music makes me lose control IV: the man comes around

I wanted to do something to challenge myself in the month of March, so I bet Joe a month of being straight-edge that the Saints would win the Super Bowl, since losing a bet is possibly the best reason to give for not drinking and the like. That didn't exactly work out, so new challenge: I will blog every day in March. It won't always be substantive or well-written or well-thought out or even entertaining, but it will be there. To start off this little experiment in the field of "Dan not being a lazy bastard", here's a super-short sample of what I've been listening to lately.

VAMPIRE WEEKEND

Vampire Weekend's bouncy and unapologetically indie self-titled debut album grabbed me at the first few notes and instantly found a warm and cozy place on my regular rotation of the essentials, but I was wary of their planned follow-up. As much as I love the Stone Roses and their monument of a first album, they'll always be tainted by the crap they churned out afterwards, in the way that all bands who peak early and then decline are. It makes their earlier stuff feel almost like a fluke, a lucky accident instead of the result of talent and effort.

I shouldn't have worried. As one writer put it (in an analogy I wish I had come up with), if Vampire Weekend was Rushmore, Contra is The Royal Tenenbaums. They've maintained their distinctive energetic and intelligent style and took it to the next level, proving that great bands don't use up all their good ideas the first time around. Plus, they got Jake Gyllenhal in stripper pants in their video.

OPETH

What the hell? Is it 2006 again? The last time I seriously sat down and listened to Swedish progressive-death metal was back when I was convinced that the more convoluted the name of your genre, the better you must be. However, setting aside the silliness of the waist-length hair, the corpse makeup, the Cookie Monster vocals screaming about death masks, and the complete insanity of the entire scene's fanbase, Opeth is actually objectively pretty awesome. I've grown up to the point where their epic, 18-minute tracks are starting to drag a bit, but the clean vocal stylings and composition of "Face of Melinda" show that they're a group capable of complex and emotional songs underneath the trappings of typical Scandinavian metal.

One more thing: when I saw Opeth in concert, between songs Mikael Åkerfeldt screamed "DO YOU GUYS LIKE FLOWERS?! FUCK FLOWERS!!"

FLEET FOXES

Now, I'm a big lyrics guy. For me, a truly great song can stand alone as poetry, which makes me incredibly intolerant of shitty, lazy lyrics (I'm talking to you, post-Pinkerton Rivers Cuomo). However, in "Quiet Houses", the Fleet Foxes make poetry out of "lay me down", "don't give in" and "come to me" repeated infinitely, providing more depth and sophistication with those words than any given asshole with a rhyming dictionary.