na: jean on jean, jonestown
Your sweaty Monday morning snapshot:
Jean on Jean, Jean on Jean: We really, really love this record. Jean on Jean is a project lead by Molly of Out Hud, although the two bands sound nothing alike. Jean on Jean is chamber pop done by the Softies, real sweet and soft and loose and (pleasantly) off. “Tonight,” the first song, is the real hit, a soundtrack kind of song, grandiose, emotive and evocative. So good. Other great songs: “Summer,” “Circle,” “Hawaii” and “Finally.” And in the what-might-have-been files, please note that we had originally planned for Jean on Jean to be part of eMusic Selects, paired with Crystal Stilts. Ended up they already had a label, so it didn’t end up happening, but that’s how much we love them. PS: We have this album several months early. You can only get it here.
The Twilight Sad, Here It Never Snowed. Afterwards It Did: One of those bands the message boards always go nuts for that I’ve never ever heard. I don’t think I will like it (and a skimming this morning confirms my prejudices), however, I do believe that it will do extraordinarily well on the site. The year since their last has seen their rep grow.
Booka Shade, The Sun & the Neon Light: Arriving a bit late thanks to some technical issues, this is the eagerly awaited follow-up to Movements. In his eMusic review, Michaelangelo Matos says, “it’s the definition of a grower — the more attention you pay it, the greater the reward.” Fair enough.
Brian Jonestown Massacre, Pretty Much the Whole Catalogue: Also arriving today is everything Jonestown has done. (We used to have it but it disappeared.) So what do you need? Here’s how I rank them, in order:
01 Take It From the Man!: Easily my favorite Jonestown album, an amazingly tight early ’70s British rock record, the whole thing fun and enjoyable, a great summer album. You need “(David Bowie I Love You) Since I Was Six” no matter who you are.
02 Thank God for Mental Illness: Lots of great songs on this one, especially “Spanish Bee,” maybe my favorite Jonestown song ever. Very Love.
03 Their Satanic Majesties Second Request: Not as psychedelic as the name would suggest, just more solid Laurel Canyon rock.
One big one I am omitting is Methodrone, which most big Jonestown fans love, but I can’t hang with it. If you are a big My Bloody Valentine fan, though, you’ll almost certainly love it.
Thanks for the updates, Yancey. I DL’d the Twilight Sad (I like em, man… a lot), and the Booka Shade right off the bat.
I also snagged the Jean on Jean, sound unheard, in large part because I still enjoy listening to the Out Hud albums as much as I did when I first heard them (and, in the case of their second album, a lot more). As is often the case with advanced eMu releases, no album artwork was available, save the 150×150 snapshot on the site. Is there any way to get the artwork at a larger resolution — say, in the 500×500 to 600×600 range?
And despite your recommendations, I am on the fence about which BJM to DL. I never really heard their music until I saw Dig, in which I thought they were vastly less enjoyable to my ears than my perennial guilty pleasure band, The Dandy Warhols. I’ll figure something out, I am sure (and it’ll probably be Methodrone, honestly).
My problem with the Twilight Sad is the same one I have with BJM — I like the IDEA of them more than I like the thing itself. How can you go wrong cherry-picking the best riffs from the Stones? One way is to do it for 16 tracks. I can’t even get through the samples without my eyes crossing. I could cherry-pick the best 10, but I’m just so darn tired.
Twilight Sad is tougher. I’ve got more bands from Glasgow than any one place I can think of. I get what they’re up to, and there are aspects of their sound I adore. I kept their 2007 release on my Saved list for maybe 6 months, trying to figure out why I hadn’t already paid for the thing and moved on. I’m still not exactly sure why…but hey, that Frightened Rabbit thing? Amazing.
Not to be negative (or facetious), but BMJ and Twilight Sad are two of the performers at the tippy-top of my “great idea, but…” list, and I was startled to see them in the same post. (Of course, it’s Monday morning and I’m easily startled.) I’m sure these groups are composed of nothing but very nice people and hope they get really, really rich, and that emu is the reason why.
Loving, loving the Booka Shade though. Great idea, great record, and digging it out of the box.
Oh I definitely cannot claim any sort of greatness for BJM. I just like a lot of their songs and I listened a lot in a very specific time/place. They are not a great band, not even really a good one. But they’re fun. That’s all.
Quick big-ups to the Jean on Jean for anyone who was a fan of that old K Records sound — see: Lois, Softies, even Mirah and the softer Heavenly moments.
With BJM, I found that downloading a very selected group of individual songs and making them into a playlist worked best. Their output quality is very spotty. I especially like the sadder songs with lots of 60s instrumentation, like “Leave Nothing For Sancho” and “Malela.”
Deb you are totally right. We should try to crowd-source a BJM best-of!
In that case my vote would be for ‘You Look Great When I’m Fucked Up.’
Your description of the Jean on Jean sounds interesting – it’s in my Saved for Later list. I sampled the new Booka Shade album, but I was left unimpressed. Perhaps the samples don’t do their songs justice, so I’ll try again later.
By the way, do the RSS feeds work? I noticed the last entries haven’t been showing up on My Yahoo page. I check the 17dots blog regularly, so the RSS probably wouldn’t help me that much.
)
Tim’s comment on Glasgow made me laugh…
Glasgow was one of eMusic’s “featured regions” last week, so I clicked on it… and I owned every single album listed on the front page of returns.
BTW, the significance (and usefulness) of the “featured regions” has long escaped me — how many of the “featured regions” have returned, like, one band? Maybe someone can explain how they’re selected.
Thanks for reminding me about the feed, q! I’d removed my 17D module from its place of honor in the upper left of My Yahoo. It stopped working when the site went down, and never came back.
So just now, I decided to delete it and add it back, see if that rebooted it.
If you look for “17 Dots” in the My Yahoo Add Module util, you’ll see 3 feeds. Mouse over each for the preview, and you’ll see that the one at the top hasn’t been updated in a week, the one on the bottom hasn’t been updated for a month…and the one in the middle is juuuussst right.
Digging the new Booka Shade a lot, thanks for the heads up Yancey.
hey Tim – Thanks for the tip. I was able to add the right RSS feed.
I knew I was hanging onto some downloads this month for a reason. And that reason has become Jean on Jean.
As we say in Korea “Ah-sa!”
I love Jean on Jean, so lovely and fresh!