DEAD CANARIES
Something Else
DOWNLOAD IT FROM THE QUIXODELIC RECORD STORE FOR FREE: here
Full tracklisting:
1 Going For A Ride
2 The Pump Got Caught In My Trouser Leg
3 Something Else
4 The Shortest Hour of the Day
5 Song For #6
6 Kim’s Unfinished Ride Home
7 Doli Lemon
8 Something
9 Nothing Else
10Vindaloo Was Her Name
11 Don’t Mess With The Gear Box So Far From Home
12 Tim’s Bajo Story
13 The Hoborchestra’s How & When
14 Nothing
15 Who Knew?
16 Black Hole
(C) + (P) Dead Canaries
A Cozy Home Record, 2009
This much anticipated follow-up to 2008′s brilliant “Critical Mass: Flying Things Vs. Crawling Things” is available to download from today from our little musical curiosity shop. “Something Else” has been available for a couple of months over at Cozy Home Records, but we know how pressed for time your average surfer-collector is, and this record is that great that we collectively decided to host it here as well. I’ll save babbling on about it here and instead just post a review I wrote a while back for a magazine we just couldn’t get off the ground:
I guess you’d have to live with and probably even sleep with the new offering from Dead Canaries for a month before passing serious judgement on it. But as it happens I don’t have a month, and even if I did I want so badly to stand in its corner and shout about how great it is after only a handful of listens, that I don’t think I could wait that long. It was with the same excitement that I bought the long-awaited second Stone Roses album that I eagerly followed the breadcrumbs back to the Cozy Home record store where the second Dead Canaries record “Something Else” was waiting for free download. It never even crossed my mind that I’d be as disappointed as I was when I first heard “The Second Coming”, simply because Jon of the Atom and his musical friends seem to have been chemically inoculated from making a bad record. From The New Wave Dirt to JOTA solo projects and onto last year’s critically-acclaimed underground Dead Canaries debut “Critical Mass: Flying Things Vs. Crawling Things”, it’s been an upwards audio trajectory, conversely going irretrievably deeper into the rabbit hole of musical possibility. Whoever said that there is nowhere original for guitar music to go has obviously not been fortunate enough to stumble over the same aforementioned breadcrumbs.
The best thing about Jon Fink recording projects is not really knowing what you’re going to get, or where he’ll decide to take you, and thankfully this one is no exception. I’ve been privileged to remotely observe the development of many of the 16 songs over the last year, commencing with the dark, acoustic “Thanks For Nothing You Freak Out Primadonna” EP, through demos of drum-enhanced tracks and snippets of song on various compilations, so there’s an element of familiarity about the contrasting sounds and styles that jostle and fight for breathing space across forty-something minutes in my ears. “Something Else” it would seem is a beautiful balancing act high up on the tightrope of creativity, mechanically fusing experimental organic sounds together, frequently gloomy and spectral, yet at the same time melodic and intimate, teetering precariously between the careful craft of song-writing and stumbling audio explorations. If “Critical Mass…” was about toy piano bells, unidentifiable clunking rhythm and experimentation, “Something Else” picks up the baton and really runs with it. The toy piano continues to play and mysterious objects continue to whirr and clack, but add to that the glue of dynamic live drums, a more carefully honed blend of boy/girl vocal harmonies, and the constant dance of a clarinet that really does come across like “the sound of God”, and you get the idea. In fact if you can objectively tear yourself away from listening to it, you could quite easily mistake this for as many as four separate records ripped apart and rolled into one, sparkling bluesy folk music sewn imperceptibly into glimmering instrumentals in turn giving way to sixties-tinged Indie anthems and feedback freak-outs.
Highlights? Try the brilliant instrumental would-be indie-flick-soundtrack “Kim’s Unfinished Ride Home” on for size, or the wonderful acoustic “Something” with its sweet soulful voice that sings about getting “a Jesus for my dash-board”. Arguably three of the finest moments are saved for the home stretch – “The Hoborchestra’s How and When” (indie excellence, with beautiful harmonies), the upbeat melodic mod riot of “Who Knew?”, and the closing haunting waltz of “Black Hole” (as beautiful a song as you are likely to hear this year). All things considered, all the early signs point to “Something Else” being another stunning success, a gingerbread house of a record with plenty of places for you to hide out and get lost in, where tales of unrequited love and loss simmer away beneath the psychedelic surface, and of course not forgetting instrumental pumps that get caught in your trouser leg. After all, this album isn’t just something else from Dead Canaries, it really is something else.
Find out more about DEAD CANARIES at
