This Is A Long Drive For Someone With A Lot To Listen To... A Sunday Sermon

Dan here. Been a while for me as well with the blogging and the keeping people informed. As James has already pointed out, we've been busy with prepping the record, the tour dates, and also rehabbing a new practice space with state of the art (read: whatever I can find extremely discounted on the Internet) gear. My standards for the new gear have been "Will not course electricity through my body when turned on." So far, so good.

I recently went on one of my long jaunts up through New York State (where James and I both hail from). Being unemployed until the start of July, I've had some time to kill and have been spending it seeing family and friends who have otherwise gone neglected for the last couple of years. With that said, my preferred method of transport is almost always a car, and preferably be one that I'm driving. I have at times a raging type-A thing going on, and being in control of a vehicle helps.

So during my last trip, I loaded up the fauxPod with a ton of records that I've downloaded and haven't gotten around to listening to yet. Here are a few that I finally got a chance to check out over the last week:

The Wooden Birds' "Magnolia"
- This is Andrew Kenny's new band. Kenny was the frontman for an absolutely superb band called The American Analog Set, one of my personal faves from college. It's a very muted, quiet record, with very sparse arrangement and a ton of close mic-ing on everything. I really love the tight, up-close-and-personal sound on this record, it's hardly treated at all (ie. no walls of reverb, overproduced drums and vocals, ten-layer guitar tracks, etc.). Kenny's voice is hushed and soothing, and the girl he has singing with his is excellent. Fans of AAS, Songs:Ohia and the like would definitely enjoy this.

Heaven and Hell's "The Devil You Know"

- Old rock stars should just sit at home, collect their royalties, and stop embarrassing themselves by creating reality shows that show what dysfunctional lives they lead. Unless you're Ronnie James Dio, Tommy Iommi, Geezer Butler and Vinny Appice and you want to pretty much pick up where "Mob Rules" era Sabbath left off. Heaven and Hell is the post-Ozzy lineup of Black Sabbath, often overlooked by most fans, but glorified by the die-hards. The new record is by no means an earth-shattering reinterpretation of anything. It is a solid album of old metal dudes proving to the rest of the genre that they must never forget the face of their father. Iommi's lead playing has really progressed, and there is not as much of his classic "pentatonic noodling" (that's a Josh term, and I thank him for it). This record came on at a point where I was starting to get a bit car-groggy, and it did the trick better than a 5-Hour Energy Shot.

Grizzly Bear's "Veckatimest"

- I am not very familiar with Grizzly Bear, but this got some insane rating in Pitchfork (who could snark at anything, I swear). What a fresh sounding record! Only gave it a once-through listen, but I was really impressed with the overall tone of this record. I could produce a laundry-list of influences on this , but rather than playing the spot-influence-then-cross-reference game I often play in my head, I just let it happen. That doesn't happen often to me, so it's welcome when it does.

Sonic Youth's "The Eternal"

- SY is one of those bands that has influenced me so hugely, but which you can hear almost no evidence of when I play. Like The Velvet Underground, I think everyone who bought SY albums in their musically formative years went out and formed bands, whether those bands sounded like "Goo" and "Daydream Nation" or not. Mine certainly didn't. My fave from them still continues to be "Murray Street", and "The Eternal" works on me in the same way, which means I enjoy it as a record from a very talented crew of players who have been consistently making records for around 25 years, and I get to accept it as part of a very large body of work, an autobiographical progression of songwriting, if you will. I love a band that just goes out and does what they want, how they want and has a fan base that is (for the most part) willing to give it all a shot and not bitch and moan about artistic vision, major label betrayal and the like. "The Eternal" is incredibly accessible, very melodic in a lot of places and genuinely a great rock record.

Phish's Summer '09 Tour Tapes

- Like James said previously, they're playing better than they've played since coming back from hiatus. I was lucky enough to see them in Camden a couple of weeks ago, and it was like coming home. Proclaiming anything about Phish stirs up a lot of sentiment from both sides of the coin, but they've been one of my favorite bands since high school and will never apologize for that, ever. The Northeast tour tapes have been truly great to listen to because I get to hear four of my musical heroes refind what they love about playing music while they're finding it.

Okay, enough of my gushing. I tend to only post about music that I love, so you'll rarely hear me snark about much of anything musical here. If I don't like it, I tend to just not mention it, as it isn't worth my time to listen to, much less write about.

In Sobriquets news: We've got a date coming up July 1st in Philly at Lickety Split on 4th and South Streets. This place has been hosting a great roster of bands from Philly and beyond, and we hope to see you there. Check out thesobriquets.com as usual for more dates, particularly the CD release shows on July 17th and 18th. The show on the 17th is with a band we recently played with in Baltimore and we just love them. I'll gush about them later in the week, I'm sure.

-Dan