Album Review: Maximo Park, "Our Earthly Pleasures"

are nowhere to be found on this record

Maximo Park, "Girls Who Play Guitars"
Mark Ronson, "Apply Some Pressure" (feat. Paul Smith of Maximo Park)

edit: I swear to god I knew the name of Maximo's first album was A Certain Trigger

second edit: I SWEAR TO GOD I KNEW Version WAS MARK RONSON'S SOPHOMORE ALBUM HENCE THE CLUMSY ITALICIZING EMPHASIZING THE IRONY. O SHIT, I GOT WARRANTS.

In an interesting paralell to the situation ten years ago, we may have plenty of wiggle room to go in this decade, but it's a fair bet that modern Britpop has already seen its moment come and go. There may well be incredibly enjoyable albums and singles still a ways down the pipeline at this point in the genre's current incarnation, but it's highly unlikely (if not flat-out impossible) for them to be delivered at the blinding pace at which they showed up during that magical year bookended by the Futureheads and the Rakes' respective debut albums; as staggeringly inconsequential as all those albums turned out to be, the panicky, nervous through-line connecting them all was simply too intoxicating to resist at the time. (Of course, one could easily raise the counter-argument that this same homogeneity of effect did more to undo the genre's viability than anything else; eventually, consumers will settle on the one album that best approximates the idealized form of the genre that they've been cultivating in their heads and send everything else back to the record store in epic fashion, which is why the imaginary people who come over to my apartment and nose through my stuff always register so much surprise to discover Capture/Release as the lone representative of this period in modern musical history in my record collection. But I digress.)

In a lot of ways, Maximo Park's debut album Apply Some Pressure epitomized all the virtues of the age, and in some of them it even demonstrated the potential for the aesthetic's future growth. Other bands might have had better ears for a hook or a gimmick, but no band on earth (or at least in England) was able to manifest pure urgency quite like the Parkers were; more than any of its contemporaries, A Certain Trigger sounded like a record made with the express intent to get itself released before someone else beat them to the punch. Unfortunately, it's this precise phenomenon which keeps Our Earthly Pleasures, their sophomore album, from demonstrating itself half as compelling as its older brother - artistic urgency is, after all, awfully hard to sustain when you've already proven yourself supernaturally adept at managing it.

That's not to say that Our Earthly Pleasures even remotely resembles a bad record; it's simply impossible to compare it to A Certain Trigger and not be stricken by the leaps Paul Smith & co. have made in the last year when it comes to being an Actual Rock And/Or Roll Band. Songs like "Girls Who Play Guitars" demonstrate a leap forward of Maoist proportions in terms of efficiency and articulation when broken down to their component parts like "lyrics" or "guitar lines"; I'd honestly call "Girls" one of the three best songs they've ever written, and it probably won't even get a single release until November, assuming it ever gets one in the first place. Still, the problem isn't even how... galling? is that the word I'm looking for here? it is to see a band which hooked me on their wild abandon suddenly start preaching the virtues of restraint - I'm not happy about it or anything, but anyone who's ever lived two or more years in a row understands how all youthful exuberance, no matter how genuine or earned-in-earnest it might be, tends to wither and die over time. No, the real problem at the root of Our Earthly Pleasures is that the game has simply changed; now it finds itself tilting at the second-finest guitar-pop record of the decade compositionally and lyrically, and like the rest of its brothers in second-generationhood, it's simply not a fair fight. Maximo's gift was always for performance rather than demonstration, and if Our Earthly Pleasures is any indication, now that they've found themselves in a position where they've got the attention of people looking to follow in their shoes they flat-out don't have much to say.

Of course, all of this is basically so many wasted words when comparing any song from Our Earthly Pleasures to Mark Ronson's Mitch Ryder'd-up revisitation of "Apply Some Pressure" for his sophomore LP Version. By any criterion available to man or beast, "Apply Some Pressure" is at best the fourth-best song on Version, but it's by far the most illustrative of its source now that Maximo's lead vocalist Paul Smith seems more in love with the serpentine power of double-tracking than in his own preturnatural yelp; despite widely surfacing nearly a month after Our Earthly Pleasures, Smith's performance on Ronson's version of "Pressure" remains the first glimpse of of his old enthusiasm for keeping up with his backing track, presumably because Our Earthly Pleasures devotes itself so single-mindedly to the task of making an album to which people will still be listening ten or twenty years down the line. The dueling ironies, of course, are that (1) just as before, that's exactly what all of the Park's contemporaries are trying to do, and (2) attempting to do this precise thing may be the single most effective way to cancel out all of Maximo Park's strengths, or at least all of the strengths they demonstrated on their first album. I'm all for bands developing over time and everything but damn, folks, if this is what we've got to look forward to from the class of '04-'05, we are in for one bumpy-ass ride. (Click here to buy Our Earthly Pleasures from Amazon.com, or here to buy Version from Amazon.co.uk)

The Killers, "Bones" (Tiga remix) - With Scott Stapp seemingly finally banished from the cultural discourse, I'm honestly not certain if there's anyone working in music today who inspire quite as much unbridled venom on my part as the Killers; in the interest of saving space, let's just say that I see them as having the same relationship to rock as P. Diddy has to voting and leave it at that. Nevertheless, I find myself inexorably drawn to any remix of any of their tracks by anyone with even the slightest shred of dancefloor acumen; I've even heard that worthless "I've got soul/But I'm not a soldier" song turned into a legitimate house-music axe murderer, no mean feat considering we're talking about the single most resigned-sigh-inducing lyric in recent memory not mulling over a track's merits as a "panty anthem". And, true to form, Tiga's remix of "Bones" is a world-fucker; words really can't convey just how much more palatable Brandon Flowers' sixth-grade stabs at depth become when backed by a track which in no way attempts to secure anything even approaching legitimacy. Of course, I wouldn't even be able to make that claim if the backing track Tiga pulled out of god-only-knows-where weren't arguably the best thing he's come up with since his take on "Sunglasses At Night"; his work here defines the appeal of his icy musical perfection in exponentially more adroit fashion than anything on Sexor, and that's even before the chorus bathes you in the majesty of his interpolation of the big hook to the Killers' original. I still think the Killers need to hire Jacques Lu Cont to produce their entire next album pretty much more than anyone needs to be doing anything anywhere ever, but after hearing this remix, I'd settle for Tiga guiding them through the musical birthing process; if he can wring something this close to Speak & Spell-era Depeche Mode out of the Killers when they're taking aim at boring-ass rock bluster, the possibilities to what he could construct for them with direct access are all but limitless. In the meantime, please enjoy this histrionic triumph, although you'll readily recognize that you hardly need my permission. (Tiga's remix of "Bones" is currently unavailable commercially, but in the meantime, visit his MySpace to hear more music)

Sarabeth Tucek, "Something For You" (Contino remix) - The original version of Sarabeth Tucek's "Something For You" is a pretty, if predictable, alt-country pining-away girl-n-gee-tar affair, but flip the record over and boy are you ever in for a treat. Contino's remix may take a few listens to fully sink in, but I speak from experience when I say that it'll absolutely bury itself in your consciousness; whether it's the gentle clatter of about six layers of instruments or the note-perfect evocation of wistfulness inherent in Tucek's voice cutting through them all like a scythe through a wheatfield, you have my word that there's a hook in here for you somewhere. Anyone in love with the empty-veined tone of records like Beach House or The Greatest will be unequivocally over the moon off this song, I can guarantee you that much; everyone else can go kill themselves for all I care. (Click here to order the "Something For You" single from Sonic Cathedral records)

Album Review: Voxtrot, s/t

I did manage to find the cover art for Voxtrot on their website, but I'll be damned if I kick off my 200th post without a picture of one pissed-off cow-cat

Voxtrot, "Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, & Wives" - Anyone who's ever taken the time to listen to Voxtrot - a demographic which, I assume, includes everyone reading this post - will be roughly as surprised to learn that Austin's second-finest musical byproduct came up with a really good debut album as they would be to see Oprah on the cover of O (FINALLY AN OPRAH JOKE ON GP). The question, then, becomes "how good is it", since albums demonstrating the kind of singularity-within-a-multitude which courses through Voxtrot like blood through a vein obviously need to be catalogued, poked, prodded, probed, plumbed, perfectly calibrated to fall into place along one's party lines. By "the question", of course, I mean "the question I will absolutely not be answering here today"; I barely even care where Voxtrot ranks among my top-five albums of 2007, let alone yours (having said that, it's probably my third- or fourth-favorite full-length of the year). I am far more interested in "how it's good" than I am in "how good it is", and not because Voxtrot is some masterpiece of album assembly or musical vision or what-have-you. It's not. It's just a good album - a really good album - but it's important to remember that there's just as much to learn from simple, non-insistant records as there is from show-stopping earthquakes rendered in shellac. In other words (and at the risk of my musical-Yoda-only-with-dick-jokes schtick wearing even thinner than it already has), Sound of Silver may have taught me more about what kind of music I like, but Voxtrot's already taught me more about how I like it, and I've only had the record for like three weeks.

The point of reference to which I keep returning is Midlake's* The Trials of Van Occupanther, which is a little ironic since Midlake's 2006 opus is pretty much exactly the opposite of what I'm talking about when I refer to the nebulous concept of a "good album". Van Occupanther proudly features between three and five of my absolute favorite songs from all of last year and organizes the album to deliver them in an incapacitatingly satisfying fashion, but anyone who describes it to you without using the word "flawed" is straight-up lying to your face; no album as absurdly front-loaded as Van Occupanther can lay claim to any ideal of perfection, and it's such a simple proposition that I don't even have a clause to wrap that statement up tidily. There are songs on Van Occupanther that will bore you, interludes over which you will skip with unflagging regularity, attempts at singles which will steamroll you into a state of hipster ennui ("Young Bride", I poop upon thee) - and yet, over the course of a year's worth of thinking "Y'know, I think I'd like to listen to 'Roscoe' on the way to In-N-Out tonight", I found myself coming to anticipate these lesser lights, warts and all. That's not to say that I'm running around throwing "Van Occupanther" or "Branches" on mixtapes willy-nilly; they're still tedious songs, no matter how productive the tedium they generate happens to be. But I definitely grew to be thankful for the way they spaced out the experience of the album; I'm supremely confident that I would have strangled every ounce of pleasure "Roscoe" or "Head Home" have to offer before summer ended if I hadn't forced myself to develop an affinity for another way of consuming them which had little if anything to do with my own musical prejudices, and Midlake did a heroic job of making that task as easy on me as possible, even if I don't necessarily run around extolling the virtues of their incomplete successes like I'd stumbled over some lost triumphant moment. Regardless of the circumstances, learning to adapt to situations is an indelibly good thing, and good albums have precious few lessons to impart with more lucidity than those pertaining to the way we adapt to them. After all, great albums are a piece of piss to approach on their terms; that's kind of the point. Good albums simply are what they are, and it's up to you to find value in them.

Which of course brings us right back to Voxtrot. Unlike The Trials of Van Occupanther, Voxtrot has little to no downtime; some might even be compelled to describe it as a model of consistency on all musical fronts, from influences cited to song structure probably down to even the level of major keys employed from track to track. Unfortunately, one could just as easily describe it as a catastrophic misstep by a band who not only made their name on the backs of a few singles, but actually managed to rise to commercial prominence on the basis of three EPs for god's sakes; in the age of single-song consumption, you're just not going to see too many bands cultivate a rabidly devoted audience on the backs of products with the kind of barely-perceptible value which defines the EP as an artform. For a band, in other words, who amassed their fanbase by going HEY HERE'S THIS ONE SONG and these two other songs which are kinda pretty good BUT HEY REALLY SERIOUSLY THIS ONE SONG to come along and deliver an album as devoid of standout singles as Voxtrot, then, would at first glance appear to be career suicide; where exactly is their audience supposed to discover the pristine immediacy of tracks like pre-album single "Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, & Wives" on a record which steadfastly refuses to break stride just to exalt any single song? That's not to say that Voxtrot is some radio-hostile dirge-a-thon, of course - you could probably set your iTunes to shuffle it on repeat the next time you have all your friends over to flaunt your ironic t-shirts and stroke your calculatedly unshorn scruff while picking over Grindhouse and just wait for the "hey, kickin' party mix!" platitudes to roll in. Hell, "Kid Gloves" alone is probably going to dominate any club serving PBR on tap to an extent unseen since everyone woke up to the fact that they really only like, like, two Clap Your Hands Say Yeah songs, tops - and Voxtrot STILL refuses to cast a spotlight on it beyond putting it in the "designated hit" slot on the running order (i.e. it's track number two). Some might use the word "galling" to describe the sensation of encountering an album which operates so counterintuitively to the way you want it to work, and I would count myself among their number.

But here's the thing: that's exactly why I fully expect to still be dropping Voxtrot into my player months from now, if not outright years; even after just a few scant weeks of listening time, it's already apparent that I like a gang of songs off this album, with more emerging every time I give it another playthrough. Obviously I'm no soothsayer (although I am within three thousand copies of being a soothsayer) and as such can't really speak to my future with this record, but I feel pretty confident that it's going to take a long time for me to wear my enjoyment of its pleasures down to a bloody nubbin precisely because I can't listen to it the way I want to (or at least not yet - ask me again in a few months once I'm familiar enough with it to point out my fourth-favorite chord change). Instead of flooding my serotonin receptors en masse once or twice and then filing the album away forever, I'm giving myself over to its uniformity and, in the process, constantly stumbling over a new couplet or a squirrelled-away flourish in the background. And while I'm not worried in the least about whether or not I'll find records I end up liking more than Voxtrot over the course of the year, I'm not worried in the slightest about whether or not they'll diminish my ardor for it; my appreciation for Voxtrot has nothing to do with anything other than the record those crazy kids managed to make, and world-conquering single or not, that's one hell of an accomplishment. Voxtrot comes out on May 22nd; I suggest that you buy it. In every sense of the word, it's a keeper. (Click here to pre-order Voxtrot from Amazon.com)

*Midlake, I presume, would be Austin's third-most-successful musical export, although even the aggregate of enjoyment derived from numbers one through three aren't enough to make up for the city's hand in the unholy popularization of the fish taco. NO, NOT THAT KIND OF FISH TACO.

Slow Down Tallahassee, "So Much For Love" - Anyway, who needs albums to deliver singles while we've still got England? Slow Down Tallahassee's "So Much For Love" showed up in my mailbox in with a grip of other random sevens I'd ordered on whims from Rough Trade and has been kicking my ass ever since, album-generated context be damned; in a better, fairer world, "So Much For Love" could and would stand on its own against any competitor in the field of sparkling little indie gems married to a chugging Jesus & Mary Chain beat and fuzzed-out wanna-be Nuggets reject in triumphant fashion. Admittedly, most of this has to do with their stumbling into one of the most infectiously hooky melodies indie-pop's yielded in recent months, but don't overlook their girl-group chops - the harmonizing on those "Whoa-oh-oh-oh"s have a way of sticking in my head in ways most bands have to pay out the ying-yang to achieve, and let's not even get into the brutally urgent effectiveness inherent in the way the vocals kick through the ceiling to a higher register during the chorus. It's a damn shame South Park has conditioned a generation of movie viewers to expect any and all montages to be at least somewhat ironic in nature, because you won't hear a track this year better suited to soundtrack three minutes' worth of comic misadventures as some non-descript nerd attempts to whip himself into dateable shape for some unattainable princess at the behest of his smouldering drummer friend who becomes hotter than the fires of hell as soon as she takes her glasses off; one can practically hear the silhouettes of awkward Karate Kid poses against the backdrop of a setting sun in every passing moment. And I absolutely mean that as a compliment. (Click here to buy the "So Much For Love" 7" from Rough Trade)

The Draytones, "Keep Loving Me" - Like the View, this year's Sensational British Band Of The Rapidly-Receding Moment, the Draytones came out of the blue on 1965 Records; unlike the View, the Draytones have at least one inarguably awesome song to their name. That song is, of course, "Keep Loving Me", a doe-eyed love letter to the Kinks and the 13th Floor Elevators and all those other bands whose names have inexorably devolved into shorthand for critics too uncreative to find accurate ways to talk about really-not-very-good songs to which they clearly feel some sense of obligation since the songs came their way for free. I, however, am stupid enough to fly this shit over from England on my own dollar, so you can believe me when I say that this just fucking rocks; "Keep Loving Me" is loud and fuzzy and joyously devoid of subtlety in ways which belie a genuine enthusiasm for the idealized form at which they're clearly taking aim - you get the feeling that if the Draytones made minimal techno, they'd be beating up the genre's framework to find a way to incorporate the unrelenting skin-bashing and searing guitar tones that define their signature track. Fortunately for us, then, they've settled on nakedly revivalist pop as a vehicle, meaning that instead of being forced to look for an entry point into "Keep Loving Me" we can simply throw this song on our iPods and wait for that moment when we're able to share in the joy of lead singer Gabriel Boccazzi's shaky glee at coming back for MOARRRRRRR. If you're anything at all like me, it won't take you too long to get there, either.

ELSEWHERE
- Bloc Party may edge closer to pole position on the list of my contemporary bete noires by the moment, but I'll be damned if their stuff doesn't reliably make for some awesome remixes; fortunately the always-dependable Derek over at Good Weather For Airstrikes doesn't share in my hostility towards them and as such dug up two overpoweringly awesome remixes of "I Still Remember", Bloc Party's latest whiny opus about repressed bisexual leanings or Bush's foreign policy or the plight of the titmouse or what-the-fuck-evrrrr. The Sebastian one is incredibly great - like "Man, I've really been missing the boat on this Sebastian character, haven't I?"-type great - but if you only download one MP3 this week, make it Lull's Music Box & Tears remix, a legitimate contender for the throne of "most cosmically graceful thing I've heard since that live version of 'Heartbeats' hit last year". You are doing yourself a profound disservice if you're listening to anything else.

As I Come Back (Again)

So I've decided to start doing a few more album reviews than before, which is to say I've decided to start doing some album reviews. There will, of course, still be plenty of pure MP3 content (by which I mean "MP3s and me bitching about the shameful dearth of third-person female manipulation of my junk), but album reviews are easy and I need to get back on the right track. SO:

Try and guess what pun you'll be seeing lead off every single review of this album

Shitdisco, "Disco Blood" (single mix) - It's just a sad fact of life: sometimes, even our most carefully cultivated methodologies fail us. My introduction to Scotland's Shitdisco, for instance, came to pass thanks to one of my iron-clad rules of singles-buying, namely that any single of even the most marginal interest put out by a band which doesn't appear to have an album in their future is to be immediately purchased. You will of course forgive me if I didn't expect to see an album proudly flying a flag reading "Shitdisco" in my lifetime; when I placed my order for the "Disco Blood" single back towards the tail end of 2005, I figured no band with a name like that pushing a sound like theirs promised to sound (second rule of singles-purchasing: if at all possible, let your purchasing instincts be guided as thoroughly by the hilariously untrustworthy descriptions furnished by the shops trying to take your money - hey, that initial listening experience isn't going to preserve itself) had a hope in hell of seeing so much as a second single, let alone a full album. Unsurprisingly, "Disco Blood" revealed itself to be a mix-CD stalwart almost on contact - I have friends with things like "lives" and "relationships" and "clean driving records" who, to this day, couldn't begin tell you who Bobby Orlando might have ever been, but know for a fact that he's coming 'round for tea. It wasn't even that "Disco Blood" was even necessarily all that great; it just sounded like a bunch of kids trying their damnedest to make something, and their enthusiasm for the task (to say nothing of the startling efficiency with which they accomplished it, given their means at the time) was just too infectious to deny.

At the time of this writing, Shitdisco's debut full-length Kingdom of Fear is two weeks away from its release date, and with it comes a really high likelihood of Shitdisco never crossing my mind again. Kingdom of Fear is, of course, by no means a bad album; with the exception of the less-than-engaging "I Know Kung-Fu" (ironically the b-side to the "Disco Blood" single), pretty much every song has something to reccomend it to the modern Anglophile, be it relentlessly frantic drums, searingly timely backing vocals, or that singular glee which only ever seems to show up on records made by young British kids acutely aware that although they may or may not be making art, they're definitely making a product. Kingdom of Fear could quite reasonably be summed up as the precise midpoint between the Klaxons' Myths of the Near Future and the Rapture's Pieces of the People We Love, and given my freely-admitted affection for both those records, I don't have it in me to tell like-minded spirits to give this one a pass outright. The record does a more than capable job on that front itself.

The problem with Kingdom of Fear, I guess, is that for an album released by a band called "Shitdisco", there's precious little of either actually on the record. It's arguable that Kingdom of Fear represents the apex of indie-rock production this year, given the raw material out of which it shapes itself; songs like "Another" echo the Shitdisco I used to know only insofar as that it moves at breakneck speed and Joel Stone and Joe Reeves' signature yelps probably couldn't even be wrangled into submission by Phil Spector. Everything else about the track is sweetened and smoothed to the point where it might as well be serve in a cone - I mean, even my little sister could probably differentiate between the layers of sounds on this track and point out lots of cool little moments where they come into collision. These songs actually sound like disco songs now - three-and-a-half-minute disco songs for the Paul Epworth set, sure, but disco songs nonetheless.

And therein lies the problem: everyone already knows what those songs sound like, so there's little incentive to try to introduce them around to people. Kingdom of Fear is full of finished products utterly immune to frivolous deconstruction, which is a perfectly admirable accomplishment for a band except for the fact that sitting around and frivolously deconstructing music is a substantial part of the point of getting way too into music in the first place. I stopped being interested in movies right around the time when those insufferably tedious Lord of the Rings movies became the lingua franca for discussions of the virtues of the art of filmmaking among my friends, mostly because I'm exponentially more interested in how people interact with those virtues than the volume of their presence. Compared to the Shitdisco with which I grew acquainted a year and a half ago, Kingdom of Fear is kinda like that - its artistic successes have absolutely no bearing on anything outside the confines of its running time, up to and including the actual band themselves. They may have made a real, no-foolin' record, but they've done so at the cost of their enthusiasm for (a) making music and (b) finding a way to turn that music into songs, and while the tradeoff might seem fair on the surface, in the long run it's just nothing to get excited over - or rather, nothing which promises to foster excitement for any period of time past the end of its tracklisting.

Look, I'll be honest: I'll probably end up keeping Kingdom of Fear on my iPod for a good minute or two if only to see how well it fares popping up randomly when I throw on shuffle mode (and I'm guessing it'll fare a lot better like that than as a contiguous experience). There are going to be a lot of people who like this album a lot more than me, and I can't fault them for doing so, although my guess is that across the board they'll be both younger and less interested in having good taste (or being gleefully supercilious about having bad taste). It is not - repeat - not a bad album, and the band has enough of a gift with a hook and an innate grasp for how a song should flow that it's wholly conceivable that they've got a for-realsies good album in there somewhere (although with a bandname like theirs, the window of opportunity before the real world sets in may be pretty small). But it's not a compelling album, no matter how closely or for how long you've been tracking the signifiers it draws upon, and anyone who could imagine themselves listening to it in fifteen years with the same doe-eyed admiration it'll most assuredly draw from some quarters upon their first listen is without question kidding themselves in a sincerely hilarious fashion. Hell, in fifteen years, do you even think the members of the band are going to be talking about how Dad had some minor chart success with a band called Shitdisco? Fun though it may be to listen to, there's simply no other way to describe Kingdom of Fear as anything other than an abomination; if they'd stayed the course of releasing singles whenever the spirit really and truly moved them, they might have cultivated an earnestly enthusiastic fanbase, all while refining their sound into something with little (if anything) to do with conceptions of being au courant. Now the most they can hope for is to stay just far enough below the radar to avoid being mentioned on VH1 Scotland's I Love The 2000s. (Click here to pre-order Kingdom of Fear from Amazon.co.uk)

Strange Idols, "She's Gonna Let You Down Again" (single mix) - Of course, if you want to hear how to put together a song so immaculately that you probably won't be able to help but tell your grandkids about it, look no further than Strange Idols, this year's early frontrunner for my springtime Britpop fixations. To say that "She's Gonna Let You Down" again is impeccably formed would actually be a pretty gross distortion of the truth; the reality of this magnificent little pop gem is that it's in dire need of another verse or two (ironic considering the way it clocks in awfully close to the mythical three-minute mark) or just some sort of gentle rreintroduction to the sonically hostile world known as Everything Else I've Heard Since This Song Suddenly Showed Up In My Life. They're already working with Gareth Parton, quite possibly the ideal producer in light of his work with the Pipettes (war crimes committed against "Dirty Mind" excepted, of course) so they've clearly got a future ahead of them; as anyone who's come into contact with the songs from their demo which made the rounds last year can attest, they already have an undeniable knack for songcraft even before they started steeping themselves in the dark arts of auteurist production. And if that is, in fact, what's happening, you couldn't ask for a better first step on this kind of journey than "She's Gonna Let You Down Again", a remarkable concoction of in-your-face brassiness and painstakingly arranged layers playing off each other to come up with something with the patina of an instant classic, something I can't even imagine haters being able to deny. Non-haters, of course, are in for a serious treat. I urge you to give it a shot and see on which side of the fence you end up falling. (Click here to order the "She's Gonna Let You Down Again" single, which is backed by the also-quite-kickass "Berlin" from Rough Trade)