Monday 12 April 2010
QBiM SPiNS: You Say Party! We Say Die! XXXX
We all have one, our own special version. Maybe yours is a book long ago purchased and left on a shelf (or in a bag) that you find (again), read, and realize we’ve been missing out on a beautiful story. Maybe it’s a sweater gifted to you by a friend or relation that has sit in a drawer long enough to forget about, but once you stumble across it and put it on, you realize that nothing in your current wardrobe is as comfortable or warm. So it is with me and XXXX, an album released on September 29, 2009, and only now getting my full attention and review.
I don’t have any excuse to give you–it’s a matter of not having paid close enough attention when it first came out–but just like the Globe & Mail said at the end of the year, the third full-length You Say Party! We Say Die! album certainly was one of those great record released last year that I (and maybe you, too) didn’t hear really listen to. I did talk about it in this post, and I spoke about it quite favorably–glowingly I might say–but in the music blogging world sometimes even the good records die a young and immediate death. As soon as you hear something that draws your attention it’s replaced by something else that does the same (in my case, that post was followed by Morrissey collapsing on stage and The Wilderness of Manitoba). But I digress, for we’re not going to let the same thing happen twice.
XXXX is YSP!WSD! at it’s dark and dancey best. “Dark Days” and opening track “There is XXX (Within My Heart)” both have an edginess that in lesser hands could come off as cartoonish and posed. The dancier elements on XXXX are balanced out by the punkier moments of “Glory”, “Cosmic Warship Avengers” and “Make XXXX”, sequenced in an almost rotational fashion so that we never get the same thing back-to-back. Where YSP!WSD! shine though is on the glorious 80s inspired mid-tempo-techno-ballad “Laura Palmer’s Prom”. I could very well hear the song being played in the gymnasium of Twin Peaks’ lone high school, girls in taffeta and patent white shoes carefully bopping with plastic cups full of punch in their hands, while their dates decked out in rented tuxes sway cautiously lest the flask hidden in their breast pocket should fall loose. No body is smiling of course.
What will make you smile though is “Heart of Gold” the album’s closing track. Back in September I said “The song has a remarkable depth to it, and reveals a true heart of gold beating beneath its surface” and I still feel the same way. I also said that it “destroys all previous conceptions about what/who this band are all about”. “Heart of Gold” is the band’s coming out track, their evolutionary jump forward as a band that can’t easily be pegged by derivative genre-splicing categories. XXXX may well be the album that changes You Say Party! We Say Die! in the eyes of the record buying public. It’s success so far has demonstrated that there’s more to the band than initially meets the eye and the ear. If like me, you already filed this LP away in your library, please do them the honour of going back and listening again with fresh ears and an open heart, ready to let XXXX in.
MP3: You Say Party! We Say Die! “Laura Palmer’s Prom”
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