Fucking in the Streets

It’s weird, but falling in love (or even just very strong like) with
a record—the kind of infatuation that makes a person want to
write about music in the first place—can be detrimental to doing
the job of a music critic. Nobody likes a whiner, and, sure, getting to
hear new music for free and sometimes still briefly ahead of the leaks
is great, but there is a never-ending pileup of new albums
coming out to grapple with, mail bins full of manila-enveloped promo
CDs that need listening to. Wanting to listen to one album on repeat
for days at a time can really get in the way of that already
daunting “to hear” pile.

Of course, you can’t hear it all. Some old crank famously observed
recently that there are now far more hours of music coming out every
year than there are actual hours in which to listen to them. The idea
that any person could possibly attain some comprehensive firsthand
impression of everything that’s currently happening (to say nothing of
already happened) in music is laughable, let alone the idea that one
could have time to hear as well as to think about all that
stuff. Which is not to say that a conscientious critic won’t still feel
an impossible urge to stay on top of it all. (The Stranger‘s Michaelangelo Matos recently proposed a rebellion
against this pressure: the Slow Listening Movement, which attempts to
absolve the critic for only being able to hear one thing at a time and
proposes a healthier, more sustainable pace for consuming music.)

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that the last few weeks have been a
terrible time for my staying on top of it all—there’ve been
missed shows and listening parties, incoming records piling up higher
and higher. There are at least a couple of reasons for this, but one is
Creaturesque, the forthcoming new album from local
indie-pop act Throw Me the Statue (due August 4 via Secretly
Canadian).

Creaturesque will be the band’s second album—following
their much-loved (at least by The Stranger) debut,
Moonbeams, which was self-released on bandleader Scott
Reitherman’s Baskerville Hill label in 2007 and rereleased by Secretly
Canadian in 2008—and it is not entirely without the problems that
stereotypically plague sophomore releases. Where Moonbeams surprised at several corners, Creaturesque feels comfortably
familiar; some of the old album’s endearingly rough, homemade edges
have been traded for objectively better production (courtesy of Phil
Ek); and so on.

But! The best, most lovable things about the band remain:
Reitherman’s odd knack for cramming unwieldy words and phrases into
totally charming pop songs where they should really have no
business, the band’s simply catchy melodies and flattering
arrangements, that chorus-sweetening glockenspiel.

You can hear some of the new material when they play the Vera
Project benefit A Drink for the Kids on July 11 at Neumos, opening
for Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes. And you’ll no doubt be
reading more about the band and the album this summer—consider
this rant merely a warning.