BIRD & BATTERIES I’ll Never Sleep Again
(Self-released; 2007)
I'm always weary of albums that begin with a cover song. The first song on the album is the first impression, a taste of things to come, an appetizer, if you will, for the main course. So when the first song is a cover, it’s like the band is saying, "Our best moments come from reinterpreting someone else's music,” or "Prepare for us to sound like other bands you've heard before," or perhaps even "None of our own songs were strong enough to start the album off right."
I’m not saying that Birds & Batteries’ decision to start I'll Never Sleep Again with a cover was the worst decision the band could have made, just that maybe it wasn’t the best. The album begins with an interesting take on oft-covered "Heart of Gold," which in and of itself is pretty cool because the Birds & Batteries version definitely sounds different and restructured from Neil Young’s original. Plus it blends seemlessly into the song's second track, "Jungles (Oceans)," so well that by the time you are on the album's third track you really feel as if you’ve heard only one song. I just wish that the first two songs fell in the middle of the album instead of the beginning – that would have been such a cool thing to build up to.
Instead, the songs on I'll Never Sleep Again are seemingly arranged by genre: the first few tracks are an Americana/downtempo hybrid (think Neil Young, Wilco meet laid-back electronica), then the album moves into straight up, dead-on Delgados-style pop (especially the song "Ocarina"), and the album ends with a Flaming Lips kind of feel.
Listening to this album, I find myself going back and forth between liking and it and not. The songs are easy to listen to, mellow enough that you could listen to them and not be distracted from reading your book. It's the kind of pleasant music that most hip parents would probably not mind you popping into the CD player. It's safe, basically. This music won't challenge you mentally or emotionally, it may not take your soul on a joyride, it may sound extraordinarily familiar to music you've already heard and like, but at the end of the day it is still quite pleasant.
I'm always weary of albums that begin with a cover song. The first song on the album is the first impression, a taste of things to come, an appetizer, if you will, for the main course. So when the first song is a cover, it’s like the band is saying, "Our best moments come from reinterpreting someone else's music,” or "Prepare for us to sound like other bands you've heard before," or perhaps even "None of our own songs were strong enough to start the album off right."