Surrender

Today's Music of the Day is Surrender, from The Chemical Brothers. Sorry if anyone here expected Cheap Trick!

Surrender is a pretty neat album. It's mostly electronic, some of it danceable, some of it not. I feel like the album as a whole is a solid work, though I care for some tracks more than others. I think that occasionally, the songs settle for being bright and loud and fast and sparkly rather than building emotion or musical progression. Still, some of the darker, driving tracks are really good, maybe not Explosions in the Sky or Four Tet - good, but more than tolerable nonetheless. At the risk of generalizing, I haven't really been into the other Chemical Brothers releases very much - this is probably my favorite album of theirs. I guess I've listened to so much music that isn't vocally/lyrically driven - Four Tet and Mogwai come to mind - that something like this seems unambitious if not too simplistic and straightforward for me. Still, if I went to a party, and people were dancing to this music, I would be hard-pressed not to join in. "Let Forever Be" is a song I'll always have memories of.

In other news:
Henry Rollins was freakin' awesome. Also a little scary, though; I could easily see myself being him in twenty years if I'm not careful. It's a frightening thing, to see your possible future on stage ranting in front of you.
Jason need sleep.
I might get a new laptop this weekend, I'm certainly going to try.
I'm listening to The New Pornographers' Electric Version today, loving it. Why you don't listen to this band more often is beyond me.