As a result of my current employment (newspaper delivery), I am awake at difficult hours, driving around for over an hour every, well, technically it’s the morning, but I start early enough that I still think of it is as night. This series, which will be weekly despite my doing today by itself as a proof of concept, will chronicle what I’m listening to while I’m out and about, what I think of it, and what it drives me to think about.
May 15th, 2015: Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Fever To Tell. I put this in at the start of my day, and kept it in for the whole go-round. Initially I was struck by how much they sound like Metric, probably drawing from a common ancestor or two, given that this album and Metric’s Old World Underground Where Are You Now came out within a few months of each other (spring 2013 was a good season for this kind of music I guess). Where Metric goes full-bore into the synth, Yeah Yeah Yeahs embraced their low-fi roots, with a bit more of a grungy sound. Towards the end of my trip, I was pegging the band as Metric and Pixies in some sort of interestingly unholy union. It’s a pretty good album, though not, I think, one I’ll keep in for days and days. I listened through every track once, but there was some extra time towards the end, and I ended up listening to Y Control a number of times, it was, for me, the catchiest thing on the album. If you like Metric, or Pixies, or shoegazey-garagey-type-stuff, it’s definitely worth a listen.