But this has a lot more to do with the good kind of alt.country (Rilo Kiley/Jenny Lewis, The Czars, etc., as opposed to those corny pop dudes who just want to piggyback on country s broad shoulders, I won t mention any names here) than any kind of Devendra/Sufjan/Joanna nexus.
Our Time has nice jangly old-timey lines like an old Marty Robbins song, and Society has a nice little sexy jazzy strut with a low backing voice ...
why, I do declare, that s Kurt Wagner of Lambchop! As I live and breathe! La La is a great single, riding low and smooth and melancholy ("I never look on the bright side") with a wonderful sarcastic/hopeful chorus ("And we all know a song that s tearin everybody else up / It goes fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa / And the words that you use are laleelaleelaleela la ").
But it is telling that this pretty hard-edged country-pop confection spends its closing moments fading into cool psychedelia. Because it then segues into the lovely epic title track. This song unfolds, over the course of seven minutes, to encompass electronic music, chamber pop, country-folk, hippie rock (some serious Jefferson Airplane vibes at times), spacey ambient music, and a few more genres that I m not sure are invented yet.
And yes it also sounds like Radiohead at times, but also kind of like 10cc s I m Not in Love and OOIOO and Kraftwerk and Erykah Badu and Dani Siciliano. And this reviewer is a sucker for all that stuff. Then, at the end, it gets really weird.
So let this be two lessons to you. One, never turn off a CD after 1:45, even if it sounds kind of boring to you. Two, better start respecting Cortney Tidwell now, before she takes over the universe.
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