the substars

I’ve traded copies of my RPM albums, Buildings and Real Time, with various other RPM Challenge participants. Since I feel like I should be writing more here, I’m going to briefly review profile the albums I’ve received. We’re not really giving out grades here, since everyone gets an A for finishing, naturally.

I should also point out that you can find all this music in its entirely on the RPM Challenge Jukebox.

Artist: Mike Kosec

Album: Run Devil Bridge

“Folk” generally brings to mind the image of a dude and a guitar, or perhaps some other formulaic group of instrumentation. But despite describing himself as such, New Jersey’s Mike Kosec isn’t afraid to use his four-track and a variety of sounds, instrumental and otherwise, to explore interesting sonic territory. The album’s opener, 1969, begins by pretty clearly evoking its namesake with acoustic guitar and reminiscing about various idiosyncratic hippie types, but gives us a glimpse of something more as the song ends with eerie backwards guitar. The poppier fare of Baby, You Don’t Love Me Anymore brings things into focus for a bit before we hear the processed and instrumental Ice Under Water, where processed xylophone chatters back and forth with birds as water flows and…is that a typewriter? The Sparklehorse-esque Water Under Ice unexpectedly features a driving Casio keyboard rhythm and haunting double-tracked vocals, and the closer, To Dance, approximates a straight-up pop song until an entirely different song emerges unexpectedly and the album ends much more mysteriously than it began.
Why you might like it: This is a powerful record that combines strong songwriting with adventurous production value and a strong thematic link, the latter being all the more amazing given the time constraint that is the RPM Challenge.

Why you might not: This record comes across as self-sabotaging, as deft instrumental work and powerful lyrical imagery repeatedly come together only to fall apart into odd rhythms and abstract sound manipulations (or another song altogether) that suit the album’s evoking of nature and time, and the loss and renewal that they invariably bring. Pop perfection, this is not.

My (additional) two cents: The two influences that came to mind as I listened were Sparklehorse and Tom Waits, but Kosec’s own RPM profile claims The Beatles as his only explicit influence. I’m not really a huge Beatles fan, but I suppose it does evoke the four-track wizardry of Sgt. Pepper and the what-the-fuck-ness of Revolver at times.

Note: I know I said I was going to do a different album this time, but don’t worry, I’ll get to that one, too.