Tuesday 21 June 2011
Finer Details
There’s an understated sophistication to the music of The Details. It’s the quiet confidence evident on songs like “Weightless in the Dark”, an effortlessly catchy song who’s lyrics cast a sallow shadow over the music’s sunny disposition. They do it with such ease and grace that you forget just how hard it actually is to create that balance on record.
Some bands write epic arrangements for songs and muck the whole thing up with lyrics as limp as wet noodles. Others pen a 10,000 word novella and try to cram it into a three-minute pop song, neither of which should have ever gotten past the editing room door. Maybe it’s because they don’t work with a crap filter, or maybe it’s because they’re pressured into getting something, anything, out there for people to hear, but you just know what these artists are selling you is second rate at best.
The Details are different. Ever since listening to their first LP, Draw A Distance, Draw A Border, I knew that this Winnipeg-based band understood the art of the musical deal. Practice, patience, perseverance, and perfection lead to the great payoff: a devoted and dedicated audience. It’s their work ethic that led legendary music producer Kim “the creepy manager in The Runaways” Fowley to fall all over himself trying to get the band to work with him. It was their astute self-awareness that led the band to take a pass on Fowley and spend three years writing and refining the songs on Lost Art before stepping into the studio with Stephen Carroll (The Weakerthans) and Brandon Reid (The National’s engineer). The result is an album of substance that often finds the delicate balance between sarcasm and sentiment exemplified on “Lazy Activists”.
The Details are rediscovering the lost art of record making, and doing it on their own terms. They released Lost Art independently on May 31, and it’s available for you right now through iTunes. There may be bigger, more popular records released this year, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a smarter, finer, album from as hardworking band as The Details.
The Details – Weightless in the Dark by killbeatmusic
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 21st, 2011 at 8:35 am and is filed under MP3, QBiM SPiNS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
