Indie Rock Captain Beefheart: Precious indie that is strange enough to be interesting. Like the Flaming Lips without acid. Male vocals and varied instrumentation. Songs are very multifaceted, go through many themes, tempo, timbre, rhythmic changes quite often. Theh first few easily segue, smacking of “concept album”. Use of noisey sounding synths, drums, guitar, but somehow glaze on an accessible sheen that never offends even though it sounds like it will at any second. Never a dull moment. If I were more of an authority on the genre I’d probably name-drop Fiery Furnaces, Animal Collective as well as the Lips. Cuz I’m old I’ll toss in Pavement cuz everything starts to sound like pavement lately. Track by track is actually tough to do cuz the songs go through so many changes, like Captain Beefheart when I think about it (!).

1) tribal tone with soaring melodies and vocalizations, then picks up into epic upbeat pop/rock
2) easily segues out of previous, ambience to start and uses a sparse beat n a stripped down dreamy context, very pleasant
3) trippy spacey ambience with harmonized vocalizations, campfire song on the planet Uranus until finger snapping a capela pop appears joined in with guitar and stripped down drums, pretty hip
4) heavy beat with a familiar guitar hook, like a cover of a song from the 60’s
5) starts off spazzy like Hella or something but shifts into some pretty precious indie rock with the vocals
6) pretty with marimba, shifts into a cool heavy beat with playful organ/synth
7) really lovely semi acoustic ballady piece, maybe my favorite track
8) brief, near-experimental ambient weirdness, noise
9) melody driven and epic pop feel, with a big drama thing in the middle, wtf?
10) another multifaceted thing, groovy
11) begins with ambient environmental sound, waterfall inside the Exploratorium? Pleasant guitar and chill melodies, near sing songwriter pop
12) very chill to start again, then simple guitars bring in a “heartbreaking” melody and vocals, simple fare I can imagine whipping the indie kids club into a cuddle-orgy
13) a dark yet uplifting, soaring lilting affair, awesome bookend to a great cd