Shuffling III

Ready.

Set.

Shuffle!!

1) Something Against You by Pixies: Here we have the Pixies in all their raw glory, yelling and loud guitars and fast rock. This is one of those songs that doesn't work on its own but in the context of an album, it's genius.

2) Slavin' Away (live) by The Fiery Furnaces: I honestly can't remember what album this is from. Originally, I mean; this here is the live version from their live album Remember. Turns out it's from Rehearsing My Choir, which makes sense since I don't really like that album. Yet this version makes me want to revisit it. Or, at the very least, force myself to listen to Remember all the way through in one sitting.

3) Full Throttle by The Prodigy: During one of my many drunken nights, I got the hankering to hear both their best known work (Fat Of The Land) and their most respect, Music For The Jilted Generation. I've always loved that album title. It's got that 'big, important, era defining' ring to it, doubly so for a mid 90s electronica album. I'm not entirely sure this kind of big beat music will survive or age unscathed, but I still admire the curiously psychedelic and drug addled elements of it all. If you haven't listened to Dig Your Own Hole by the Chemical Brothers in awhile, you might be surprised at what you hear. Regardless, The Prodigy are a group who's critical respect will come some day. Anyway, this is one of those good mid-album chuggers that keeps you moving between the bigger or slower tracks.

4) You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb by Spoon: Spoon grow more and more popular and beloved with each album yet they're never become too popular or released a sell out, bad album. Even the more poppy affair like this is pretty awesome. There's just something about their classicist pop/rock as approached from an indie rock perspective that I can't get enough of. And Britt Daniel Daniel has one of those voices that shouldn't be good yet is.

5) Dead by Pixies: Damn, this is the Pixies Sandwich Edition of Shuffling, isn't it, kids?? And this is oddly similar to 'Something Against You' in that I don't think this song works particularly well on its own but it works brilliantly in the context of the album. Why, as this song ends, I can just hear the lead in to 'Monkey Gone To Heaven' in my head...

Album of the Week: Ween- The Mollusk

If you were a young nerd in the late 80s and early 90s, you probably really liked Weird Al and They Might Be Giants, bands that were themselves nerdy but incredibly intelligent and with a keen ear for pop music (or in Weird Al's case, a keen sense of turning pop music into something that was clever and/or funny). They had a knack for reproducing various genres of music and their humor bordered the lines between PG and PG-13 while often having obscure references you didn't get until years later--I remember hearing They Might Be Giants's 'Meet James Ensor' and assuming he was some character they made up, like 'Mean Mr. Mustard' by the Beatles.

Well, Ween are kind of like the band you get into when you're old enough to think about and experiment with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. You never outgrow They Might Be Giants or Weird Al, but they also belong to a younger version of you in many ways. But Ween, now here's an older version of what you had. They're equally witty and equally adept at covering musical genres and writing brilliant pop songs. But Ween are like the R rated version of the above bands, juvenile while at the same time very adult in nature. Ween tow the line between absurdity and sincerity so often you're never sure if a song like 'It's Gonna Be (Alright)' is for real or not. And while they wrote about adult things like sex or drugs, they wrote about them in a decidedly immature way.

The Mollusk is Ween's answer to questions about sincerity vs. parody and originality vs. genre pastiches. Yes, it's a vague concept album about nautical things; yes, it has a song called 'Waving My Dick In The Wind; yes, it borrows heavily from psychedelia, art rock, and prog rock. But no it's not a joke; it is a masterpiece.

The reason Ween can pull of this album is that they are utterly committed to the music they make even if some of it is just a joke to them. You don't record music you hate to make fun of it. Ween may be goofy and immature at times, but they are serious about their love for music. Album opener 'I'm Dancing In The Show Tonight' is a goofy musical number complete with silly voices and a spot-on piano melody. The title track is a transcendent ode to the creature itself, complete with a cheap synthesizer chorus of flutes and brass. 'I'll Be Your Jonny On The Spot' combines a superfast drum machine with crunchy guitars and deadpan vocal delivery. Then there's 'The Blarney Stone', a Scottish bar sing-along with appropriate ambient/crowd sounds. And the instrumental 'Pink Eye (On My Leg)', with its cheesy and cheap sounding drum loop...and dog barks...and what sounds like a guy burping or saying "uhhhhh" slowed down. Of course I would be remiss if I didn't bring up 'Ocean Man', which is so pleasant and catchy that it was used in the Spongebob Squarepants movie.

And so we come full circle: Ween, a band who can write about very R-rated things (one of their classics is a track called 'L.M.L.Y.P.';you might be able to guess what that stands for) but still retain a child-like whimsy. Even when Ween are spinning a style of music or some genre to their own means--sincerely or otherwise--you never doubt their love of music and their way with both songwriting and instrumental chops. Anybody can write lazy, simple joke songs but it takes a truly skilled band to pull off 'Buckingham Green', which is like a trip from Syd Barret-style mid 60s psychedelia to early 70s prog rock and back.

While the rest of their albums might be funnier, weirder, more interesting, more profane, more populist, or more varied, The Mollusk simply and neatly demonstrates everything that makes Ween such a great band. You might wish they took things more seriously. You might wish they took things less seriously. But you could hardly wish for a better and more consistent album from them.

Video: Beat Happening- Pine Box Derby

There's something sublimely off-kilter, lackadaisical, and brilliant about Beat Happening. Calvin Johnson has one of those voices that you'll probably hate until you've heard it enough, at which point you love it. It fits the music so perfectly too, the way the song barely holds together and stumbles along as if the band can't be bothered to keep on the same time wave length. To put it another way, it's so loose it wraps back around to tight.

As Johnson sings about witches and vampires we get some masterful images of the band knowingly dancing in a bad way. Which reminds me of how Calvin Johnson might've become the American Morrissey if he had had a 'better' voice and gave enough of a damn to try to make Beat Happening into a huge success. Whatever, man, Beat Happening are just as excellent as The Smiths but on their own terms.

The Rapture- Echoes

I want to begin this review by admitting that when this album first came out, I thought it was absolutely amazing. Dance-punk wasn't a terribly familiar kind of music to most of my generation. At least it wasn't to me; bands like Gang Of Four, Liquid Liquid, and ESG still aren't very popular, that is to say, they aren't some of the more obvious ones that older music fans will point you to when you're starting out. So Echoes came as a revelation, and I'll never forget listening to it in the winter of '03, 'Open Up Your Heart' starting just as snow began to fall when a friend and I were on the way home from going out to eat. It was magic, and the rest of the album was a frenetic throwdown that combined the kinds of music he and I were heavily into: arty punk/post-punk, experimental and otherwise electronic music, and funky dance music.

But with that history in mind, Echoes is an album that I've recently revisited and it doesn't hold up. Perhaps it was the blush of youth, where every new album I heard was exciting and interesting. Perhaps my tastes have changed a bit. Maybe I'm a little bit more keen on spotting something that I think will endure instead of being a momentary, 'capturing a time period well' thing. Or perhaps this album isn't as good as I thought, not a 'classic' though still pretty good.

You know, I'm going to go with that last 'perhaps.'

The Rapture were at the forefront of the dance-punk explosion that took place roughly around 2003, which was sort of concurrent with the freak-folk explosion and slightly after the new garage rock revival thing had begun to die down. As alluded to above, their music combines the energy and raw power of punk, the production techniques and techno beats/bleeps of electronic music, and the booty shaking power of funk. Single 'House Of Jealous Lovers' seemed to speak to everyone, giving us music we didn't really know we wanted. There's no denying the greatness of this song--it'll easily go down as one of the defining tracks for this decade, at least as far as the 'underground' is concerned--but barring a few other gems, the thing I've come to realize is that Echoes is a fun album anchored by a fantastic song and a few great ideas spread out thinly over 11 tracks. Nowadays, Echoes sounds very homogenic, and I usually lose interest by 'Killing.'

This kind of situation, in which one retrospectively realizes an album isn't nearly as good as one thought, happens. It happens a few times to each of us, I think. A band will release a single or two and then eventually have those on their first album and the music press and all the scenesters go crazy for it, praising it to high heaven. I mean seriously, Pitchfork gave this album their 'best of' status for 2003. 2003 wasn't an incredible year for music but still, there were better albums than this. But I digress. In the end, you come to know that whatever was praised so highly, what captured your heart so strongly, doesn't hold up. Echoes is an OK album; it's a fun listen and really good to drive or dance to, but it's not going to go down in history. Other than 'Open Up Your Heart' and 'Infatuation', the album is little more than 9 variations on the sound 'House Of Jealous Lovers' established. It's an excellent song, sure, but I don't need that many things like it. Maybe this is a good thing if, again, you want a peppy, energetic album to groove to, but it doesn't make for a timeless music.

The Rapture face the same problem that many bands do who release a single or album that defines a sub-genre of music: where to go from there?? Too often the new sub-genre attracts a hundred new bands who all sound nearly identical, the 'sound' becoming a homogenized and dogmatic one in the process. Dance-punk is a great starting point, but you've got go somewhere from there. Unfortunately, The Rapture chose to wait 3 years before releasing their next album, by which point no one really cared about them anymore. Moreover, they had trimmed away some of the interesting experimental/punk aspects of their music, effectively making them a white boy indie rock dance band. The only band of the 2003 dance-punk era who seemed to have escaped is Liars, who were always far more 'out there' than the other bands and quickly proved it with their second and third albums. I suppose LCD Soundsystem escaped too by virtue of the fact that they were always much closer to the dance side of the dance-punk equation. Also, with songs as good as those on Sound Of Silver, it wouldn't matter what 'style' you were. Hey...now that was a classic album, one that'll stand the test of time (probably). Just as most of the hardcore punk bands are a historical curiosity because they didn't go anywhere from super fast, super aggresive punk rock, dance-punk bands will probably go down as a historical curiosity because most of them didn't go anywhere from their starting points, either. As a 'scene' they're important and good, but as individual bands they're forgettable. I'm sure The Rapture's follow-up to Echoes, Pieces of the People We Love, is decent, but I really don't care.

It may seem as if I'm being a bit hard on Echoes, but I like to think of this as more 'correcting the curve.' For what it is and what it's trying to be, it makes for good, fun, danceable music with a handful of fantastic ideas and sounds. Unfortunately, these fantastic ideas and sounds are stretched to fill 11 songs, and anytime I can tell someone they only really need to hear one song ('House Of Jealous Lovers') off a record, I'm a bit reluctant to get too crazy about it. Anyway, Echoes is good but it's not 5 stars, 10 out of 10 good. In the end I just feel...ambivalent about it.

The Videogame Solipsist: Baldur's Gate I

Baldur's Gate(PC) 1998

In the mid to late 90s, I flirted with being even nerdier than I already was: Magic The Gathering and other 'collectible card games' became a short time obsession. In fact, I had subscribed to InQuest magazine and eventually tried forcing all of this on my friends. As if that wasn't enough, the same went for a starter kit of Dungeons & Dragons. I might have gotten my friends to try collectible card games once or twice, but the D&D kit never saw use beyond me reading the big manual over and over, messing with the figures included, and wishing I had friends who weren't jerks. Since I never had a girlfriend in high school without being a D&D and Magic playin' fool, I doubt it would've made much difference. And I think I would have really loved D&D because, hell, I'm a writer and I'm a good improviser. Plus I have a soft spot for anything fantasy. On a sidte note, one of friends was really into Warhammer, specifically the naval sort of Warhammer, so I don't know why he felt so 'above' my stuff. But I guess this is just nerdy kettles calling nerdy pots black.

Anyway, it was during this time that my family got a second, newer computer and I was getting fed up with my Nintendo 64. Thus I ended up going through a phase where I played a bunch of awesome PC games in about 3 months before I got back into console gaming again thanks to the Playstation I got for Christmas in 1998. With Half-Life 1 and Starcraft fresh in my memory--two games that revolutionized their respective genres--it seemed only appropriate that I would play Baldur's Gate in early '99, a game that similarly revolutionized PC RPGs after they had spent years wandering in the wilderness.

The original Baldur's Gate is one of those "classic" games that you can go back to now and find lots of flaws with. It's a matter of evolution in terms of game mechanics and graphics. Graphically, it hasn't aged badly, but it doesn't still look amazing, either. Mostly, I suppose, the flaws are with its gameplay, which tries to encompass too much in one game. To be a true D&D experience, it would need to allow for a wider range of options and character types. Even though you can go anywhere at any point in the game, theoretically, you're definitely guided down a linear series of stops. At the same time, you'll be hard pressed to finish the game if you don't make a character that's at least very good at combat. Baldur's Gate isn't as combat intensive as the dungeon hacky Icewind Dale games, but it's still more or less mandatory to beat the game. The Fallout games did a bit of a better job with this 'open ended character' idea; it wasn't easy to finish Fallout 1 or 2 with a non-combat character, but it was at least possible. This isn't the case for Baldur's Gate, but then again, that kind of play never interested me. I suppose the biggest problem with the game is that you would really need to know a lot about the D&D universe and rule system to understand most things without trial and error. The death mechanic and spell systems are very, very different from most other RPGs and without reading the impressively thick manual you would only find these things out too late. Even as familiar as I was with D&D, it took me awhile to get over the fact that Warrior types are incredibly basic and have no 'special' attacks. And the armor class thing has thankfully been finessed a bit in later rule revisions of D&D. THAC0?? Oh no!!
However, I'm not here to criticize Baldur's Gate. Sure, the future Bioware/Black Isle games would improve on nearly every aspect of this game--from the combat (the Icewind Dale series), the story/dialogue (Planescape: Torment), to the expansiveness of the world and number of options available to you (Baldur's Gate II)--but there's always something to be said for being first. To my knowledge, this was the first RPG that operated in real time but let you push the spacebar to 'pause' the action and issue commands on the fly. This made the game simultaneously more streamlined and more strategic than the average PC RPG. This 'real time' concept carried over into the non-combat elements of the game, meaning that Baldur's Gate had day/night cycles and changing weather. Unfortunately this tied in with the D&D mechanics of how you regained spells and replenished health, so you would have to stop every so often and 'rest', causing hours to pass in the process so that you would suddenly be in the dead of night and at a disadvantage (unless you had someone with infravision). Or you might have that annoying thing where you try to rest but random enemies interrupt your sleep, so your battered party has to fend off some foes with low health and/or spells. In which case you quickly learned to use (abuse??) the game's save/load system. And if you didn't rest, eventually your party members would complain incessantly and their abilities would suffer. This made the game more realistic but also more frustrating, too.
Though I never got far into the game, the story and characters were the first inkling most of us got of how brilliant Bioware/Black Isle's writers were. The first two Fallout games were out by this point but they were mostly just about the character you made; as they were set in post-nuclear war settings, you were alone for long stretches of time and the world was a lot of empty, moody expanses. Still, it all gets a bit complicated when you know that while Bioware wasn't involved with the Fallout series, Black Isle worked a bit on Baldur's Gate and solely developed later games using the Infinity Engine ( the engine made for Baldur's Gate) including the aforementioned Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale. At any rate, I was looking over a FAQ for this game yesterday and Baldur's Gate has way more characters than I remember, most of them with unique voice actors and personalities. The most memorable is, of course, the crazy Minsc, who has a hamster named Boo who he thinks is some kind of 'giant space hamster.' It'll be awhile before you forget his battle cry of "Go the eyes Boo, go for the eyes! Rarrrghhhhh!" The story, meanwhile, was a classic fantasy tale of the main character (who you create) trying to figure out his or her backstory set against the backdrop of bandit raids and an iron shortage in the Baldur's Gate/Sword Coast region. I think it eventually comes out that you're a spawn of one of the Gods or Demons of the D&D world, which is a pretty interesting plot twist.
Though the Fallout series got there first, Baldur's Gate set the precedent of Bioware games having moral choices and entirely different quests based on your actions. Of course this moral system is borrowed wholesale from the D&D 'alignment' system, but it arguably makes the first, best, and most consistent use of it in an adaptation of D&D to videogame. Depending on your alignment and the responses you give in dialogue, you can end up intimidating people, tricking them, insulting them, praising them, and much more. Not only did this go for NPCs, it went for your party, too. Depending on their alignment, the characters in your party might leave if they don't like your actions or how you're running things. There are also a few 'pairs' of characters, so if you, say, get rid of Jaheira or Khalid, the other will leave, too. If memory serves, you could even run into situations where your party members were so horrified/disappointed with your actions, they would leave and subsequently attack you. Speaking of killing: since I didn't play Fallout until later, this was also the first RPG I played where you could kill anyone you wanted in the game. Yes, this would call down the guards and eventually powerful bands of mercenaries and troops, but it was a really novel thing for the time.

I still have my complete box copy of Baldur's Gate and looking over the contents just now really puts me back in the mood and mindset of a younger version of me, incredibly excited to sit down with this game and go on an adventure. The Baldur's Gate series always struck a Lord Of The Rings-like balance of exploration, story/dialogue, and combat, and so whenever I think of classic RPGs--PC or console--it's usually what I'm thinking of. Looking back, the game has some flaws insofar as the gameplay is concerned--the difficulty varies wildly depending on your party and how you're playing the game, on top of the sudden curves already inherent to it because of the various assassins and 'boss' characters--and you'll need to do a lot of tweaking and modding to get it to run properly on today's computers. But I would argue that, for its time and for how its aged, Baldur's Gate is every bit as important and still incredible as its '98 brothers, Starcraft and Half-Life.

Just remember to gather your party before venturing forth.

Album of the Week: Nick Cave- No More Shall We Part

It's strange how I often don't notice the lyrics of a song on the first listen. As a writer, you'd think it was what primarily interested me in music, but that's not really the case. Sure, I eventually notice the lyrics on the second or third spin, but music has an ability to communicate meaning and/or narrative without having to state it explicitly.

On No More Shall We Part, Nick Cave has a way of writing songs that function as vivid short stories, most of the narrative contained in the lyrics. The rest of the 'story' is told through the music in an implicit, abstract way. And that is where this sort of album goes from merely great to excellent. There's something about the way the music clings to Cave's songs that fills in the rest of the details. 'Hallelujah' has Warren Ellis's mournful violin floating above the action, putting an image of an overcast dreary day in my head as Cave goes for a walk and tells us what he's thinking. 'God Is In The House' sounds like it was recorded in a church, Cave bellowing to the congregation about suburban hypocrisy and concepts of safety; the timbre of the piano reminds me of old, slightly out-of-tune pianos you hear in so many country churches across the country. And then there's that magic moment where he starts whispering to you as if he's right there...

No More Shall We Part is a classicist's singer/songwriter album through and through (though Cave gives his own unique impassioned spin on the whole thing). It's full of stories and scenes. No song is shorter than four minutes and the entire thing finally draws to a close 67 minutes after starting. Every time I listen to this album I feel like I should be sitting in the dark with candles lit, drinking a bottle of red wine and staring out the window. It's the style of album that people who flirt with the singer/songwriter genre make midway or late into their career where they simply record a bunch of great songs; slow, sad, majestic, introspective songs. They don't worry about whether the album is too long or too plodding or doesn't have a hit single. No More Shall We Part may be mostly slow songs, but its deliberate pace and thoughtful songwriting is the point entirely, what makes it so fantastic.

Nick Cave's career is far too varied (and mostly unfamiliar to me) to easily pigeonhole, but this is without a doubt the best of his singer/songwriter leaning albums, an exquisitely poetic collection of story-songs and song-stories. No More Shall We Part may be a tad overlong, it may drag in places and have poor pacing...but it's a classic in its own right. Pop open a bottle of wine, light some candles, and get ready to stare out the window...

Lil' Indie Round-Up 5

Mommy yes, the Lil Indie Round-Up returns!!
Album: Firelight by The Coral Sea
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: Well, it's probably supposed to be some intense torch given the periodic table of elements look of the album title and band name, but to me it sorta looks like a sparkler. So, I dunno: brainy indie rock about chemistry equations??
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: Chilly post rock atmospherics (our guitars have a lot of delay and reverb, dude) meet warm, spiky indie rock. With keyboards/piano thrown in for good measure from time to time. This is actually a pretty good album if rather unexceptional. This is a case where the band has their sound down but the songs just aren't there.
Album: Chandeliers by The Boat People
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: Well, the intention is clearly to give you the impression of something soft, natural, and pretty. My guess is it's something minimalist--maybe all instrumental, even.
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: What we have here is excellent indie pop from Australia. Between it and New Zealand, they're threatening to take the indie pop crown away from Britain and the U.S. This band may not have the most original sound in the world but they have great songs and the hooks embed themselves in you quite nicely. A heaping helping of Belle & Sebastian and a few spoonfuls of harder edged American indie pop, good sir or madam??
Album: Soho Lights by Tat
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: Well, other than the fact that I can't get the image to display with the proper colors, it makes me expect something obnoxious and profane. Tat is an exceedingly stupid name for a band, and the album title is a cheeky, insidery New York kind of thing that irks me to no end.
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: Remember in the mid 90s, when alternative rock was boiled down to a lame halfway point between the pop/punk of Green Day and the ultra generic, watered down grunge rock of bands everyone has forgotten?? This is that, only with a girl singer. And they're from England but you would never know it and they should know better.
Album: Bedroom Superstars by Scarlet Blonde
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: Given the musical equipment on display, it's probably some awful bedroom laptop pop affair.
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: If there were ever a Massive Attack, Everything But The Girl, and Bjork cover band, and that band went on to write original songs, it would probably sound like this. A very English-y electro-soul pop album with some experimental electronic edges. The singer has got a really nice voice, certainly, and the music/production backing her is good, but those two things don't add up to much and the whole thing is rather unexceptional. Not bad, not good.
Album: Fools Want Noise by Oh My God
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: "Dude, you remember that movie, 'Monkey Shines'?! Let's write an album and have that on the cover!!"
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: Think of the most uninspired hard rock you can. This album sounds like that. It's all the hardest rocking but at the same time least good Foo Fighters songs in one place, and the most interesting thing about this band is the backstory of how they got in a car accident before it was released. I'm sorry for that, and I know the band put a lot of work into this, but I don't grade on effort or hardship. Shitty music is shitty music no matter what.
Album: The Kindness Kind by The Kindness King
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: I think someone fell asleep in art class and hurriedly made this cover after having a dream about gay sex and cough syrup. This roughly approximates my idea of what the album sounds like: gay sex on cough syrup. Which is to say, awesome.
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: This isn't half bad. This band's got one of those powerful, melodic PJ Harvey type of female singers. This is perfectly competent but forgettable indie rock with a handful of electronic touches. A decent album but the band don't do enough to make themselves unique. The best song here--'A New Sense'--basically sounds like a cover of a Spoon song.
Album: Bittersweet Batch by Jesse Dee
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: You probably can't read it, but the little bit in the corner says 'Almost Exclusively In Stereo.' So I expect some kind of retro revivalist throwback like the new wave of garage rock bands in the early years of this decade.
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: It's a white boy with a big ol' soulful voice, set to an appropriately soulful/funky backing. I'll cut to the chase and say that for what this album is trying to do, it's actually very good. However, I never go for these kind of genre pastiches because it doesn't give the artist much room to grow. Unless he changes his sound a lot, it's just going to be an entire career of stuff like this, and who really needs three white boy soul albums?? Hell, I don't even need one.
Album: You're Being Watched by Fugitive Kind
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: Ooooh, it's all neon. Kinda like Electric Warrior by T. Rex, yeah?? Something tells me this isn't as good, though. I mean, the only band I can think of who got away with showing their gear on the cover was Battles.
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: Like so many bands I end up reviewing in this column, Fugitive Kind exemplify the truism that just having some instruments and a 'sound' is worthless without good songs or inventiveness. This band features neither good songs nor anything inventive. Instead, it's ultra generic alternative rock with an over-reaching, show offy female singer who writes the kind of lyrics you filled notebooks with and then left at home when you got into college. I mean seriously, "I wanna hold my breath/just to see/if it feels like I'm alive"??
Album: Hannah by The Age of Rockets
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: I appreciate the old timey look of this. Coupled with the band's name, I'll guess it's some kind of old timey, "singing about the 19th century and early 20th century" band, like the Decemberists only nowhere near as good.
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: The press blurb included with my copy of this album compares them to The Postal Service, but for all intents and purposes they might as well be The Postal Service. The music has that same indie-electro-pop sound and most of the time the singer is so eerily close to Ben Gibbard I wouldn't be surprised to find out they were twins...or clones. I also detect a dash of The Flaming Lips circa The Soft Bulletin but mainly in the (over)use of big choruses of voices. Or it could just be that the whole thing reminds me of The Postal Service's cover of The Flaming Lips song, 'Suddenly Everything Has Changed', a song from The Soft Bulletin. Whoops, looks like The Postal Service has you beat there, too...