http://www.contrastandcompare.com/ Grab Latest Downloads Here en-us Letting Off the Happiness, the sophomore album from Bright Eyes, cuts its predecessor in half -- both in number of tracks and length of album -- but almost doubles its quality, both in songwriting and production. That's not to say that this album doesn't have its fair share of stinkers; the first half dozen tracks on the album is almost completely forgettable. That is, it would be, if it were not for Padriac My Prince and The Difference in the Shades. However, the last four tracks are all quite stellar, and well worth at least a casual listen. A Poetic Retelling of an Unfortunate Seduction especially foreshadows the tone and style of Fevers & Mirrors: definitely a good thing. The album as a whole doesn't fair as well. The album, although featuring more good tracks than not (barely), reeks of a naiveté -- a immature experimentation in studio noise and trickery that leaves the disc feeling entirely disjointed. Indeed, it cannot decide from one track to the next whether it's joyous or melancholy, deafeningly loud or barely audible, good or...well, not very good at all. Previous reviewers of this disc have insisted that the album requires multiple listens to really "get". That's not always a bad thing, but such a prerequisite usually demands <i>something</i> to draw the listener back for the second, third, or fourth time necessary to hook them. Letting Off the Happiness, however, seems to lack a certain je n'est-ce pas quoi -- that special something that demands another listen, another chance to win you over. It's with that in mind that Letting Off the Happiness is difficult to recommend to anyone other than previous established Bright Eyes fans; certainly, there's nothing here that will win over someone who has already passed on Fevers & Mirrors, Lifted..., or I'm Wide Awake..., but there's a number of tracks that would certainly pique the interest those who already love the aforementioned. That being said, as much better as Letting Off the Happiness is than A Collection of Songs..., it remains amongst Bright Eyes' most unessential releases to date (Winter, 2006). Bright Eyes James Taylor's mid-'70s departure from Warner Bros. may be one of the best things that ever happened to the label; otherwise, it might not have been in such a rush to compile his <I>Greatest Hits</I>, one of the company's biggest sellers ever at 11 million and counting. Taylor's style, which all but defines the word diffident, has more backbone than it's often given credit for. Here, as surprisingly complex songs like "Carolina in My Mind" (in a newly recorded version) and "Steamroller" stack up, he sounds like an artist worth spending some time with. At the least, few of his singer-songwriter cohorts came up with a melody as lovely as "Sweet Baby James." <i>--Rickey Wright</i> James Taylor Wrapping a wordy, darkly whimsical title around a bunch of songs many will find catchy and none will find pretty, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank takes after Modest Mouse's other four albums, even with guitarist Johnny Marr added to the equation. Like everything the band has released since signing with Epic in the teeth of a millennial panic, it's louder and somewhat less twisty than the group's indie output. But where song lengths diminished to four minutes on 2000's The Moon and Antarctica and three on their 2004 breakthrough, Good News for People Who Love Bad News, here they're up to four and a half. Cut to a shot of Isaac Brock just not giving a fuck. Epic hopes there's another "Float On" here to goose sales. This is unlikely, not just because novelties always are but because "Float On" found Brock in an atypically live-and-let-live mood. Usually he's more fuck-me, let's-get-lost or oh-shit-not-again. Insofar as his latest lyrics make sense at all, they yoke images of failure and frustration to the loud and the catchy -- thus rendering failure and frustration more fun, although after five albums this victory is getting too theoretical. One "Float On" candidate is the instantly hooky "We've Got Everything," with its "we know, we know" backup and, well, its "left you dying on the floor" finale; another is "Steam Engenius," which tosses in some woo-hoos on its way to "stasis is what you got." That's what Brock can tell his label, anyway. Fact is, he's a dour guy with a lot of talent and a good hustle who's been mining the same vein of meaning for more than a decade. That's a long time -- maybe too long. ROBERT CHRISTGAU Modest Mouse At the risk of being excoriated repeatedly by The Modest Mouse Club, I must first admit that the only record I own of theirs is Good News for People Who Love Bad News, perhaps the most displeasing entry in the band’s catalogue for fans, and I haven’t listened to that for, like, three months. I know, I know. It’s criminal that I would dare examine Sun Kil Moon’s Tiny Cities without first understanding the preexisting emotional resonances of the songs included. It’s criminal because I’m encroaching upon a space from which I have actively sequestered myself. It’s criminal because it took Mark Kozelek to show me that behind Isaac Brock’s disconcerting, awkward vox is a strong lyrical foundation. But here’s the thing: all that doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter because there are two types of tributes: those that are merely rote rehashes (you know, Eve 6 cover bands and such) meant solely to evoke happiness through precise nostalgia and those that view music as a reconstructive endeavor—those that see each note and lyric of every song as conditional appearances. Neither supercedes the other when they encounter a tyro’s ear, but the latter possesses the most puissance because of its transformative nature. Song is best viewed as an incomplete science offered by its creator as a challenge to all of us; a challenge to unravel, to decipher, to deconstruct, and especially to reconfigure. Tiny Cities, while lacking in certain respects, does all these. A striking feature of the entire album is its brevity. Ghosts of The Great Highway was marked by density and extension, layered narratives and visceral characters, presented no more wondrously than in the 14-minute opus of “Duk Koo Kim.” With a total run time a little over 30 minutes, Tiny Cities requires a paradoxical speed to understanding the tales described since songs seem to blossom as quickly as they furl. Sometimes you feel that this was definitely to the album’s detriment, especially on “Space Travel Is Boring.” The orchestral support never feels as though it was offered the chance to expand the sonic parameters and was instead thrown in almost without consideration. “Dramamine” presents the same phenomenon, since when the backing band enters there’s only a little under two minutes left and the piece has exhausted its transformative effects. The collapsed nature of the album is a bit surprising given Kozelek’s historical strength with extended soundscapes. This still doesn’t terribly dilute the album’s aggregate impact, and many will surely appreciate the ease with which the lyrics and themes of the originals were translated into the acoustic environ. Kozelek doesn’t seem to derive the strength of the songs from public foreknowledge—except, perhaps, on his quotidian rendition of “Ocean Breathes Salty”—and instead employs his own strengths and, this is key, interpretations. Slight inflections and vocal emphases create perceptible changes in mood and tone and Kozelek once again does both deftly, so though he may not have written the songs themselves, he is undoubtedly the source of each one’s momentum. In the long run, however, Tiny Cities should not be considered anything more than an interesting exercise of Kozelek's tiniest muscles or a musical junket into slightly different territory. This fact is especially true for those of us who appreciate the man more than the message and even the opposite. Cover albums are tricky things because they conjure some of the most vivid memories and tell you to consider only the contours while the rest is reformed. The greatest impediment to the endeavor may ironically be those that are the most appreciative of the songs since they will be the least open to the process. I'm particularly dispassionate about Modest Mouse's efforts, and even with Kozelek's laudable work on this outing I feel that something more robust could have emerged had the roots been original. Sun Kil Moon