Some time on a plane let me get caught up on some albums making people's best of the year lists. I completely missed this when it came out, but it kept cropping up in my browsings.
Why is it that dense, complex, interesting, adventurous indie rock is so often accompanied by high-pitched, generally annoying crooning? I'm looking at Of Montreal, Fiery Furnaces, and the legendarily over-inflected Joanna Newsom here. EMA breaks that mold, though maybe I only even thought to put her in it because of the wonderful, epic, suddenly swerving opener The Grey Ship, which inspired me to dub her the un-annoying Joanna Newsom.
While it never reaches those heights again, the first half of the album retains that adventurous spirit, full of noise and seething fury and well-engineered left turns. I feel like I need to here some of those songs again and again to map their ever-shifting curves, at least for a moment.
The second half is a disappointment though, descending into too much murk, too much repetition, Marked and Butterfly Knife in particular striving for some kind of silky menace that never quite lands. It's an interesting one, wringing more newness from the broadly-defined indie sound than I thought was possible these days, largely admirable for trying even in the places where it falls oddly limp 4/5
You might like this if: you're looking for complex, undulating rock with a good sense of pacing and hook, at least for half an album or so.
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