First post!
One Time Bells - French Kicks
My favorite new CD in a while- Down Now is my favorite song here, largely due to the last minute or so of the song. The amazon.com review got stuck in my head as describing their music as "angular post-pop" which I thought was very fitting. Building these links this morning, I see that sadly the actual text of the review starts with: "The French Kicks angular proto-post-art-punk..." which is alright, but I prefer my corrupted "post-pop" to "proto-post-art-punk" in the end.

I listened to it on a train in europe last month- started as we were sitting at the station still, and I could see a clock hung on a station pillar. The first two songs played out as I watched our departure time count down, and listened to announcements in a language I couldn't understand through my jet lag. Then we started moving, slipping slowly through miles of stopped tracks and apartments, the city trailing away but refusing to give out to countryside for a long time. Down Now felt like a fuzzy blanket draped across my exhaustion, the sparseness of the arrangements about all I could handle. This is not an empty, echoing album, although I can hear Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone (recorded in the same studio) in it. Most of their songs start off slowly with isolated drums and guiter, and take a few minutes to build up. It's an interesting approach, and I like the structures that are set up.