WILL SOMEONE PLEASE SAY SOMETHING ABOUT THE MOTHERFUCKING RAINBOW FAMILY ALREADY
The Rainbow Family, "Mr. Picture Perfect"
The Rainbow Family, "Seagus"
Blah blah blah no record player bloo bloo bloo torturing me from Rough Trade's catalogue for months blorf blorf blorf iTunes skiddledy-doo-dah SOOOOOO fucking great. My god, people - who cares if you know the story already when the payoff comes as close to magnificent as the Rainbow Family's debut EP tends to do time and time again? It's not even that it's anything remarkable - one could reasonably make the argument that the Rainbow Family are to the Doobie Brothers what the Guillemots were to ELO this time last year - but rather that it exists at all; I'm willing to accept that my affinity for these five songs may lap a little less agressively at the lip of my attention span in time as long as I get to use them NOW NOW NOW.
See, unlike a lot of extremely vocal people, I'm hardly dissatisfied with 2006 as A Year In Music. I wouldn't call it a classic vintage for pop or anything, of course, but the harshest criticism I can think up to levy against it is that it just hasn't been all that dynamic; it's been a great year, for instance, for very narrowly-delineated genres like metal or dance music or revisionist pop or super-arch blue-eyed-soul, especially if you look at each of those respective genres as a composite of a billion other microgenres unto themselves, and I absolutely think that that should count for something in the face of the undeniable plodding pace at which music itself has been moving since the year rolled over. Hell, at the very least it should be taken as a fine piece of evidence in the unwinnable war against listmaking - how, after all, are you supposed to arrange a list of exemplars of a genre in any sort of order that'll be even a little bit useful to anyone who didn't come out of your mother's vagina on your birthday? I mean, right now my favorite song of the year is probably a toss-up between "Ghetto Story", the DFA remix of "Colours", and "My Love" - is there any conceivable order of those songs bearing any insight on any of them which couldn't be gleaned from a conversation about the genres or organizing principles guiding them?
Having said that, of course I'm a compulsive listmaker, and of course I've been curating various and sundry top ten lists for 2006 since late 2005, and of course I've been painfully aware of the drag for months and months now. Hell, I found Silent Shout and "Ghetto Story" - very possibly the best candidates for best album and single of 2006 that I've found, respectively - before the calendar rolled over to April, and as thankful as I am to be living in an age affording me the kind of access to music that would allow me to encounter stuff this great, I'm not going to front and act like six months isn't a hell of a long time - fuck, by the consumptive standards of the music intarwebs, Silent Shout might as well be a golden oldie. Hell, it's not even that I want them topped - I just want the thrill of encountering something that imbues me with that confidence that I'm listening to something truly world-beating, something worth flipping out over at great lengths on the internet to a captive audience of cat-flingers and people who preorder Sufjan Stevens albums. After all, it's easy to keep listening to music; all you really have to do is sit down and not fall asleep. But finding reasons to stay involved - well, that's what lists are for, even if they also kinda have the exact opposite effect from time to time.
Enter, at long last, the Rainbow Family, a band whose debut single I saw enthusiastically flogged by Rough Trade and nobody else on the planet. Having finally acquired their EP on iTunes, I can safely say that if, in fact, Rough Trade actually does manage to stand apart from the rest of the music-consuming world on the strength of their observational acumen, then we're all in a lot of trouble; I'd hate to think that the fate of bands as richly endowed with musical and compositional gifts as the Sunshine Family are in the hands of a store that forces you to email the staff just to check up on the status of orders you place. I mean, it's one thing to come up with sensationally accomplished music - I suppose one could make the argument that Duels have managed to do just that, although I sure hope the Lord takes me before I ever give in to any curiosity as to what in His or Her Name they could have possibly accomplished. But it's another thing entirely to labor over something meant to be consumed by people who don't necessarily share your perceptual or emotional tics; in my more charitable moments, I actually see making something so expressly for everyone (or, this being indie rock, "everyone") as being almost kindasorta noble, or at least more noble than choosing a Marshall stack over a therapist's couch.
And, at the risk of being pedantic, the Rainbow Family make music for everyone. Whether it matches up to the lofty summits of the yacht rock it tries so desperately to emulate is ultimately up to the listener, of course; I obviously think it manages to do so without breaking so much as a fat man's eatin' sweat - to be slightly more accurate I keep expecting to hear news reports of Michael McDonald being found dead in his apartment with this EP on repeat and an incomplete, poorly-spelled, tear-stained suicide note ending with a big, block-lettered, all-capped "THE SMOOTHNESS" followed by a huge snowdrift of empty white paper - but since this doesn't matter, feel free to allow your mileage to vary. What I like about The Rainbow Family EP, I think, isn't so much the melodies or the stylistic trappings as much as the Family's utter conviction to seeing these songs through; I may have been walking around all day marinating in the melody of "Seagus" or silently clapping along to that rhythmic nail on which the chorus of "Mr. Picture Perfect" gets so sumptuously caught, but it's the overall atmospheres of the songs that impresses me most of all - it feels like these guys went "Hey, let's write some Loggins and Messina songs" the way the dudes in Midlake suddenly all decided that Fleetwood Mac's Tusk was their favorite record ever. The giveaway, of course, is that they just keep piling on more and more stuff; I've bought enough singles now to where I'm cursed with the knowledge that most bands tend to be content to find one musical pattern for the verses, another for the chorus, and then call it a day (HELLO THE RESEARCH), and consequently it's nothing less than a treat to listen to a song like "Mr. Picture Perfect" and find myself dealing with another two-part harmony or another sudden breeze of strings or any of the eleventy squillion elements that drift in and out of the song. Or, conversely, they can do one thing so flawlessly that it's impossible to ignore; one hates to bang the Doobie Brothers drum too loudly, but if "Seagus" isn't the song that "Black Water" could have been, I'll eat my hat.
But really, this is fairly misleading - recreating the music to which you were conceived, after all, might not necessarily be the best realization of pop music's potential on this earth. Instead, I've been focusing with my ears (1) on the way the Rainbow Family make it crystal clear what they appreciate about the styles they inhabit so effortlessly, and (2) on their efforts to make those pleasures available to anyone who even bothers to look for them, regardless of how many pop-music footnotes they're able to digest. There are, I think, few better sensations that a record can imbue in me than an awareness of other people liking the same stuff that I like; it is to The Rainbow Family's immense and undying credit that it leaves me intractably conscious of the overlap between my taste and theirs, but it's a credit that's dwarfed by that it earns from hinting at the possibility of overlap between my taste and other people who share the same appreciation for the band that I do. It's just a hell of a single, easily the best five bucks you'll spend on iTunes at the moment, and although my sustained affection for that Tin Bangs EP which I hearted while Pitchfork hated weighs heavy on me as I say it, probably the best EP I've heard this year, or at least the most invigorating. And these days, that's in mighty short supply. (Click here to buy the "This Is Not A Circular/Mr. Picture Perfect" single from Rough Trade , or click here to visit the Rainbow Family's MySpace page which has a link to their iTunes store)
Billie the Vision & the Dancers, "Summercat" - By way of contrast, here's one of the more charmingly indie-osyncratic (CHOKE ON YOUR GLIBNESS, FOOL) songs I've heard in recent weeks; whereas I can imagine anyone with a temperment inclined towards less abrasive rock music could probably find some measure of pleasure on the Rainbow Family EP, I can't really see anyone taking a shine to Billie the Vision & the Dancers' "Summercat" without someone already having installed the upgrade necessary to appreciate that particular brand of sixties fetishism which never really seems to take root with quite the earnestness that it does in Sweden. I hasten to add, of course, that this doesn't diminish "Summercat" in the slightest; if you're one of those folks for whom "That Great Love Sound" or "Hey Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken" had you sheep-dipping yourself in mod trappings, then y'all all better get down on your knees and thank the Lord that this little gem revealed itself to me while the air outside is still temperate and the sun stays in the sky long enough to permit you to play it a nearly sufficient amount of times. That's not to say that you should go in expecting anything sumptuous - although "Summercat"'s atmosphere may be fully deserving of a wealth of descriptors, you'll probably be as tempted to wade around in it as you might otherwise be by a long-lost b-side by the Coral - but rather that it'll give you an easy point of entry as to how to appreciate those horns or all that jauntiness, i.e. As Stuff Reasonable (If Weird) People Can Enjoy. And once you get that down, it's just a matter of time until you wake up to the earnestness in the lead singer's voice - it's nothing particularly remarkable on its own, but set against the bouncy jig of the music it gets endearing enough quickly enough for even my crusty old animus to notice.
That being said, the horns are actually kinda good. (Click here to buy the "Summercat" single from Rough Trade)
The Rainbow Family, "Seagus"
Blah blah blah no record player bloo bloo bloo torturing me from Rough Trade's catalogue for months blorf blorf blorf iTunes skiddledy-doo-dah SOOOOOO fucking great. My god, people - who cares if you know the story already when the payoff comes as close to magnificent as the Rainbow Family's debut EP tends to do time and time again? It's not even that it's anything remarkable - one could reasonably make the argument that the Rainbow Family are to the Doobie Brothers what the Guillemots were to ELO this time last year - but rather that it exists at all; I'm willing to accept that my affinity for these five songs may lap a little less agressively at the lip of my attention span in time as long as I get to use them NOW NOW NOW.
See, unlike a lot of extremely vocal people, I'm hardly dissatisfied with 2006 as A Year In Music. I wouldn't call it a classic vintage for pop or anything, of course, but the harshest criticism I can think up to levy against it is that it just hasn't been all that dynamic; it's been a great year, for instance, for very narrowly-delineated genres like metal or dance music or revisionist pop or super-arch blue-eyed-soul, especially if you look at each of those respective genres as a composite of a billion other microgenres unto themselves, and I absolutely think that that should count for something in the face of the undeniable plodding pace at which music itself has been moving since the year rolled over. Hell, at the very least it should be taken as a fine piece of evidence in the unwinnable war against listmaking - how, after all, are you supposed to arrange a list of exemplars of a genre in any sort of order that'll be even a little bit useful to anyone who didn't come out of your mother's vagina on your birthday? I mean, right now my favorite song of the year is probably a toss-up between "Ghetto Story", the DFA remix of "Colours", and "My Love" - is there any conceivable order of those songs bearing any insight on any of them which couldn't be gleaned from a conversation about the genres or organizing principles guiding them?
Having said that, of course I'm a compulsive listmaker, and of course I've been curating various and sundry top ten lists for 2006 since late 2005, and of course I've been painfully aware of the drag for months and months now. Hell, I found Silent Shout and "Ghetto Story" - very possibly the best candidates for best album and single of 2006 that I've found, respectively - before the calendar rolled over to April, and as thankful as I am to be living in an age affording me the kind of access to music that would allow me to encounter stuff this great, I'm not going to front and act like six months isn't a hell of a long time - fuck, by the consumptive standards of the music intarwebs, Silent Shout might as well be a golden oldie. Hell, it's not even that I want them topped - I just want the thrill of encountering something that imbues me with that confidence that I'm listening to something truly world-beating, something worth flipping out over at great lengths on the internet to a captive audience of cat-flingers and people who preorder Sufjan Stevens albums. After all, it's easy to keep listening to music; all you really have to do is sit down and not fall asleep. But finding reasons to stay involved - well, that's what lists are for, even if they also kinda have the exact opposite effect from time to time.
Enter, at long last, the Rainbow Family, a band whose debut single I saw enthusiastically flogged by Rough Trade and nobody else on the planet. Having finally acquired their EP on iTunes, I can safely say that if, in fact, Rough Trade actually does manage to stand apart from the rest of the music-consuming world on the strength of their observational acumen, then we're all in a lot of trouble; I'd hate to think that the fate of bands as richly endowed with musical and compositional gifts as the Sunshine Family are in the hands of a store that forces you to email the staff just to check up on the status of orders you place. I mean, it's one thing to come up with sensationally accomplished music - I suppose one could make the argument that Duels have managed to do just that, although I sure hope the Lord takes me before I ever give in to any curiosity as to what in His or Her Name they could have possibly accomplished. But it's another thing entirely to labor over something meant to be consumed by people who don't necessarily share your perceptual or emotional tics; in my more charitable moments, I actually see making something so expressly for everyone (or, this being indie rock, "everyone") as being almost kindasorta noble, or at least more noble than choosing a Marshall stack over a therapist's couch.
And, at the risk of being pedantic, the Rainbow Family make music for everyone. Whether it matches up to the lofty summits of the yacht rock it tries so desperately to emulate is ultimately up to the listener, of course; I obviously think it manages to do so without breaking so much as a fat man's eatin' sweat - to be slightly more accurate I keep expecting to hear news reports of Michael McDonald being found dead in his apartment with this EP on repeat and an incomplete, poorly-spelled, tear-stained suicide note ending with a big, block-lettered, all-capped "THE SMOOTHNESS" followed by a huge snowdrift of empty white paper - but since this doesn't matter, feel free to allow your mileage to vary. What I like about The Rainbow Family EP, I think, isn't so much the melodies or the stylistic trappings as much as the Family's utter conviction to seeing these songs through; I may have been walking around all day marinating in the melody of "Seagus" or silently clapping along to that rhythmic nail on which the chorus of "Mr. Picture Perfect" gets so sumptuously caught, but it's the overall atmospheres of the songs that impresses me most of all - it feels like these guys went "Hey, let's write some Loggins and Messina songs" the way the dudes in Midlake suddenly all decided that Fleetwood Mac's Tusk was their favorite record ever. The giveaway, of course, is that they just keep piling on more and more stuff; I've bought enough singles now to where I'm cursed with the knowledge that most bands tend to be content to find one musical pattern for the verses, another for the chorus, and then call it a day (HELLO THE RESEARCH), and consequently it's nothing less than a treat to listen to a song like "Mr. Picture Perfect" and find myself dealing with another two-part harmony or another sudden breeze of strings or any of the eleventy squillion elements that drift in and out of the song. Or, conversely, they can do one thing so flawlessly that it's impossible to ignore; one hates to bang the Doobie Brothers drum too loudly, but if "Seagus" isn't the song that "Black Water" could have been, I'll eat my hat.
But really, this is fairly misleading - recreating the music to which you were conceived, after all, might not necessarily be the best realization of pop music's potential on this earth. Instead, I've been focusing with my ears (1) on the way the Rainbow Family make it crystal clear what they appreciate about the styles they inhabit so effortlessly, and (2) on their efforts to make those pleasures available to anyone who even bothers to look for them, regardless of how many pop-music footnotes they're able to digest. There are, I think, few better sensations that a record can imbue in me than an awareness of other people liking the same stuff that I like; it is to The Rainbow Family's immense and undying credit that it leaves me intractably conscious of the overlap between my taste and theirs, but it's a credit that's dwarfed by that it earns from hinting at the possibility of overlap between my taste and other people who share the same appreciation for the band that I do. It's just a hell of a single, easily the best five bucks you'll spend on iTunes at the moment, and although my sustained affection for that Tin Bangs EP which I hearted while Pitchfork hated weighs heavy on me as I say it, probably the best EP I've heard this year, or at least the most invigorating. And these days, that's in mighty short supply. (Click here to buy the "This Is Not A Circular/Mr. Picture Perfect" single from Rough Trade , or click here to visit the Rainbow Family's MySpace page which has a link to their iTunes store)
Billie the Vision & the Dancers, "Summercat" - By way of contrast, here's one of the more charmingly indie-osyncratic (CHOKE ON YOUR GLIBNESS, FOOL) songs I've heard in recent weeks; whereas I can imagine anyone with a temperment inclined towards less abrasive rock music could probably find some measure of pleasure on the Rainbow Family EP, I can't really see anyone taking a shine to Billie the Vision & the Dancers' "Summercat" without someone already having installed the upgrade necessary to appreciate that particular brand of sixties fetishism which never really seems to take root with quite the earnestness that it does in Sweden. I hasten to add, of course, that this doesn't diminish "Summercat" in the slightest; if you're one of those folks for whom "That Great Love Sound" or "Hey Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken" had you sheep-dipping yourself in mod trappings, then y'all all better get down on your knees and thank the Lord that this little gem revealed itself to me while the air outside is still temperate and the sun stays in the sky long enough to permit you to play it a nearly sufficient amount of times. That's not to say that you should go in expecting anything sumptuous - although "Summercat"'s atmosphere may be fully deserving of a wealth of descriptors, you'll probably be as tempted to wade around in it as you might otherwise be by a long-lost b-side by the Coral - but rather that it'll give you an easy point of entry as to how to appreciate those horns or all that jauntiness, i.e. As Stuff Reasonable (If Weird) People Can Enjoy. And once you get that down, it's just a matter of time until you wake up to the earnestness in the lead singer's voice - it's nothing particularly remarkable on its own, but set against the bouncy jig of the music it gets endearing enough quickly enough for even my crusty old animus to notice.
That being said, the horns are actually kinda good. (Click here to buy the "Summercat" single from Rough Trade)
posted by James at 4:36 PM
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