two more

and with these final two reviews, i'm done with my required programming for this semester at vanderbilt (i did get to pick these out):

South - You Are Here - Yam Recordings
Very few South songs grab your attention the first time around. There was their “breakout single" Paint The Silence for which they are best known, but virtually the entire remaining output by the band has been not nearly as radio friendly. You Are Here follows that trend. South have made another record with a group of songs better heard as a whole than on their own, which is why no 1 track really stands out as a favorite. tracks 1, 2, and 7 offer the best examples of the kind of British popular music South produces. Track 13 is a great song in its own right, however it ends at 3:16 and a bonus track picks up at 6:26 with a spacey backmask introduction before it swells into a beautiful song that represents the best 2 minutes of the entire album.

Elbow - The Seldom Seen Kid - Polydor
Elbow 101: The pop music Elbow make always offers layers you can never catch on a first or even a twentieth listen. The lyrics are always engaging and offer emotion without being trite. The good-natured humor they bring to the table defies their music’s reputation as occasionally gloomy. And they always put out top-notch, well-crafted work. Bearing all that in mind, The Seldom Seen Kid doesn’t disappoint at all. It’s hard to pick out favorites from such a great album, but track 3 (driving and elegant love song), track 4 (bar-fight rock), track 5 (flamenco), track 7 (slow-mo industrial), and track 10 (uplifting and hopeful) are all more than worthy of airplay and are so stylistically different that you shouldn’t have trouble finding something to like.