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John recommends Curse Your Branches by David Bazan.
Link: http://drop.io/dbcurse
About David Bazan
From his official bio:
Known for his work fronting the enigmatic rock band Pedro the Lion, David Bazan’s emotionally charged narratives, eye for telling detail, and mournful voice have more in common with J.D. Salinger’s “Nine Stories” or Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood” than with the usual lyrical slant of popular music. Bazan is a gifted storyteller, weaving parables of spiritual conflict, suburban ennui, and personal surrender into magnetic, well-crafted songs.
Why I Chose Curse Your Branches
When Bazan began his career over a decade ago with Pedro the Lion, he quickly became something of a spiritual hero to a generation of people (myself included) who were uninspired by superficial pop-Christianity and easy answers. His songs were full of questions, and his albums filled with tales of complicated, messy lives. Faith seemed to be hanging by a thread, and Bazan's characters were running with scissors.Curse Your Branches is something else entirely. It's Bazan's first work since becoming an agnostic. The weight of the album hangs on these lines:
"All fallen leaves should curse their branches / For not letting them decide where they should fall / And not letting them refuse to fall at all."
And on this question:
"Did you push us when we fell?"
Favorite tracks:
- Hard to Be
- Bless This Mess
- Please, Baby, Please
My Musical Taste
My favorite band of all time is U2. Andrew Bird's Noble Beast was my favorite album of 2009, and here are a few other songs I loved last year.
About Me
Hmm. For starters, I really don't like talking about myself.
I'm 30, have been married for 10 years and have two little girls. I work a corporate day job while building a community news startup in what little spare time I have left. I enjoy riding a road bike, and this summer I'm doing RAGBRAI, a six-day ride across the state of Iowa.
Music is very personal to me, and I often find that an album will become tied to a specific time or place in my mind. And despite my slacker approach to Musooklub, I love discovering new bands and albums.
3.5, there were some tracks on this album i really enjoyed (#1: hard to be), some i couldn't stand, and most were somewhere in between. so this one gets a # just slightly above average. thank goodness for 1/2 star ratings.
ReplyDeletei wish someone made me listen to something more "mainstream" like the national =)
I can totally get into some folk-rock, so I appreciated this album. My one complaint is that it's not varied enough to keep me interested through 10 songs. I do love his voice and the orchestration is beautiful, but maybe a little somber for me at times.
ReplyDelete(What do you think of the Spoon album, by the way? Not incredibly impressed by that one.. But looooving the new National!)
This album was a challenging to listen to. The lyrics were engaging and well written. At times, I felt the melody didn't quite complement the vocals or something else, not exactly sure.
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot of nice writing and arrangement on this CD. The lyrics are clearly well thought out - however, there was perhaps a bit more angst and bitterness than I like across the whole album (clearly he has a chip on his shoulder and an axe to grind) and that weighed it down a bit. Still, I give it a 3.5.
ReplyDeleteKari, I dig the Spoon album quite a bit. It took me a while to get into versus the previous album.
ReplyDelete