The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.
Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.
Hippie-dippie jazz dreaming brought down back to Earth for us mortals.
"He made me embrace simplicity in my songwriting," Slip frontman Brad Barr reminisced about Surprise Me Mr. Davis bandmate Nathan Moore. "I had to make my guitar solos say more in a shorter amount of time." Paired with a newfound desire for looser, more joyous performances led The Slip to anchor their overgrown jam rock with stellar results on their magnum opus Eisenhower. Memorable musicmaking is all about contrast, and the mix of their formidable improv chops and these accessible, windy, wispy indie rock tunes gives dimension to the latter and hooks to the former--an absolutely delicious pairing.
Like Built to Spill on Keep it Like a Secret, it's not so much The Slip dumbing down their music as it is tightening up what makes it compelling in the first place. These guys continue to play like a hydra, able to take the rollicking, nostalgic "Children of December" towards a surging finish or carrying "Even Rats" and "Life in Disguise" as far on the cool breeze as they need to go. Jams still happen, of course, but with such sturdy, evocative songs, like the ode to falling behind "Airplane/Primitive" or chilly piano balladry like "If One of Us Should Fall", they justify all the time in the wilderness they take.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Airplane/Primitive", "Mothwing Bite", "Paper Birds" | "Even Rats" | "First Panda in Space" |  |
I don't do jam bands, man.
Given the excellent-excellent-excellent Eisenhower, I figured The Slip had earned enough cachet with me for a blind used CD purchase of Angels Come on Time. One from their more jazz fusion-y days, Angels is, if nothing else, ambitious. The Barr brothers and bassist Marc Friedman move as one spidery, lithe unit through twelve tracks of genre exploration and improvisation. They're fantastic performers, no doubt, and they cover a lot of sonic ground here. For jam band fans especially of the adventurous variety, this might be your cool vibe--but it's pretty dry and heady listening with hooks and vocals few and far between, which makes it tough to keep actively engaged with the material.
It's hard to say Angels even starts before the third song, as "Landing" amounts to precious little other than noodling and "Get Me With Fuji" is an intricate old-school hip-hop groove missing the spice of a few sticky verses. It ends just as aimlessly. The stronger tracks here reign in the experimental long-winded mood setting (like on "Love and Tears") or sound like early prototypes for the breezy, wistful, wordy indie rock The Slip would take to the moon on Eisenhower ("Sometimes True to Nothing", "Sorry"). This is an album that'd make someone very happy, someone fond of subtle, fussy, occasionally rustic jazz jam rock that answers to nobody but itself (was that AutoTune I heard pop up for one entire line?). I'm not them.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Sometimes True to Nothing", "Sorry", "Love and Tears" | "The Nashua Rose" | "Landing" |  |
INDEX | CHANGELOG | CONTACT
ART | MODDING | MUSIC | WRITING
GAME REVIEWS | MUSIC REVIEWS
This site powered by AutoSite technology.