AMG Review of My Best Friend Daniel

Stewart Mason
All Music Guide

Originally self-released in 2004 but reissued by the Lovely Feathers' label a few months after their proper debut album Hind Hind Legs, My Best Friend Daniel is more of an interesting curio than anything else. These homemade demos include lesser versions of several songs that made it onto the far superior Hind Hind Legs, including "Photocorners," "I Really Like You" (here just called "Like You"), "The Only Appalachian Cornfield," and very different versions of "Wrong Choice" and "The Lion Eats the Wildebeest," the former running nearly two minutes longer while the latter is cut nearly in half. The eight songs that weren't re-recorded for Hind Hind Legs are clearly inferior to the others: generally, they're not bad, but they're definitely juvenilia, and they make plain a strong debt to the late Montreal quirk-pop outfit the Unicorns, a similarity that Hind Hind Legs downplays considerably. Devoted fans of that album might be vaguely interested in hearing the band's unsteady early days, but the Lovely Feathers are a band that got much better very quickly after their debut, and as a result, My Best Friend Daniel is recommended strictly for the diehards and the completists.