6. Minus Story, The Captain is Dead, Let the Drum Corpse Dance (Jagjaguwar)
Minus Story practically gets away with murder by including a punctuation mark in their album title: more often than not I'd hurl such a CD out the window just on general principles. After all, the rule, clearly articulated by me whilst talking to myself many, many times over the years, states "There shall be no God-damned punctuation marks in titles, except for maybe exclamation points at the end of them." So Minus Story can fairly be described as "practically begging for it."
However, their album is marvelous, so they get a pass. Ain't life a bitch? There are dozens of Cds lying around in the back yard who didn't even get played because of the punctuation problem. This morning I was feeling charitable — must be the increased flax in my diet — and I gave The Captain is Dead, Let the Drum Corpse Dance a spin, and it was like a very slow explosion filmed by one of those early French moviemaker guys. Really dense, sometimes overly-conscious of its density, maybe not quite playful enough at times: but the operating trope here, shockingly, is love: you can hear a genuine love of sound, and of the miracle that allows us as creatures to organize sounds into structures, and a love of the particular structures being made. The album is somehow connected to the Appleseed Cast, whom I admittedly haven't heard anything by since Low Level Owl, but the links seem obvious: this is more song-oriented, though, and less grand. As I am increasingly suspicious of any grandeur that doesn't involve really long guitar solos, I am in favor of dusting down the grandeur. Hence the name "Minus Story"? One can only hope. A great album, anyhow. >>