First Impressions

Generally I don't put a music review (if you can call my prattling a "review") up here until I've given an album a number of listens, but I'm making an exception this time. I'm fairly familiar with these artists and these were the first few albums I was really anticipating for this month. My opinions may change with a few more listens, but these are my snap judgements based on the first go-around.

Distortion by The Magnetic Fields
Stephin Merritt is one of my favorite song writers, so I was really looking forward to this one. There are some great songs on here, with "Too Drunk to Dream" sticking out as one I particularly liked. Yet as the title of the album suggests, there's a lot of, um, distortion. I'm not a huge fan of distortion for distortion's sake, and what's the good of having clever lyrics if you can barely understand them? So, I can say right off the bat that this will rank fairly low among Magnetic Fields albums for me. That said, it's by no means terrible, and I look forward to listening to it again.

Unfamiliar Faces by Matt Costa
I touted Matt Costa's last album pretty heavily on this blog several months ago, so it should be no surprise that I was looking forward to his latest, which came out yesterday. I wasn't blown away from this first listen. The first song, the snappy "Mr. Pitiful" is quite good, but it kind of goes down hill from there until "Trying to Lose My Mind", which was also good. The penultimate song, "Heart of Stone" is pretty terrible, then things lurch back to up to almost great with the last song, "Miss Magnolia." The whole album's kind of like a sandwich made with really fresh tasty bread, one nice slice of cheese, and the rest is pretty much iceberg lettuce. I liked Songs We Sing pretty much from beginning to end, but it looks like I'll be cherry picking this new one.

Jukebox (deluxe edition) by Cat Power
I really hope my first impression of this album isn't my lasting impression, that impression being summed up as: Zzzzzzzzz....

Maybe Chan Marshall deserves to coast a bit after the popularity that The Greatest provided her, but I was really hoping she wouldn't phone this one in. Perhaps I just wasn't in the right mood when I listened to the CD this morning, but it all seemed kind of slow and repetitive. I actually really liked her Covers Record from 2000, but this effort doesn't have any standout covers like "Sea of Love" or "Satisfaction." Even the cover of her own song, "Metal Heart," doesn't hold up to her original version. Then there's the final song on the bonus CD in the deluxe addition: "She's Got You." This song was made famous by Patsy Cline, and say what you will about the types of songs Patsy Cline sang (they're all pretty much about being a poor girl who can't get no lovin'), once she did her rendition, it was hers. Chan Marshall has an amazing voice--or at the very least an interesting voice--but she's no Patsy Cline.

I'll listen to this album again in a different setting and/or if I'm in a different mood, and maybe it will grow on me. As it is, as far as these three first listens went, this one was the biggest let down.