Sam Amidon - Bright Sunny South (2013)

Sam Amidon - Bright Sunny South on Nonesuch
Ben Morgan

If Sam Amidon had been born in a different time his life would have been just the same. He would still run music through him natural like a river. Musicians like him have existed forever, winding in and out of towns making old standards their own. Amidon was raised in music as a community and he bleeds tradition. His technique of mixing dynamic production and dissonant emotional soundscapes with traditional folk and banjo is a wonder to behold. Amidon has found a glorious confluence where tradition and innovation merge.

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Daft Punk - Random Access Memories (2013)

Daft Punk - Random Access Memories (2013) on Columbia Records
Sonny Crooks

The robot brothers are back. With the release of Random Access Memories Daft Punk fall into the long string of comebacks by releasing their first offering in eight years—if you don’t count their 2007 live album or their 2010 soundtrack for Tron: Legacy. But, you should count them. More than any other album they challenged their rabid fanbase’s expectations and subsequently proved that you could always count on the French duo to create great music whether they’re busy selling out or not.

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Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City (2013)

Vampire Weeekend - Modern Vampires of The City on XL Recordings
Ben Morgan

Vampire Weekend have never had a time in their career when they didn’t have to manage an aura of hype around them. In general they’ve controlled it deftly and kept a consistent, unrepentant image. This new album continues that trend by deftly avoiding repetition all while grappling with religion and the meaning of life. Vampire Weekend aren’t afraid to put in the work, but what’s most impressive is how good they manage to look doing it.

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Jim Guthrie - Takes Time (2013)

Jim Guthrie - Takes Time on Static Clang
Jacob Dixon

When you look at an artist like Bon Iver or Father John Misty, you’ll see someone so tortured by the art that they create and, while at times their concepts or delivery may come off as tongue-in-cheek, they always take themselves and their craft very seriously. Then you have someone like Jim Guthrie, who is the equivalent of a musical John C. Reilly; someone who can be incredibly serious and poignant (see Magnolia, Gangs of New York, and The Hours), but can also take it a little too far in the opposite direction (see Step Brothers, The Dictator, and Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie).

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Band Review: Sigur Rós, Part 2

Band Review: Sigur Rós, Part 2
Sonny Crooks

Part 1

As if (  ) were a perilous journey out of danger back to the warmth of waking life, Takk… is the melancholy ending. We realize that during the exile in Made-of-Emotions-Instead-of-Atoms Land the idea of home was greatly romanticized. It’s great to be back, but a perilous journey is also an adventure. “Sé lest” fades into an oom-pah band refrain in a way that only Sigur Rós could make sound beautiful, then back to the melancholy, as if the narrator were staring out the window longing for the high seas or mysterious espionage. 

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M83 - Oblivion OST (2013)

M83 - Oblivion OST (Deluxe Edition) on Back Lot Music
Jacob Dixon

The purpose of a film soundtrack, simply put, is to increase the emotional depth and to bridge the gap between the viewer and what is being viewed. If well executed, a film soundtrack has the power to, without words, cause an emotional response from its audience, in ways that an actor performing lines may not fully satisfy.

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Band Review: Sigur Rós, Part 1

Band Review: Sigur Ros, Part 1
Sonny Crooks

For all the right reasons Sigur Rós sounds otherworldly and emotionally cliche, but the kind of cliche that’s so cliche it’s become vogue again. Their music is big in the way that a two-ton block of obsidian is “significant”. It’s an object not a iTunes visualization.

Ágætis byrjun begins with the droning stride of an object traveling at light speed; a ship carrying every element deemed beautiful by dead old white men. The passengers perform a vigil to the welders who died while building the vessel. Between each song we hear a different strange noise signifying that we are traveling Magic Schoolbus style through the body of god, to another limb of reality. The music I’m talking about is the soundtrack for such imagined events, but it was all made by men—well no, the album came out in 1999 making the oldest member 24 years old; so they were barely men—Boys. Boys who barely knew anything about music theory or song-crafting, who were making instruments out of trash bin finds, who chose their vocalist by deciding who was the “least bad” at singing. This overwhelming lack of experience and talent went on to produce a body of music, starting with 1997’s Von, that is truly in a class of it’s own.

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Tegan and Sara - Heartthrob (2013)

Tegan and Sara - Heartthrob on Warner Bros. Records
Ben Morgan

I feel a little late to this party. Tegan and Sara first came on my radar when the White Stripes covered “Walking With a Ghost” in 2005. After that I never gave them a second thought until this year saw the release of Heartthrob. At this point the sisters are signed to Warner Bros., hit the charts at no. 3 easily, and are on their seventh album. I feel a little bit like I just decided to check out “that email thing” and signed up for an AOL account. It looks and sounds like the thing everyone else is using and enjoying, but I get the sense I’m doing it wrong. Maybe I’m too late after all. All the cool people left early.

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Daft Punk’s New Album Is a Thing You Can Listen To

Daft Punk’s Album Is Streaming on iTunes
Ben Morgan

Daft Punk’s red hotly anticipated new album, Random Access Memories, started streaming today in iTunes only hours after a video of the robots opening the album and playing the first ten seconds posted to YouTube.

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She & Him - Volume 3

She & Him - Volume 3 on Merge Records
Gene Priest

I will start this review by saying I have always been a huge fan of M. Ward’s solo music and I feel he is quite possibly one of the best and most important songwriters in quite some time, and what I can’t wrap my head around is that in my conversations with people here and there, he seems to be widely overlooked by quite a large number. I will also admit I equally love Zooey Deschanel and her vocal style and quirkiness, which you can’t deny if you have ever seen her in any of her countless movies or Fox Television show New Girl. Volume 3, being the third full length LP (barring a Christmas Record), comes with no surprises. To some, this is a great thing, I honestly already knew what to expect out of this album before hearing a single note. To others there is a point of stagnation in a band’s output that can easily turn them away from further listening. I would still say I fall in with the former, primarily because I have loved everything up to this point, and I was not disappointed.

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Over The Rhine tease new album

Over The Rhine tease new album
Jacob Dixon

For the past few days, Over The Rhine have been taking to Facebook, and have been offering quite a few glimpses into their forthcoming album, which is entitled Meet Me At The Edge of the World. The double-disc album is only just now entering the mastering phase, so no official release date has been announce as of yet.

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Subscribe to Desert Hymns Podcast on iTunes

We just want to remind everyone that the Desert Hymns podcast is officially on iTunes.

You can subscribe to it by clicking below or by downloading the Podcast app from the iOS app store and searching for “desert hymns”. 

The Uncluded - Hokey Fright (2013)

The Uncluded - Hokey Fright on Rhymesayers
Ben Morgan

Imagine the first time you saw swirl ice cream coming out of a machine at a family buffet restaurant. It seems like a good idea. Chocolate and vanilla are both pretty good. Everyone has their favorite. Together they could be even better. Now take another leap and imagine that machine puts out french fries and ketchup in the same kind of melange. It should be alright. Those things go together too. But, why did they have to be smashed together like that? It probably still tastes pretty good. I’m hungry.

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Hem - Departure and Farewell (2013)

Hem - Departure and Farewell on Waveland Records
Jacob Dixon

If there’s one thing that I love about artists like Hem, Aimee Mann, or Over The Rhine, it’s their unashamed honesty. You listen to an album like Drunkard’s Prayer, and you can tell without being told, that the album is about Karen and Linford’s near-divorce and eventual reconciliation. But even when the songs are anything but autobiographical, they still carry this believability. Departure and Farewell, the newest offering from Hem, is much the same, but in a very different and unique way.

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Akron/Family - Sub Verses (2013)

Akron/Family - Sub Verses on Dead Oceans
Sonny Crooks

Deep in the territory of Akron/Family’s seventh album Sub Verses is the track Sand Time which boast lyrics so biting its a wonder they’re not already cliche: “You can borrow money / but you can’t borrow time”. It’s a monolith of a statement, the catchiest bit of philosophy I’ve ever been offered by an ‘experimental’ band, and is indicative of an integrity that has set Akron/Family apart for over a decade.

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