Morning Better Last!

An Uneven Gem

     

After purchasing their last album, Glad Fact, I very eagerly expected a whole lot of the same...lo-fi ingenuity, the warbling lead vocalist crooning with lovely, intricate guitar arrangements playing inbetween sputtery dissonance, folk and jazz. I was really disappointed, hearing terrible audio quality and ugly recording of instruments on tracks 3-5 (bad casio keyboard, electric guitar and drum machines which occur only here and stick out like gangrenous sore thumbs), fearing the whole album was doomed to empty-headed noodling with defiantly bad sounding instruments and stupid lyrics. Thankfully, this is not the case! Just ignore 3-5 (maybe also 11) and skip forward from track 2 to track 6. It's a perfect jumping off point...the rest of the album is delicate like the prettiest moments from Glad Fact and the songcraft is frequently stunning. The album doesn't seem to acheive the silly fun of "Winter's Here," which is a bit of a dissapointment, but it succeeds at being blissful and lowkey. Both Glad Fact and this album are must-haves, despite their lo-fi limitations. I'd reccomend their work to anyone who likes the organic and quirky quality of the Animal Collective. They acheive similar moments of overlapping harmonic textures and densely layered beats (pots and pans), but this album specifically seems to focus upon their lead singer and more personal songs.