My listening mood tonight could be described as fairly sombre, thus explaining the artists, whose output (specifically Songs:Ohio - Magnolia Electric Co , Sun Kil Moon - Ghosts Of The Great Highway and Sparklehorse - Good Morning Spider) are all treasured top ten albums for me. Personally, I think these songwriters all share a gift for finding beauty in sadness....I'm less inclined to use the word bittersweet, but I guess it's accurate. Another thing which binds them is perhaps them being labelled into genres like Alt Country/Americana etc.
What i'm interested in is whose career output has been stronger and why ? Which artist: has a better lyrical prowess/has taken more creative leaps/is more worthy of a future 'classic' status/haven't compromised their musical vision/have their best yet to come.
It's definately a hard choice, but I would have to side with Sparklehorse in regard to the above. From the somewhat lo-fi 'Vivadixie...' to the more sumptuously orchestral 'It's a wonderful life', Linkous' not only offers haunting and evocative music, but creates a world around them with his poetic lyrics. I have to admit that his last album 'Dreamt for light years...' really hasn't grown on me as much, as it veers a bit towards a watered down and slightly more commercially pop sounding Linkous (still much stronger than both Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips and Grandaddy's last albums - with whom Sparklehorse are often genre bunched in with), but his future collaborations with dangermouse (Dangerhorse) promise a more experimental outing to look forward to.
I realise something similar is probaly on ILM to this, but it's fascinating to see how peoples tastes have changed and where their true music loyalties lie. Red House Painters seem to have a fair bit of threads on ILM, Molina's stuff a bit less and I'm upset to see next to no Linkous Love....anyways I'm crapping on too much as usual...I want all your damn opinions now, so let the thread wars begin !!!!
― Piano Fire (Piano Fire), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 12:28 (seventeen years ago) link
i think Molina was too inconsistent for too long, though I love Ghost Tropic and some of the later stuff, but earlier he was too Oldham-lite for me. Linkous is great, I love sparklehorse. I think Kozelek has been the most consistently strong though (mainly because he's just put out more music than Linkous)
― akm (akmonday), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 19:21 (seventeen years ago) link