Customer Reviews
great stuff
com, who Amazon should have a business relationship with because all I do is hear music there and come buy it here) and loved it. I heard a JV song on this Internet radio station (3wk. Got the CD and this thing is just unstoppable. Great, great album. JV has a great sense of melody and a great sense of humor. Highly recommended.
William Blake writes my songs too
Having seen the name, it caught my eye. I wander thro' each charter'd aisle,
Near where the indie'd rock does flow
And mark in every album worthwhile
Marks of love, marks of "whoa"
Wandering through the misbegotten aisles of a cherished music store, in the "used" section where diamonds await to be found like buried treasure in the muck, I found such treasure just about a week ago. I know this guy- he's friends with The Mountain Goats, otherwise known as John Darnielle. Some type of relationship there, probably from "We Shall All Be Healed," The Mountain Goats most recent that I reviewed last year. That's about all I knew- well, I did sneak a listen to one of Vanderslice's albums on the internet a long while ago and left him all but forgotten (one of those times where it sounds alright, but it just isn't the right time or mood).
So, at $6. 99, I made an extraneous impulse purchase and am now able to pat myself on the back once again for my incredible taste in music, even concerning music that I have completely no idea what it really sounds like. Now, it's your turn to pat yourself on the back for reading this because you can go buy it and impress all your friends and they'll tell all their friends, and so on, and then this three year old album will become some type of runaway hit just because I came across it in a record store in Ohio.
Back to the top, once again, and you'll notice I fudged one of William Blake's little written things to describe my experience in finding this album. Vanderslice does the same on a song called "if I live or if I die," although he doesn't even bother to change the words from Blake's "Little Fly, Your Summer's Play," he just rips it straight off and adds music. AND IT ROCKS! Not rocks like hard rock or anything because that definitely doesn't rock, but rocks like sweet minor chord piano with unpronounceable percussiony blippy blurps and bleeps sprinkled throughout.
Then Vanderslice rips off some of his brother Jesse's stuff that he sends him from his little hideaway in the Antarctic where he works for the National Science Foundation and begins going all "Polar Madness" because he experiences spontaneous trance states and alternations in consciousness induced by his exposure to the Antarctic's isolation (and I tell my students not to write run on sentences. . . ).
If those letters are to be believed, then this is a charmingly and geniously crafted album loosely based around these letters his brother sends home expressing his loneliness and isolation and the things he writes about (including William Blake and the Internet). If not, then he sure did go take a lot of time to fake a lot of letters, and therefore he should spend less time writing fake letters to himself and making more sweet indie rock for us to idolize.
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Greatness
The record is crazy and peculiar and sad and happy and everything at once. One of my friends gave this to me and once I started listening to it, I was intrigued and amazed by it. Some songs tell stories, others are simply poems of moods and ideas. One song "If I live or If I Die" is a poem like Blake moderized and made into a song, a fact i stumbled upon reading Blake's Song of Experiance.
John Vanderslice;s music is allways interesting and fascinating, drawing you in, and even if you might feel repulsed by it at first, there is somethign which draws you in and won't let go, his music is basically some of the best music to come out the rather dull current Indie scene. I highly suggest this record and all of his others to anyone who likes strange indie music, or even music in general, please buy, you will be amazed.
. You can see a complete list of all John Vanderslice discography, or go back to the John Vanderslice tabs
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