Vetiver - The Errant Charm

This album is great for walking around campus, driving the streets with the windows down, or sitting in a living room absorbing the vibes. The tone is one of meandering melancholy, though not downtrodden in the least. Songwriter and bandleader Andy Cabic handled each of the compositions brilliantly, often complementing his ambient guitar parts with cool, collected keyboard sounds, propelling the track ever-forward with ebullient (read: peppy) drum machine loops. The lead guitar parts are reserved, but sweet, melodic, and pleasing when they top the mix. There are vocal harmonies abound here, but never layered too densely. As the album progresses, it moves from a sound of idling idyll into a driving midsection of (relatively speaking) steadily heavier jams until “Faint Praise”, where Cabic pulls his ambient guitar picking down from the clouds in a contemplative mood, leading into the album closer, “Soft Glass”. This final track is a nice showcase of both the folk rock roots and the more explorative arrangements. This recording is a mature work with a refined sound, and an excellent collection of songs, so have no fear loading this into a CD deck at the station or your personal music library.

Quiet Houses

Listen to Fleet Foxes.

The gist of this post comes down to the four words above, so you may as well start your download or playlist now, then come right on back here. Born from a Seattle suburb, this five-piece group makes beautiful and harmonic melodies that evoke a sense of spatiality, peace, and calm. In 2008, the group's excellent Sun Giant EP debuted, followed by their still-better self-titled LP (see left).

Leads Robin Pecknold and Skyler Skjelset share a gift for creating masterful and wonderous vocal arrangements, which seems to sonically differentiate Fleet Foxes from other folk-influenced contemporaries such as The Dodos, Bon Iver, and Iron & Wine. The music comes across as wide as a national park (see video). Percussion is rhythmic and upbeat when present, expressed with excited tambourines, simple shakers, open and acoustic tom-work, not so unlike that of Grizzly Bear's Christopher Bear. Instrumentation is somewhat varied, at least for the genre, predominately featuring a two-acoustic-guitars, vocals, and drums lineup. The group does well integrating electric guitar (Sun it Rises), mandolin (Blue Ridge Mountains), and flute (Your Protector), evoking different moods as they see fit. The overall mood is one of mature calm, painted in the utmost of sincerity by a young band destined to make more beautiful music in the coming years. Hear them for yourself.

Yellowstone from Andrew Curtis on Vimeo.

Alpha Alpha Alpha

It's Thanksgiving (Fall) Break, and finding myself in my home town of Wichita for the first time in a few months has been harsh. Wichita isn't Lawrence. It isn't. It just does not function the way that Lawrence functions, look the way Lawrence looks, breathe the same way Lawrence breathes, or think the way Lawrence thinks. I won't go into Wichita too much, as it is not particularly exceptional, save for being exceptionally average. Lawrence isn't average. But you know that.


This blog comes from the sky. It will be about the great blue at times, but will mostly focus on what's going on under the azure. This should entail concert, album, song, movie, and book reviews, photos, upcoming events, vague descriptions of some thoughts I am grappling with, other cool stuff on the internet, obscure facts, strange quotes, sweet pictures - a culmination of interesting stuff.


Ch-check it out.