There's not much I love more than browsing in a record store, mind set on buying something, whatever, even if ones choice and judgement is based purely on an artist or bands witty/quirky selection of name, track listing or cover-art. For a student with little scratch to add well-researched sure bet winners to a collection alone- it's a bad habit but oh such a fun one too that's provided, luckily, more hits than misses.
So on this wet Autumn Melbourne day another session of skimming over genres and alphabetic tags, a dear mate of mine, "sesh00", chooses a couple of gems. His 'sure bet' was Spoon's Girls Can Tell, being on sale it's just collection hole-filling on his part (as was my pick of Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage). But his grab-bag purchase, loaned to yours truly immediately afterwards to get my poor soul through a long work stint, was Grand Archives self titled gem (chosen essentially because the cover art is simple and darling, of course).
This Seattle Indie-Rock 5-piece are probably well-known to many of you fantastic audiophile nerds, but I remained clueless through the first rotation and a little confused how they went under my radar and that of my comrades (who is the first to dismiss his music tastes to anyone that will listen - but don't believe it). Here are some things that should have enlightened me earlier and convinces me these kids are right up sesh00's proverbial alley: They were chosen by Modest Mouse to support them on seven U.S West-Coast tour dates. Ron Lewis, guitarist/keyboard player, has been in a handful of great bands including on the radar Ghost Stories, and singer/guitarist Mat Brooke was formally, amongst other groups, in Band of Horses who is also signed to Sub Pop Records. The lyrics are so...argh, there's a lot of words I could use that my limited vocabulary wouldn’t do a description justice, but ahh! If any of my friends had heard the album and not shared it with me before now (it's been out since February this year!) I would have been sore over it.
