Album Review : White Rabbits

I saw White Rabbits live in King Tuts in Glasgow one Valentine's Night, supporting the wonderful Spoon, and was blown away. The band were excellent, thriving on rattling percussion from two, sometimes three, drummers and there was plenty of the same to be found on second album It's Frightening. Well, the boys from Brooklyn are back a couple of years down the line with new album, Milk Famous.

Over at The Line of Best Fit you can read about the studio trickery learned at the knee of Spoon's Britt Daniel that's resulted in a record with a different sound to the previous rattling White Rabbits experience. It's still pretty good, and you can read more in my review, available right here!

Top 33 of the Year.....The Top Ten!

Ooooh, getting close! What's at numbers 4 and 3?

4. Spoon - Transference.

Seven albums in, and Britt Daniel's band continue to weave their angular magic.

Coming after the pop majesty of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, there's an unsettling quality about Transference, with the band taking their studio trickery to new heights. Demo-sounding snippets suddenly surge into full blown productions, vocals suddenly drop out of the mix, there's stereo separations, but above all there's some cracking tunes.

There's the familiar groove of 'Trouble Come Running' and 'Before Destruction', the skeletal funk of 'Who Makes Your Money?' and the frenetic 'Got Nuffin'. The record also contains what's possibly Spoon's most lovely-sounding song, the gorgeous 'Out Go The Lights'.

At the centre of it all, however, is the seething, piano-abusing 'Written In Reverse'. Rarely has Daniel sounded so angry and urgent, bitterly spitting out lines about an unrequited love:



The sound of a band who just enjoy letting their hair down.

3. Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest.

Simply a wonderful album about childhood nostalgia and the joy of discovering new music.

Bradford Cox continues to have a knack of being incredibly prolific as the helmsman of Deerhunter while also producing music as Atlas Sound, and Halcyon Digest is an amalgamation of the direct pop of the former and the bedroom electronica of the latter.

Incredibly, on a record full of Cox's brilliant songwriting the highlight is actually guitarist Lockett Pundt's 'Desire Lines'. Having said that, there are so many moments of joy that it's hard to focus in on just one. So here's 'Helicopter' as well:



Can you really argue with the brilliance of an album that reminds of the thrill and excitement of discovering new music? Answer: No.

Happy first blogaversary to me!

It took friend and fellow blogger Colin Bell over at It's Bloggerin' Time to point it out to me, but 21st November marks a year of blogging here at 78sDW!

It's been an interesting old year, and to celebrate the anniversary I'm only going to post a short blog. However, what I'm leaving you with for today is a song that's extremely close to my heart for personal reasons, that always leaves me with a smile on my face and, in the words of John Michael Stipe, goes out to the one I love.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Spoon with "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb".



One bloomin' year! Here's to a more prolific second year, and thanks so much to everyone who has taken the time to read. I really do appreciate it.

Cheers!