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Pop Rock Nation

Category: Mini-Reviews

  • #50 album of 2012 – Riverhood by Holobody

    Artist: Holobody

    Album: Riverhood

    Riverhood opens with two distant echoed voices in solemn harmony. The song, aptly, is called Unfold. Finger-snaps join, then foreground voices: Luke Loseth, tenor, sings a long, agile melody while his sister Charlotte, soprano, wordlessly decorates around him. Piano enters, heavily echoed; so do less-identifiable drones. It’s a gorgeous track. It merges smoothly into Hurricane Season, what hip-hop might have been if invented by Brian Eno to help his 10-year-olds play when they weren’t in aggressive moods: giddy, full of put-on voices that weave intuitively among each other, while dozens of different melodic tones and soft percussion bits whir into being and then vanish.

    Way the World Goes Round is basic folk-guitar children’s-album fare, and quite convincing, but the singers’ voices are echoed and distended, while the xylophone’s plinkings wobble in and out of tune. Plus there’s drones that wash over the track by the end. Down to the River to Pray begins as a-capella gospel, and could absolutely have worked without any instruments intruding. But the first gentle folk-guitar accompaniment is the Trojan Horse for an invasion of more piano echoes, drones, abstract fuzztone, and darting vocals lines that get ever more labyrinthine, until it approaches the Beatles’ a Day in the Life in peak intensity.

    Albums in love with drone can aim to be ugly or beautiful or just alien; I prefer beautiful. But it’s my experience that albums in love with drone will short-change words and tunes, or even jettison the entire idea of the human voice. Holobody have made, in Riverhood, a beautiful debut in which the drones assemble songs together, and singing is pre-eminent. To me, this is a welcome experiment.

    – Brian Block

    To see the rest of our favorites, visit our Favorite Albums of 2012 page!

     

  • #100 Song of 2012: Head Above Water by Men Without Hats

    Men Without Hats ”Head Above Water”
    Yes! Those Men Without Hats. 30 years after “The Safety Dance” and 25 years after penning the new Tide detergent commercial jingle (um, that would be “Pop Goes the World”), the Canadian synth-pop group led by Ivan “Godfather of Monotone” Doroschuk reconvened for their first new studio album in nearly 10 years. The album is called Love in the Age of War, and this song about sticking with your life and “holding your sons and your daughters… just holding on” was its first single. It’s got a great message and you can dance to it (if you want to).

  • The Daily Awesome – January 31, 2011: “Blizzard of ’78” by Ida (2001)

    \’\’The Braille Night\’\’, 2001

    A couple weeks ago, friend of SonicClash and Popblerd blogger Mike Heyliger asked folks to name songs about snow that weren’t Christmas songs. Here’s one of my favorites – “Blizzard of ’78” by the indie rock quartet Ida. This 7 minute epic was the centerpiece of the group’s 2001 album The Braille Night. The song is as stormy as its title would suggest, driven forward by an endlessly repeated descending chord progression pounded out on a piano over groaning strings and a noisy snare-and-cymbals rhythmic attack. And as singers Elisabeth Mitchell, Daniel Littleton, and Karla “k.” Schickele sing the song’s chorus – “You’re a thousand miles from here, you just want to disappear” – in beautiful, shifting, increasingly urgent harmonies, you can almost feel yourself trudging down a snow-covered city sidewalk face-first into a punishing, icy wind. In other words, it sounds just like what a blizzard feels like, even if the lyrics seem less about snow and more about someone trying to overcome stage fright. But it’s the evocation that counts, right? And it’s probably one of my Top 10 favorite songs of the last decade. Click the link below to give it a listen for yourself:

    Blizzard of 78