I splurged on music a bit at the weekend, branching out into some stuff that would normally be a little off my radar. I picked up Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots by The Flaming Lips, Agaetis Byrjun by Sigur Ros, Dear Catastrophe Waitress by Belle and Sebastian, and Afterglow by Sarah McLachlan. Okay, so the Sarah Mclachlan isn’t much of a branching-out for me, but I bought the CD as much for a challenge as anything else. It’s not a CD, see.
At first glance, iTunes didn’t have any problem recognising the disc as a music CD and ripping it to MP3. Upon listening to it all the way through, though, there are a couple of tracks that have a very short (a fraction of a second) burst of static at the start. I’ll try re-ripping to see if this was just a coincidence, and if that doesn’t work, it’ll be a job for the low-tech line out/line in analog solution. Ho hum.
First impressions of the albums: Afterglow sounds like standard Sarah McLachlan at her most mellow. No immediate stand-out tracks. Yoshimi seems to vary from the experimental to the meanderingly inane. Some good melodies, and a lovely drum-driven squelchy electronic cacophony in “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, Part 2”. Agaetis Byrjun is too slow and laid back for it to have fully registered on me yet. It may be a sleeper, but so far it’s just sleepy. Dead Catastrophe Waitress makes me wonder why I’ve never sampled Belle and Sebastian before. They’ve got some delicious lightweight indy-pop going on here.
Welcome to Belle and Sebastian. Be warned: it’s highly addictive and they’ve got more than a few albums out. 🙂