“Dry the Rain” was good though. Anyway, this…
[Video][Website]
[3.52]
Brad Shoup: Your freshman year suitemates at BYU hand you a flyer for their third show. They say they noticed the Smiths poster above your desk. Their MySpace genre is listed as “oompah Christmas twee”.
[5]
John Seroff: Indie folk of the decidedly creamy (not crunchy) variety, “The Chambers and The Valves” is so smooth, twee and unassuming you’ll barely notice it’s playing. I’m listening to it now and I’m barely noticing it. And I’m trying.
[4]
Anthony Easton: My mother says that it’s sad when religious music is boring, and I keep thinking that earnest-folkies-doing-gospel was done before, it was just called folk masses, and it was mostly not worth hearing. This one is just pretentious memories of third generation pentangle ripoffs trying for the earnestness of the Lord.
[3]
Alfred Soto: Mewl mewl mewl two young hearts celestes mewl mewl mewl.
[1]
Doug Robertson: It doesn’t matter what year it is, someone, somewhere will always want to be Morrissey. Here it’s filtered through vaguely epic Fleet Foxisms, but giving how miserable being Morrissey makes Morrissey himself, it’s hard to know why so many people are so keen to plough a field more firmly furrowed than the forehead of the man himself.
[4]
Pete Baran: Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s the noisy Fleet Foxes!
[6]
Michaela Drapes: I am relatively sure I never needed to hear what mixing bloodless tinctures of the Arcade Fire and Fleet Foxes in a sterile, Mumford-flavored petri dish smeared with bits of detritus from Love and Calexico could possibly sound like. What a forced, painful, manufactured-to-please disaster! One very, very begrudging point given for that lost mariachi guitar bit that wanders by at the bottom of the mix for about 10 seconds around the 1:20 mark.
[1]
Edward Okulicz: The title invokes the anatomy of the heart, and the verses traipse around in a folky fashion, setting up a chorus that should have been big and life-affirming but is curiously bloodless. If this is even close to the hottest record in the world, then call me a believer in global cooling.
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: Is there some statute that indie-folkies must sing like Gregorian-chant tenors to code real? Can we repeal it?
[5]
Alex Ostroff: Constant use of vibrato and affected choirboy vocals might signify ‘I have a good voice’ but they do not mean ‘I have a good voice’. Similarly, overuse of unrelated metaphors might signify ‘I am an effective and intelligent writer’ but they do not mean ‘I am an effective and intelligent writer. “I was lost in the fission” does not mean anything, and not in a good way. You are not Grizzly Bear.
[4]
Jonathan Bogart: It may not be their fault that they have voices that flute just like Robin Pecknold’s and the rest of that quick-moving skulk, but it’s definitely their fault that they play up the resemblance. Incidentally, did you know that the collective noun for foxes was a skulk? That’s far more interesting than what’s going on here.
[4]