and a part of me still rocks the eff out to this stuff.
Rancid's Out Come the Wolves is absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt on my list of top 10 albums. i've had to buy this album 3 times now because i listened to it so much and carted it around so much during middle school and high school. so today, tired of listening to some way-too-mellow music that was pushing me closer and closer to the edge of a complete and utter fit of pure melancholia, i decided that i needed to do something to try and reverse my impending gloom.
i paused briefly on M.I.A. and that didn't help. then Pharoahe Monch, which only made me angry, and went through the ole pod until i saw Rancid.
and i am currently rocking the eff out. and am in a totally stellar mood.
and, in keeping with the grand tradition of me having a libido that is fueled largely in part by boys with guitars and bad attitudes, i have the most enormous crush on Tim Armstrong.
to those who know me...this man looks eerily similar to several boyfriends i've had. eerily, eerily similar, especially in that picture above, to my first "love"... oh lawdy... (btw, how's the wife and kid, D?)
seriously though, slutty urges aside, this album has successfully lifted me out of my funk and placed me atop an energetic and fiesty little pedestal. i'm going to listen to this album like 4 more times before the days over.
so, now that we've gotten that cleared up, i'd like to take this opportunity to fluff the shit out of the new Raconteurs album, Consolers of the Lonely. i really liked Broken Boy Soldiers, and was hoping the boys would release another album. and lo and behold, last Tuesday (or Sunday, as iTunes mistakenly thought...) they released their sophmore effort. i won't go on and on about the way they released it, because i'm tired of reading every music critics' summation of their "guerilla-style" release, but let's just all agree on something: it's pretty fucking cool that, in a time where nearly every album is, in some way or another, leaked early and thus removed from any former methods of anticipatory christmas-morning type of release dates, the Raconteurs managed to put an album out, whilst avoiding early leaks (except for the iTunes debacle) and getting people pretty stoked.
or at least i was. maybe it's just me.
so i waited until last Tuesday, got the album and have listened to it about 5 times all the way through at this point. and i love it. i love Jack White, for my libido's sake, and for his musicianship. i think he's original and talented and, from what my untrained ear can tell, he's quite good at what he does. i like that he's like, dark and brooding and seems quite intelligent. i like that he has a couple projects that he works on. i like that the White Stripes are sort of along the lines of the newer sound that rock music has been leaning towards and favoring lately. i refuse to call it "indie" because they're on a major label, so they can't be, but since the label "indie" is thrown around and used completely out of context these days to describe a "non-mainstream" (but totally mainstream) sound, i'll use it. but the White Stripes were, in my eyes at least, one of the first to really bridge between counter-culture music-philes and the mainstream, radio-listening, MTV-watching part of society.
anyhow, i also really like Brendan Benson too, especially his solo work.
okay, enough of my school-girl rock-star yearning, back to the album.
Consolers of the Lonely is a little more bluegrass, a little more country than Broken Boy Soldiers. and, i think that, as i'm listening to it again, i think i might actually like it more than Broken Boy Soldiers. i didn't initially think i did at first--in fact, my first synopsis of the album was that it wasn't nearly as good as BBS, but now i think i like it better. much better.
lyrically, it's so on point--intelligent, honest, heart-felt--and musically it's pretty varied. (again, i know nothing about music, technically speaking, so this is all just the way i see--err, HEAR--things...). i'm currently loving 2 songs the mostest: "Old Enough" and "Many Shades of Black." "Many Shades of Black" ties with the Postal Service's "Nothing Better" as the most perfectly accurate to me specifically break-up songs ever.
here, check out some of this genius:
Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead
And smash it on the floor
Take whatever's left
And take it with you out the door...
See if I cry, see if I shed a single sorry tear
I can't say that it's been that great
No, in fact it's been a wasted-free year
Everybody sees
And everyone agrees
That you and I are wrong
And it's been that way too long
Take it as it comes and be thankful when it's done
There's so many ways to act and there's many shades of black
There's so many shades of black
There's so many shades of black
this is a super album. you should get it and listen to it.
