Sea Lion

I downloaded this album in my recent venture to become more aware of this year's (2008) Pitchfork Music Festival (if you've never been... it's AMAZING). Along with Fleet Foxes, The Dodos, and A Hawk and a Hacksaw, this album was one of my favorite finds. This band makes psychadelic rock that is at times beautiful and haunting and at other times jubulent and fun.
The opening "Blue Penguin" is one of the quiet ones, based mostly on an eerie guitar melody with lots of twiddly psychedelic effects in the background. The next two songs, "Oh Mojave" and "Tane Mahuta" are very latin influenced and remind me quite a bit of the excellent Os Mutantes. These songs are a lot of fun and I feel would go over very well at a party. You can't help but dance to them. The next two songs return to the quiet ambient side of things. I find these two songs to be the low point of the album.
However, the next song "Remember" is stunningly beautiful. Amazing melodies and beautiful arrangement and textures. The horn part in the middle is particularly nice. This song is certainly a highlight. The album really picks up with this song and the next three songs are all top notch especially "Kenya Dig It?". This song just rocks. It has such a great drum beat.
The last song on the album, "Morning Sun" is one of the weirdest. The first half is dreamy and ambient, and then all of a sudden it switches to this trancy electro-pop feel, very remenicent of recent Of Montreal. Certainly an odd song especially given that nothing else is vaguely remenicent of that feel on anywhere else on the album.
Overall, this is a great album. I will say one of my main criticisms is the running order of the album. I think they could have resequenced the tracks so that two songs with a similar feel weren't back to back. The two Latin tracks (which I might add are the only two songs that have that style) are back to back, but nothing else on the album sounds like that. This is just a small complaint. If fun and dreamy psychedelic pop is your thing, you'd be doing yourself a solid by checking out this album.

When I did my first listen-through of the second album by New Zealand band the Ruby Suns, I thought I was listening to a remixed version of the soundtrack from an old world travelogue film. World music influences permeate the album, which is largely experimental pop along the lines of Animal Collective or Panda Bear, though from song to song, the music on Sea Lion can seem the work of multiple bands instead of just one. Despite its esoteric, often restless seeming wanderings, Sea Lion remains refreshingly unpretentious, the sound of a band not showing off, but simply expressing the love of music they have arrived at and the joy of playing it. The whole album is good, but here are some standout cuts: "Oh, Mojave," "Tane Mahuta," "Adventure Tour" and "Kenya Dig It?"

Who would have thought that Flamenco riffs could be so fun and funky? South of the Border reinterpreted though a soft focus filter, by way of New Zealand!