Party Crashin'") and the weirdly out of nowhere bits of melody and hooks that show up for a second then vanish without a trace (there's like three great hooks that show up in the second verse of "Midnight Vignette") add the album a weird ramshackle charm, and demand relistening. But its the songs themselves, the writing, that is great, and there is no moment I've heard lately that's more cathartic (probably since "John Allyn Smith Sails" on Okkervil River's The Stage Names, my favorite album of 2007) than the end of "Skeleton Man."