Beat Radio - The Great Big Sea
October 17th 2006 18:13
What? You haven't downloaded it yet? Come on... here it is. Do it now.
Brian Sendrowitz is a man for whom the phrase 'heart-on-sleeve' was custom-built. Every note he plays could cure the common cold and make the cutest kitten kill itself in the bend of a string and every word he coos could render your heart an external organ in the pasting of a lover. Simply, connections with a ready-divorced audience don't often come this sweet or this tuneful. It seems reactionary to bracket the album in such a way, but it truly is one for the thinking Shins fan – all the heartbreak you could need outside of a Teenage Fanclub album, but presented in a slightly spangly guise with jittery shimmer to spare.
After creating one of these circumventing atmospheres on opening instrumental 'They Took The Sound Out Of Sound', Sendrowitz allows the spewing acerbic sweetness to flow forth in the shape of 'Elegy', a bucolic wonderment that soars as much as it plumbs emotional depths. When he sings that he 'felt much older then', and that 'I know all the stars by name' it is to Sendrowitz's eternal credit that these lines do not sound mawkish. Further than that, they sound positively insightful, tender and real. This is not a normal kind of pop writer, this is one whereby conventions are rammed into your brain but made to feel like the first time you heard it done.
It doesn't stop. Every gem-like track is a tiny reason why everyone should listen to Beat Radio, each slightly more scratchy and invigorating, more juicy and compulsive than the one before. The lilt of 'Ancient As The Stars 2' is very much a highlight, its soft banjo popping all over the place with tricksy strung accompaniment lolloping in the background like your favourite butler. The thwarting implied in the song is devastating: 'give me one more chance to come on home', pleads Sendrowitz in a telling moment of honesty jostling with several others. Ultimately, it is this puppy-eyed honesty that will bring people back over and over once they fall under the spell of 'The Great Big Sea'.
With a steadily increasing reputation as an indie-pop mini-sensation in the wings, Beat Radio is sure to light up a great deal more lonely nights in the near future. A talent with unnerving freshness and complex emotional clout is unleashed on 'The Great Big Sea', an album that will hopefully register as the first of what those-in-the-know call a body of work.
Brian Sendrowitz is a man for whom the phrase 'heart-on-sleeve' was custom-built. Every note he plays could cure the common cold and make the cutest kitten kill itself in the bend of a string and every word he coos could render your heart an external organ in the pasting of a lover. Simply, connections with a ready-divorced audience don't often come this sweet or this tuneful. It seems reactionary to bracket the album in such a way, but it truly is one for the thinking Shins fan – all the heartbreak you could need outside of a Teenage Fanclub album, but presented in a slightly spangly guise with jittery shimmer to spare.
After creating one of these circumventing atmospheres on opening instrumental 'They Took The Sound Out Of Sound', Sendrowitz allows the spewing acerbic sweetness to flow forth in the shape of 'Elegy', a bucolic wonderment that soars as much as it plumbs emotional depths. When he sings that he 'felt much older then', and that 'I know all the stars by name' it is to Sendrowitz's eternal credit that these lines do not sound mawkish. Further than that, they sound positively insightful, tender and real. This is not a normal kind of pop writer, this is one whereby conventions are rammed into your brain but made to feel like the first time you heard it done.
It doesn't stop. Every gem-like track is a tiny reason why everyone should listen to Beat Radio, each slightly more scratchy and invigorating, more juicy and compulsive than the one before. The lilt of 'Ancient As The Stars 2' is very much a highlight, its soft banjo popping all over the place with tricksy strung accompaniment lolloping in the background like your favourite butler. The thwarting implied in the song is devastating: 'give me one more chance to come on home', pleads Sendrowitz in a telling moment of honesty jostling with several others. Ultimately, it is this puppy-eyed honesty that will bring people back over and over once they fall under the spell of 'The Great Big Sea'.
With a steadily increasing reputation as an indie-pop mini-sensation in the wings, Beat Radio is sure to light up a great deal more lonely nights in the near future. A talent with unnerving freshness and complex emotional clout is unleashed on 'The Great Big Sea', an album that will hopefully register as the first of what those-in-the-know call a body of work.
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