Earn This

Common courtesy! Here I’ve been yammering for months before properly introducing myself. Without a handshake or a how’s-your-father, I would have soapboxed myself to sleep while you smiled kindly. Please pardon me, good fellows and fellowesses.

This site’s authors have set a precedent of revealing their bias to their readers up front. I have not been so upfront. It’s time to pull back the curtain and subject myself to your personal evaluation. It’s time to be proper, if not punctual.

For your consideration, I present my top ten favorite albums:

1. Spock’s Beard – Snow (2002)

What follows will prove that only the magnum opus of a progressive rock genius could suitably head my list. Although Neal Morse has maintained a dedicated following in his post-Beard years churning out autobiographical and soteriological concept albums as a solo artist, this last of his efforts as the frontman of America’s uncontested lords of modern prog remains his most engaging. For nearly two hours, an organic and thoroughly melodic stream of hard rock, orchestras, and jazz fusion accompanies the operatic story of a mystically gifted albino in search of purpose. I would direct your focus to the extensive range of genres that are perfected over the course of the album and to the number of memorable climaxes achieved en route.

2. Gatsby’s American Dream – Volcano (2005)

In order to give everything away as fast as possible, my #2 is also a concept album. However, It is not a rock opera and it barely exceeds half an hour in playtime. Gatsby’s defining motive was a bitter urge to flip off the recording industry in everything they did. Their abrasive demeanor and standard-fare equipment belie musicality that is beyond daring: it’s more like they don’t even care. They rush like fools into a world of metric modulations, 30-second songs, and 3-minute songs that rewrite themselves every 30 seconds, usually rejecting the suggestion of a chorus. This is the kind of music whitewater rapids would listen to. On Volcano, Gatsby’s loads that style with interconnected lyrics that spend the 13 tracks integrating Lord of the Flies with the story of Pompeii, with myriad easter-egg references sprinkled on top spanning at least literature, gaming culture, and, of course, the big bad music industry.

3. Liquid Tension Experiment – s/t (1998)

If you’re still wondering what I meant by “progressive rock” earlier, I don’t have space to explain it now. Think Pink Floyd or Kansas. If you only know one modern prog group, it’s probably Dream Theater. Magna Carta records offered Dream Theater’s drummer, Mike Portnoy, the chance to construct his very own dream-team supergroup. The result, Liquid Tension Experiment, is simply the most dense collection of virtuosity our planet could support. While indulgent jams dominate the follow-up, this initial release primarily features fully composed and arranged works… all worked up from scratch to final product in less than two weeks. LTE is purely instrumental. And if instruments can speak, then this is Ciceronian oration.

4. Pelican – Australasia (2003)

Another genre I must leave unexplained is post-rock. If you’ve heard of Tortoise, Mogwai, or Godspeed You! Black Emperor, think of them; if not, look up Sigur Rós or Explosions in the Sky. Sift out any remaining vocals and stir in the heaviness of drone metal, then stick it in the oven and let it bake your brain for about 11 minutes. Regroup for track 2. Pelican has received criticism for deficient drumming and is commonly held to be a lesser version of their niche’s fairy godfathers, Isis. But I find that Pelican’s simple and direct approach lends them a purity that makes it look like other bands are just trying too hard. Australasia seems comfortable in its emotions, as though these guitars are on a first name basis with calmness and tension alike.

5. The Rocket Summer – Hello, Good Friend (2005)

Surprise! A departure from the experimental and exploratory artists above, The Rocket Summer is one kid from Texas with a backpack full of jangly pop tunes about how wonderful life is. It’s true! So what am I, an apparent artsy progger, doing cheering for Island Def Jam’s premier church-going heartthrob for preteen girls? Bryce Avary is a musician of no suspect merit who performed every instrument in studio for his first two albums. When a band’s primary songwriter is a bassist, they tend to have sick bass features. When a band’s primary songwriter plays everything, every musical line gets infused with motion and intent. Layering of concurrently meaningful harmonies elevates The Rocket Summer beyond fields of alt-rock peers, and the undiluted joy in Avary’s still-maturing voice sends me to heaven.

6. Junction 18 – This Vicious Cycle (2000)

If you check the band’s extant MySpace, you might find this to be another stumper. More likely, you’re going to identify Junction 18 as my prized pet band, and I won’t dissuade you. Here we have four guys who never made a second full-length and barely toured outside of Massachusetts. They sound like any emo band from the recent peak of that insult’s popularity. My devotion is tied to their execution of a linear songwriting ethic in a genre that never heard of such a thing. By linear, I mean that choruses, when used, demarcate verses that each have their own character. Putting a different lyrical stanza to the same tune is common. Changing the underlying melodies, chord progressions, and structures of the song with each passing minute creates an experience of continued forward motion that sweeps out a coherent musical story arc.

7. Rx Bandits – …And the Battle Begun (2006)

“Ska” is a term I pray you’ve already met in some form. By convention, ska is analyzed into three waves (so far), and the Rx Bandits have a few toes dipped in each with two arms reaching for the sky. Reggae and jazz pervade the savvy rhythms of these impassioned rockers. …And the Battle Begun has its finest moments accentuated by horns, which were sadly absent from their more recent sixth release. A live recording process here ensured two things: that all of the Bandits’ energy would survive production; and that said energy would be multiplied through positive feedback between bandmates, all in one room, letting loose on jams and shout choruses. Recurrent themes and deadeye transitions add a transcendent character to this thoroughly visceral masterpiece.

8. The Cardigans – First Band on the Moon (1996)

I’m a sucker for Nina Persson’s voice. But I don’t follow The Cardigans just because that coy alto purr sends me into a fanboy daydream. Guitarist Peter Svensson has bona fide songwriting chops – and an appetite for metal, wonderfully enough, which is why a cover of Iron Man comes two tracks after Lovefool. (Lovefool is the one song you know by the Cardigans: “Love me, love me, say that you love me….”)  Later absorbed into Universal Music Group, Stockholm Records released First Band on the Moon while still an independent label willing to give some future notables from Sweden the chance to do their own thing. Amidst the gamut run by the Cardigans discography, First Band on the Moon ranks as the most oddball (in a cute way) of the pop. The arrangements are unexpected and full of zest, with bunches of instruments used, only a few at any given time, and not a single one out of place.

9. The Dissociatives – s/t (2004)

The irradiated rock generated by this assembly of quasi-famous Australians features all the harmony and vibrance you could want. It also features the “surreal for the kidz” choir, a handful of “dub freakouts,” and a guy credited on one track for playing “ice bucket.” Vocals that are both warbly and choppy blend in with an alien soundscape of blips, whirrs, and crashes. And yet the organic whole punctually plots out verses and choruses like beaten paths in a foreign land. If you’re scared, know that all the creatures surrounding you in the world The Dissociatives create are smiling and singing along. Evidently, the originality of this album defies description. More shocking still is the extreme catchiness of the melody that is the fallout.

10. Guster – Lost and Gone Forever (1999)

More than any other artist on this list, Guster might come off as plain. One of many indie success stories, another college rock band that outgrew the underground, these eco-friendly Jews now float along the mainstream between the sloping coasts of “alternative” and “adult contemporary.” But I would blindly recommend Guster to anybody seeking good music. Their consistent aesthetic appeals equally to fans of bubblegum pop, who get dominant hooks thickened by vocal harmonizing, and seekers of invention, who get uncommon teflon rhythms from Brian Rosenworcel. Universal appeal is as indisputable a reason as any to be ranked among the best.

(Get it? They’re “teflon” rhythms because they’re “stick-free!”)

Well I guess it began towards the end of 1996 when I received a call from [head of Magna Carta Records] Pete Morticelli and [head of Shrapnel Records] Mike Varney who wanted to put together a couple of “Super Groups” (for lack of a better term!).  One turned into the Black Light Syndrome project with [Frank Zappa drummer] Terry Bozzio and they asked me if I’d like to help construct the other….

So… They asked me to compile a “Wish List” of all the musicians I’ve always wanted to work with.  With Frank Zappa and John Lennon no longer being options, I came up with some other names.

These words were taken from the liner notes of the self-titled debut album by Liquid Tension Experiment, whose eventual lineup consisted of drummer Mike Portnoy (the author of the notes), bassist Tony Levin, guitarist John Petrucci, and Jordan Rudess on keys.  With no clear frontman and no vocalist in sight, this all-star prog rock dream team laid down some of the most fluid, engaging, virtuosic instrumentals ever unleashed.

They will be remembered as Mike Portnoy’s second-best supergroup.

Before the turn of the century, in fact, Portnoy worked with multi-instrumentalist Neal Morse to assemble Transatlantic: the contemporary equivalent of Asia, the grown-up future selves of A Perfect Circle, the prog rock version of… I don’t know, Chickenfoot.  Let me introduce the cast.

Mike Portnoy of Dream Theater is the premier living prog metal drummer.  What he lacks in jazz chops – and I say “lacks” only relative to the absolute greats – he proves unimportant through the inimitable crossover success of his primary project.

Neal Morse, now a solo Christian artist with a string of religious concept albums under his belt, rose to international fame as the mastermind behind Spock’s Beard, America’s answer to Genesis, founded in the 1990′s.

Roine Stolt, Sweden’s gift to prog, has achieved greatness foremost with The Flower Kings with his songwriting and lyrical prowess.  His work on guitar, no less, brings to mind a young Steve Howe.

Pete Trewavas has played bass for Marillion ever since Fish was there… which is a statement I encourage you to investigate on your own if its gravity is lost on you.

These accolades are leading somewhere, I assure you.  Transatlantic congregated for a week or two to throw together a brilliant masterpiece in each 2000 and 2001.  Almost a decade later, these musical giants of our day have graced us with one more taste of teamwork, entitled The Whirlwind.

As we should expect, Transatlantic used up just about every second of the 80 minutes a mass-produced cd can hold, filling that space with one continuous piece of music demarcated into twelve thematic tracks.  All four guys bring their own sounds to the table and everybody can be heard singing lead at some point or another.

A seven-minute instrumental overture gives way to the bookend motif “Whirlwind,” which lyrically sets the stage for tales of life’s oppressive confusion and how we can overcome it.  Soon after, “On the Prowl” lays down the sickest jam you ever did hear.  Killer drum licks pair with a genius jazz bassline to hold the ground while Stolt’s guitar and Morse’s keys take to the sky, cruising through a wild array of styles and rhythms with adept elegance.  That solo session stands as a clinic on how to show off technical ability while remaining genuinely melodic and engaging, all off the top of your head.

Expansive vocal harmonies draw your attention in “Out of the Night” while the striking guitar commands your toes to tap.  It is one of many tunes to evidently showcase team songwriting – in fact, this is true of every song on the disc.  Influences from Spock’s Beard and The Flower Kings take turns directing the overarching mood of each passage while Trewavas and Portnoy invent whatever ideal companion of an undercurrent they’d like to produce at any given time.

In truth, there isn’t much Dream Theater to be heard here.  Portnoy’s brand of rock is an outlier next to relative poppiness around him in Transatlantic.  However, in “Is This Really Happening?”, the metal beast is freed and a sonic onslaught of punishing rolls and blast beats coerces Stolt into some serious dark shredding.

Only one standalone instrumental was written for the album, “Pieces of Heaven,” and though it is shorter than one might have expected, each of the other songs contains a host of solos and constructed melodies enacted sans vocals.

Just before the reprise of the bookend motif, Neal Morse slips in some of his least obscured religious undertones in “Dancing with Eternal Glory.”  That man is a singing preacher at heart who has no reserves about his evangelical calling.

The Whirlwind closes with every bit of grand majesty becoming of a progressive concept album.  If anything, I was surprised that equal magnificence and pomp did not decorate the first few minutes of the overture, but the greatest swell was saved for last.

So as to provide some small facade of objectivism, let me critique the performance of all four musicians on this album in the department of vocal performance.  Neither Stolt nor Morse, who split the major part of the singing duties, will ever win an award for having a pretty voice.  Certainly both are capable, but with unspectacular ranges and what some might call an elderly tremolo to their sound.  Trewavas and Portnoy are nothing if not unremarkable vocally.

The music in The Whirlwind is at times technically extreme and often improvised or elaborated.  What will be far more salient to non-proggers is that the songs are long and, from a mainstream standpoint, circuitous.  Verses and choruses together make up only half of the 80 minutes, a fact which can leave unfocused listeners feeling lost.  This is all a matter of the target audience: some people find Transatlantic cumbersome in style while others see them as monoliths of ability.  Fortunately, those who have cause to stumble upon the group tend to fall into the latter set.

Mike Portnoy’s “Wish List” of musicians didn’t include a single vocalist.  Yet a couple of years down the road he and Pete Trewavas joined two frontmen to form a powerhouse collective of prog’s most famous standard bearers into the new millenium.  Any predictions for who will be part of his next collaboration?

Yesterday a package arrived.  By the Amazon logo printed on the side of the box, I knew it was finally time to crack open new material from Transatlantic, Buckethead, and Jupiter Sunrise.  That last one in particular excited me since an ad for the cd, May the Box Burn Down around You, was the first sign of life I’d seen from the “collective” once composed entirely of vegans since the noteworthy Under a Killer Blue Sky.

This morning I sat back and absorbed all 38 minutes of the new work, and I tell you what: I cannot wait for this record to be released!

As I listened to the ten original tracks, all fully mixed and produced, I foolishly began to think that the cd in my computer had been completed and advertised for sale.  The band themselves disagree.

On Tuesday, January 19, 2010, a blog post appeared on Jupiter Sunrise’s MySpace with the subject line “NEW Exclusive Music”.  Below was a Tunecore widget through which I could stream or purchase the songs from May the Box Burn Down around You and the line “Here is a convenient way to listen to and purchase some new tracks before everyone else does!”

Amazon posted the full album in mp3 format for track-by-track $0.99 downloads on November 6, 2009.  One month later, they began selling a hard copy, which I purchased without fully understanding the finely printed caveat:

“CD-R Note: This product is manufactured on demand when ordered from Amazon.com.”

Since a jewel case and liner were promised, I wasn’t sure what to make of the footnote.  The cd that arrived wasn’t labeled in sharpie – it was printed with artwork matching the liner, which displayed the picture you see at the top of this post (also seen on the band’s MySpace) and a tracklist.

By all rights, it looked like a legitimate product, albeit one with lackluster art direction.  And all of the songs were there!  Truly, your guess is as good as mine on this one.

If I may push your furrowed brow to a fully hanging head, note that the Jupiter Sunrise MySpace makes the following distinction:

UKBS Line-up: Mark Houlihan, Ben Karis, Chris Snykus, Aaron Case, Marshall Altman (producer)

Currently: Mark Malek, No’a Winter Lazerus (producer)

(If it concerns you that all of my information comes from MySpace, please find an active page on the jupitersunrise.com or .net domain and direct me to it.  Otherwise, there isn’t much information out there on our intrepid heroes.)

What is problematic about the line-ups, you ask?  All of the songs on May the Box Burn Down around You were written and sung by Mark Houlihan, who appears to no longer be a member of Jupiter Sunrise.  Curiouser and curiouser!

Indeed, the content is very much what one would expect if Ben Karis split and the rest of the “collective” carried on, though perhaps shy on variety.  The whole 38 minutes remind me of Cherry Wine, originally recorded on the prelude known by fans as the “Purple Demo” (2002).  Heaven and Endless, the desperate and anthemic closer from Under a Killer Blue Sky (2004), receives two sequels on this sophomore LP.  (Or will, I guess, once it comes out.)

There is an overriding acoustic spirit framing every song, though plugs are far from absent.  Houlihan seems to have a close, personal relationship with his nylon strings, one he cherishes aloud in My Guitar Is My Pillow.  For irony’s sake, this final song uniquely eschews picking for plunking as a grand piano takes center stage.

Styles and rhythms stave off monotony, as Jupiter Sunrise (or whatever Houlihan-based poseurs these are) ranges from Latin dance Fountain of Joy to the haunting coos of Primary Colors of Darkness.  Yet an overall lack of virtuosity across the instruments deprives each song of the full potential that is so easy to envision.

Since I credited Jupiter Sunrise with effective use of instrumentation on their previous album in an earlier post, this weakness leads me to question the current composition of the band.  With the confusion mentioned above, this question hasn’t much faith that its answer is in sight.

Under a Killer Blue Sky has long been a niche favorite of mine.  With the band far from stability, I had great hope but shaky confidence that a subsequent outing would ever be forthcoming, to say nothing of the quality I had expected.  Now I’ve taken a gut shot from the unexceptional grade of the album and I remain in the ring to suffer more until I can find some closure and put to rest the oddities surrounding the CD-R that I bought.

Jupiter Sunrise: whoever you are, whenever you are, I hope you find your way back home.

Historians tell us that the world’s first jingle was written by the minstrel Bartholomew the Profitable in 986 CE.  Hired by Percival of Shropshire to help sell chicken-bone dice, Bart traversed the countryside playing to captive audiences, replacing his traditional opener “The Tale of Sir Ywain the Bastard” with a ballad of 652 stanzas in praise of Percival’s dice.  The memorable chorus was permanently planted in the ears of all English men:

Across the streams and valleys
Of our flushing island home
Much finer dice you’ll narry find
Than Percival’s chicken-bone!

Subsequently, Percy’s sales increased to such an extent that he nearly altogether rid the British isles of barnyard fowl.  His example was adapted by all merchants who heard tell.  Soon the dales were swollen with contracted bards peddling epic commercials with the help of their road-worn lutes.

Moving forward a thousand years, we find that the jingle has blossomed into a virtual necessity for market-men in every market.  And while sing-along slogans have always adhered to the musical zeitgeist to ensure their memorability,  this continuity of spirit entails a critical divergence of form.  Advertisements measured in stanzas would naturally have been considered on par with the other merry tunes of a jongleur, but a modern critic would never lump catchy mercantile melodies in with radio pop.

Yet what is the difference between, say, the $5 Footlong song from Subway commercials and the latest Rihanna single?  The latter shows little novelty from one iteration to the next, just as the former is presented from spot to spot as variations on a theme, and neither one consists of more than ten seconds of original material.

I don’t mean to belittle the condition of the mainstream here; on the contrary, I wish to extol the substance of the modern jingle.  Chronically overlooked or perennially belittled, the songs that fill the gap between 7-minute stretches of primetime television are never given a chance, but gosh darn it if they aren’t music just the same as what plays between traffic reports on evening rush-hour radio.

Earworm moves product in any domain.  Miley Cyrus wants kids to keep singing her song until they can’t help but pay for her whole cd.  State Farm made their slogan (“Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there”) more memorable by putting it to a tune so that insurance shoppers will think of them first and check them out more often.  From an irregular perspective, we could say that mainstream songs are 200-second jingles advertising themselves as the product – and that notion has some merit!

It inspires me that we have reached a point in television advertising when some companies have abandoned mere sung slogans in favor of developed 30-second tunes that convey their message less succinctly, if at all.  Consider, for instance, this favorite Dunkin’ Donuts spot of mine.  Approachable melody, diverse percussion, thoughtful arrangement – a recipe for success! – and yet nothing in the lyrics pointing to breakfast.  Visuals and a voice-over draw your attention to the product.  If the song is part of the commercial but doesn’t advertise by itself, do you feel less dirty thinking of it both as a jingle and as music?

Let me focus now on a true paragon of melodic marketing: the Free Credit Report Band.  Their namesake website has elevated the art of music in advertisement by employing those rarest of performers, the live-action virtual band.  Honoring the tradition of Alvin and the Chipmunks and, more recently, Gorillaz and Dethklok, the Free Credit Report Band consists of characters not truly responsible for the sounds you hear.  When I search my trivia lobe for non-animated virtual bands, I can only offer Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, who would fit the bill if they ever played before an audience, or the Partridge Family, who maintained a thin veil between who its members were in fact and in fiction.

From their start in a pirate-themed restaurant, the Free Credit Report Band has managed to explore a dynamic set of rhythms and styles without reinventing their sound.  That is, the classic triumvirate of rock instrumentation appears across the boys’ takes on pop, 80′s synth, porch-front acoustic, western, and more.  Each of these genres is so firmly established as to allow a formulaic approach, of which these singing salesmen take shameless advantage.

As I implied earlier, cranking out a “new” hit need not require more than a chorus’s length of freshly-minted melodies.  When verses can be modified versions of the chorus or even three raw chords and a drum tick, it truly is that simple.  That much novel songwriting is regularly featured in FreeCreditReport.com ads.

I’ve said it enough, then: jingle artists who do a common thing well give us plentiful cause to label them musicians.

Beyond earning credit as artists, there is something more I hope to see commercial singers accomplish in the near future.  Just as Billy Mays earned America’s trust and spent a decade and a half coaching our purchases with his charismatic assurance, I want one marketing artist to perform their merchant ditties for a slew of reputable endorsers.

The Free Credit Report Band plays commercial-length songs that tell stories of misfortune that could be prevented by paying for the product at hand.  If only they would show up on a Sears commercial overriding my appliance price-comparison work!  How wonderful if they would caterwaul about a competitor’s weak 3G coverage!  That is my dream for the future.

If that goes through, only one step will remain for us to reach jingle perfection: imagine the Free Credit Report Band… then imagine Bartholomew… then imagine them together, backing the same company.  The jingle artist cross-over: coming by 2025.  Mark my words.

Twenty-five percent of the songs on Three Days Grace’s debut album ended up Top-5 singles.

Twenty-five percent of the songs on Three Days Grace’s sophomore album ended up Top-5 singles.

Do we understand each other?  There is no room to question the credentials of Three Days Grace.  As Canada’s premier alternative-metal missionaries, they bring the rasp in their voices, guitars, and outlook.

Last month saw the release of album number three: Life Starts Now.  The single “Break” is holding steady at #7 in its 6th week on the charts.  If it rises no higher, is that a letdown?  Would you say the guys are losing their touch?  To even ask the question reinforces how impressive their career has been from the very outset.  And no, it’s not a letdown.

Since Barry Stock was recruited in 2006 to relieve singer Adam Gontier of lead guitar duties, the band has been a quartet, and their increase in number has continued to represent an increase in sonic energy.  Life Starts Now shows not only meatier arrangements – the kind of rock music that expands to rattle every corner of a room – but also technical improvement on the part of each musician.  Focus on their craft has enabled more engaging drumwork and widened the range of pitch and timbre accessed during guitar solos.  Even the bass, normally the band’s weakness, has advanced to a level of competence.

Minor deviations from the normal songwriting framework make themselves known without disrupting the consistency of the band’s corpus.  Odd meters are subtly present and there is a greater emphasis on solo work than on previous offerings.  Still, verses and bridges are right where you expect them to be, you can scream along to every chorus, and an iconic guitar hook remains the raging heart of every song.

Two probable attempts at ballads remind us (and hopefully remind Jive Records) why the self-titled album didn’t have any.  “Lost in You” simply isn’t believable, as an honest Gontier can’t hide the anger that composes his soul despite lyrics bordering on sensitive and clean guitars resolving suspended 6ths into warm-and-fuzzy major triads.  The listener is given more credit by “Last to Know” as unplugged strings and a piano lead us through a tale of depression springing from frustration without hope.

Three Days Grace has a formula that works.  Life Starts Now shows an increase in talent with no drop in raw appeal.  By this time next year the hard rockers may have another set of Top-5 singles for their collection.

At the moment, there is a peripheral matter that catches my interest.  Maybe the aging and unchanging sound of the band concerns Jive, maybe Three Days Grace is trying to compensate for the recession, or maybe the guys just had a cool idea and made it happen.  For whatever reason, the band’s website is advertising a colorful variety of options for purchasing their new record.

For the iTunes-fed, blossoming young gorger of all things mainstream, “exclusive behind the scenes video downloads” are packaged with the digital download to entice a purchase directly from the website rather than through, oh, I don’t know, BitTorrent, which tends to be cheaper.

For the collector who doesn’t roll with headphones growing out of his pocket and around his ears like ivy, a hard cd can be ordered – again, with bonus media as thanks for cutting out the middle man.

For real fans, the kind who come out to shows and tell their friends about Three Days Grace, a limited-edition t-shirt can be shipped along with the album.

Beyond that, things get interesting.  The “Deluxe Package” (now sold out) is priced at $60 and includes a pile of swag – half physical, half digital – compelling enough to merit serious consideration even from teenagers living on an allowance or fast-food wages.  Towering above at $100 is the “Super Deluxe Package,” replete with bonuses from a cd signed and numbered by the band to a “smashed piece of a Three Days Grace guitar.”  That’s as exclusive as it gets.

I recently saw a similar gradient of offers posted by progressive rock outfit Spock’s Beard.  In an attempt to raise funds for their self-released tenth album, they put the album on presale before going to studio to record it.  Merchandise options included packages similar to those marketed by Three Days Grace, headed by a $200 “Ultra Package” with an intangible premier benefit:

“…And finally, [you will get] your name written into the lyrics of a new Spock’s Beard song.  This track will include a vocal section where your name (or someone you choose) will be sung by the band.  This will be a full band, fully-produced song that requires a long list of names be sung as part of the lyric.”

Deals like these intrigue me.  Have other groups been making crazy offers and selling their new releases in such intense tiered packages?  Ten years from now, if the economy is back to prime form, will we still see offers like these for the most ravenous fans?

The answers likely depend on whether the music industry follows overall market fluctuations or diverges as the onward march of the digital age changes the game.  Personally, I’ve got my fingers crossed that this is a trend with some wings, ready to take off.

How many diehard synthpop fans do you think live in Canada?  Maybe enough to crowd one Toronto club, plus a few enlightened Inuits and a caribou.  Yet this half-frozen nation has given birth to perhaps the genre’s greatest Myspace-to-riches story in Valerie Poxleitner, known to her friends and fans as Lights.

At least, riches seem certain as she now releases her first LP, The Listening.  The number of plays she enjoys on a daily basis give public approbation to her Juno Award and the various other acclaims she has racked up prior to pressing a record.

Beating The Listening to stores by a full month is Ocean Eyes, the major-label debut of Owl City (nee Adam Young).  Born even further from the equator in the little town of Owatonna, MN, Young has experienced similar popularity and growth in response to self-sustained synthpop efforts.  The two are seen by many as each other’s other-gendered counterpart.

Rumors of varying integrity have labeled Lights and Owl City friends, collaborators, sweethearts, and doppelgangers.  What we know is that their homegrown brand of electronic melodies with softened, bubble-pop percussion and smooth, coasting vocals is catching on with the kids in every neighborhood.

As far as anyone seems to remember, the last softcore electronic artist to break into the mainstream so summa cum laude was The Postal Service.  While their only LP, Give Up, was reported by Sub Pop to be the label’s most successful release since Bleach (it has since been surpassed by Flight of the Conchords), a single supporting tour is all the wake it generated.  Some chatter has ensued, but passing years show further Postal Service tours and recordings to be dreams without wings.

There’s your overview.  Here’s my problem.

Our generation has never had a mainstream affinity for the buzzes and whirs and padsynth drums of adventurous electronic artists.  Naturally, the three crooners – or perhaps cooers – to break through are extensively sized up against each other.  But as adorable as Lights and Owl City are, they are not The Postal Service.

The Postal Service is commonly referred to as a side project of Ben Gibbard, the face of indie wunderband Death Cab for Cutie.  Despite the public’s impression, Gibbard is not Death Cab’s heart, soul, and guiding light.  In particular, guitarist-cum-producer Chris Walla plays a large part in their writing process.  And despite the fact that you hear Gibbard’s crystal pipes on every track of Give Up, it was not a solo effort.  As educated as he is in sonic development, Gibbard does not have the right skill set to take a chisel to a synthesizer and carve out such an wondrously glitchy album.

The first Postal Service song was released two years before Give Up hit the shelves on an album called Life Is Full of Possibilities.  If you’re confused, check Wikipedia, I’ll wait.  Make sure you catch the artist name painted across the ambulance on the cover.  That’s the guy who wrote all the other songs on Life Is Full of Possibilities, so we’ve got good reason to interpolate that Dntel is also responsible for – did you catch it, next to Ben Gibbard’s name? – (This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan.

Dntel is mastermind Jimmy Tamborello, a synthhead who sprang out of California in the early 1990′s.  Under that primary penname and a few others, Tamborello has accrued critical acclaim and a handful of adherents by spinning out imaginative records loaded with electronica candy.  His style is of his own design.

Through a serendipity of geographical coincidence, Gibbard got an invite from Tamborello to lay down vocals over a tune he had crafted.  While Dntel had collaborated with many others before, Gibbard’s cachet with hipsters and the approachable style that later took Death Cab to more widespread fame gave The Dream of Evan and Chan unprecedented motility.  The pair hardly hesitated before plunging into a more extensive tag-team project.

First, Tamborello built a full album of instrumental material from the ground up.  He put the tracks on tapes and shipped them to the great state of Washington, where Gibbard tagged in.  The bespectacled twenty-something was given free rein to reorganize the beats as necessary while he plotted lyrical melodies overtop.  From there, extra hands came into play: significantly, Chris Walla appeared on one of the finalized songs playing piano and handled the whole recording process at his Hall of Justice studio.  Female vocals were courtesy of Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis and little-known indie songstress Jen Wood.

You might glean from the above that Ben Gibbard acted in a greater capacity than any other single contributer to shape Give Up.  I won’t press the issue because it doesn’t matter whether you’re right or wrong.  Tamborello’s brilliant work is central to the spirit and polish of the album and his part in the partnership is chronically downplayed.

Returning to Lights and Owl City, take a test drive on each of their lead singles – Saviour and Fireflies, respectively.  Then play Such Great Heights, the first Postal Service single.  If you focus on the voices, you’ll notice that Adam Young and Ben Gibbard sound remarkably alike, while Valerie Poxleitner manipulates her vox with a touch of artifice.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

If you focus on the electronics underneath, you might come to see why I feel Tamborello dominates the newcomers.  His choice of sounds shows a greater willingness to take chances and a greater depth of experience from chances taken over an inventive career.  Subtly, he employs irregular three-measure phrases throughout Such Great Heights, even overlaying them with standard four-measure phrases in other instruments to create a drawn out polyrhythmic effect.

Dntel provided the fundaments of The Postal Service, and his influence on Give Up is still the element that sets that landmark album apart from young imitators.  Over time, I’m sure Lights and Owl City will grow their talents.  They may exchange their in-your-face rocktronica choruses for more adventuresome techniques, or they may diverge from Dntel-style beats rather than aspiring to them.  But at the moment, there is no comparison.

In closing: The Postal Service was Dntel’s side project.  His idea, his beats, his project.

I have no right to review Slippery When Wet.  I can’t break down Born to Run.  To me, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pet Sounds are beyond approach.  I lack the bona fides to critique such eternal landmarks, not least of all because I wasn’t there to experience them.  Awareness of the musical zeitgeist of a decade is no substitute for being a part of a movement.  I want to be there when the next album that defines its time drops.  Maybe, I thought, maybe Ursa Major will be that album.

This was wishful thinking from the start.  Third Eye Blind already had their breakout.  The self-titled debut sent fully a third of its tracks coasting into the Top 20, including Semi-Charmed Life, the No. 1 hit famous for the shock it creates when your sing-along is shattered by the realization of what the verses are describing.  Still, the six-year hiatus that followed their third release (throughout which there were no signs of a break-up) served to infuse the band with mystery and hype.  Maybe, I thought, maybe Ursa Major will be that album.

Available only by digital download, the Red Star EP heralded a return to the band’s true form.  Then a new website appeared, 3eb.com, that put community interaction at the forefront.  The fan-centric aesthetic and an “Assembly” full of blogs, along with claims from frontman Stephan Jenkins that the upcoming album would be their most political yet, steered the hype away from melody.  Why would a band whose cornerstone was a song with overlooked lyrics and a hook for the ages predicate their overdue return to the limelight on opinion and activism?  New grounds trembled in anticipation of breaking.  Maybe…

“I want a riot, yeah!”

The rallying cry of the lead-off track has my fist in the air!  The guitars are surging back with familiar energy.  The pitch is rising, so I crank the volume and get caught up in the rasp of passion in Stephan’s voice:

“Yes I am dying to be freaked!”

Yes, I am d– wait, what?

Instantly I’m back in 1997 reliving the shock.  So, what kind of riot was he talking about?  A quick check of the lyric liner tells me the whole song is open to at least two interpretations: grassroots firepower or a plea for sex.  Alright, Stephan Jenkins, you got me.

But the music goes on.  Brand-new hooks revive with full confidence the old Third Eye Blind swagger.  Rolling snares and bam-bam rhythms lead you in and carry you like a wave from verse to verse.  The slurred lilt of the vocals are so instantaneously familiar that I had little trouble singing along not just on the first listen, but even at the first iteration of a chorus.  Then again, I was a pretty big fan.

Weren’t we all?  Who among us, born on the far side of the great divide that is the year 1990, wouldn’t hop on board at the first chord of Jumper?  Thank your lucky red stars, because fully a third of Ursa Major could have coasted into the Top 20 at the end of the last millenium.  Not to delude you; without the full promotional force of a major label (they recorded on their own as Mega Collider Records), these singles won’t see multi-platinum sales.  Besides, kids today are much more taken by their angry Seethers and their dreamy Jason Mrazs.

But the punchline is missing.  The melodies are what we all want, but this was supposed to be an intellectual firestarter!  Members of the Assembly may dissent, but what I heard was less a call to action and more what I’ll label “forward-dating.”

Through lyrics that remain as fluid and deft as ever, Stephan Jenkins has attempted to emphasize that he is here and now.  Explicit references to online dating, flat screen tv, and mp3 players appear distinctly unromantic amidst the surrounding metaphors and emotional outpours.  An entire song about “trying to flip butch chicks” and (elsewhere) an isolated mention of “Africa where life is cheap” might equally elicit groans from apathetics who find vocal activists oppressive.  Opening the cd case, you run into an advertisement for Third Eye Blind ringtones before you find the cd itself.  But all of these prove to the listener when Ursa Major was written.  Right now.

The Assembly – in fact, the overall intent and form of 3eb.com – now makes perfect sense.  Third Eye Blind is not retrieving the roots of political rock and roll by emerging from their hiatus reborn as Bob Dylan in three persons.  Instead, they’re eschewing the traditional way in which musicians relate to the public.  This record wants to kick off a new era; not of what music is, but of how it is communicated.

Thoroughly modern issues feature alongside buzzwords that are neutral but strictly contemporary in order to engage the listener.  We are meant to feel that Ursa Major is our album.  And to leave posterity with no doubt as to the exact date of its release, Jenkins sings: “Wanna be hustler school M.I.A. / Make a paper plane and then you fly away,” a shout out to last year’s multi-platinum single.  He even slips in “I’m your mega collider” which, as I mentioned, is the band’s invented label.

Finally, notice that the website tries to use open membership and encourage blogging and forum posts in order to hand over the reins of Third Eye Blind’s web presence to the fans.  This is our album, because the focal points of our daily lives make guest appearances in the songs.  This is our website, because we provide 95% of the content, unedited.  This is our time, defined.

Maybe, I thought.

So – alright, stop me if you’ve heard this one – a German, an Israeli, a Chilean, an American, and a Japanese guy walk into the Royal Conservatory of the Hague in Holland. They all pull out experimental, one-of-a-kind electronic instruments and start jamming. Then after four years of touring and recording they come to Williamsburg, VA to play a badass show at my college.

The band’s name is NiCad. They bill themselves as a power rock band with homemade electronica instrumentation. They’re visiting my school for a three-day stay, culminating in a true concert. Tonight they presented a live demonstration of some of their toys.  Normally I would consider a review of an isolated live performance to be unfair or poorly informed, but in light of my recent exposition on the borders of music and the nature of this group, I couldn’t resist.

You see, the boys of NiCad didn’t play a single “song” tonight in the traditional sense. A brief introduction set the stage for Lyset Fra Nedenunder, a “tape piece” – a term they use to specify that it was pre-recorded and not interactive in nature.  Pause to process that.

The entire room was left dark and no musicians stood on stage while it played.  For fifteen minutes, we were treated to (in the artist’s words) “a thoroughly planned walk through the garden” of “sound materials originally generated for another of the composer’s electronic pieces.”  To my ear, it began with a robot breathing heavily, proceeded to electronic slurps and ribbits, then some harsh winds, a city-destroying robot laser battle, and continued with various other non-rhythmic, pitchless, otherworldly ambiences.  Listen to it here.

Several of the other pieces followed suit. In fact, the immediate follow-up was a one-man Study on Feedback. Here, interactivity was the heart and spirit of the work. Two microphones were pointed directly at the two speakers in the auditorium. The artist sat on stage at his computer – did I mention that most of the pieces tonight were presented by the individuals who made them rather than the band en masse?

The composer – or inventor – was Roberto Garreton, who used one hand to input occasional bips and whirrs via one of two handheld iPod-like devices and the other hand to control stereo volume knobs on a nearby hard electronics box. This, again, went on for what might have been 10 or 15 minutes. The variety of sounds produced in that time went beyond what your imagination is likely to conjure from my sketch.

Let me give one more example. There is a museum in The Hague that houses an exhibit of glowing neon tubes, installed there by Gilad Woltsovitch of NiCad. Each tube is damaged in some way: a wire may be frayed, a transformer may be malfunctioning, etc. The erratic electric signals due to the imperfections make noise, but that noise is far too faint for a person to ever hear, even if you held the source to your ear.

Gilad designed a device to pick up these “microsounds” and amplify them to an audible level. One of the pieces performed tonight was Hunting for Fireflies, a “tape piece” that was simply a 10-or-15-minute recording of sounds made by malfunctioning neon tubes in Holland.

To all the avant garde loonies out there (and I mean that lovingly) whose eyes are growing wide with thrills: I must now apologize.  There was a severe downside to this show.  Many of the pieces performed were concepted as both aurally and visually interactive, but the visual components were simply not available.  Hunting for Fireflies begs for the sensory stimulus of the crackling neon tubes themselves!

Watch Satoshi Shiraishi’s Hystere, featuring his invention, the e-Clambone, at work.  It’s “an aerophone supplied with haptic sensors and digital signal processing algorithms,” complemented in this piece by real-time video processing that “seeks moments of convergence and divergence.”  The entire visual component was absent at NiCad’s demonstration.

In short, this was a tragically incomplete presentation of novel and exploratory art.

See, NiCad makes albums filled with music that people can appreciate as such. But tonight was a demonstration of their deep personal interests, the sonic experiments they pursue voraciously in their free time. Clicks and bloops and buzzes and every manner of distortion came out tonight. These don’t add up to “music” by themselves the way we’re used to thinking about it. That’s not their point.

The guys don’t imagine a sound – or tune – and go try to make it; they imagine a source and go find out what sound it makes.

What they find leads, in turn, to inspiration. They take the sounds they discover and use them in their construction of (slightly) more traditional music.

I will add that, to end tonight’s demonstrations, three of the five guys got up on stage to play an improvised jam. One of them had a mic, one a drum set, and one a guitar, but goodness knows there was more to it.

The mic had a keypad on its stand and operated essentially as an advanced Yakkity Yak, the old toy voice recorder. The German would gasp, click his tongue, stutter frustrated growls, and so forth, using his mic to record and play back loops of a few seconds or so, perhaps with volume, tempo, or distortion effects added.

The guitar had pads and pedals and extra buttons (oh my!) and rarely made the sorts of noises you would expect, sticking mainly to pick scrapes across strings, warm string synths, clicks, etc. The drum set was played very quickly and in no consistent time signature.

The German would sometimes lean his mic over to the drums to start looping their sounds instead of his own. It was equally likely that the mic would be used to crash a cymbal or that a drumstick would be used to play the mic.

This all was so out of the ordinary that I can’t possibly describe all the action on stage or all the sounds that were achieved.  If this rough outline of the show intrigues you, seek more information at NiCad.org.

Some days I get the felicitous pleasure of correcting an idiot who thinks they like all music.  Have you met this guy?  When I ask what you listen to, I don’t mind noncommital answers like “a lot of stuff.”  Feel free to tell me that classical, country, rock, and rap are all fine by you.  Just don’t be ignorant enough to say that you enjoy everything.

Such headlong claims are propelled by one of two fallacious oversights.  Linguistic philosophy teaches us that operational definitions are prerequisite to coherent discussion.  In small words, we need to decide what we mean by “like” before we can talk about whether you “like” all music.  Muddled by your intuition, with no such leading clarification to guide you, it is tempting to overapply the word and convince yourself that you truly do “like” everything.  But these technicalities aren’t so interesting.

Allow me to walk you down the other troubled path.  Our lodestar will be the core question: When you say you like all music, what counts as music?

Don’t limit yourself to what’s familiar.  Realize that the word “everything” suggests far more than “everything I’ve ever heard.”  Maybe, when you said you like everything, what you meant is that you have yet to come across music that doesn’t work for you.  In that case we have a simple miscommunication and I won’t hold it against you.

Maybe you can’t name a genre without at least a few representatives in your last.fm “Most Played.”  So you like some rap songs, some pop songs, and so on, but not all rap songs and all pop songs.  If you fit that description, my apologies to you as well.

The people I’m challenging are those who  say something bolder: that they like (or expect to like) every last bit of music, even what they haven’t heard. They believe all music will, as if by definition or natural mandate, have enjoyable, appreciable elements.  For their schooling, we endeavor to answer (I repeat): what counts as music?

We’ll start with a simple parallel.  What counts as singing?  Easy, right?  All those words coming out of the frontman’s mouth!  But what if they aren’t words?  I doubt there are many who would deny that The Dissociatives are singing on the track Lifting the Veil from the Braille, which features only whistles and ahhhs.  What about the pitchshifted pornogrind stylings of Cock and Ball Torture?  Check out the track Enema Bulldozer and tell me if you think that guy is singing.  Come to think of it, do Cake songs like The Distance actually feature singing, or is that something else?

Even the liberal-minded individual might not know how to classify the vocal performance of Georgia Brown.  This Brazilian world-record-holder has been lauded for “singing” in the so-called whistle register, using a poorly understood physical mechanism a step beyond falsetto.

Still with me?  Nothing contentious yet?  Let’s go up a level.  Let’s build a box for songs and put all songs inside the box and anything that isn’t a song outside.  Oh – you’re alright with microsongs, aren’t you?  Because some people struggle with or deny “pieces” like the 1.316-second You Suffer by Napalm Death.  How about Green Carnation’s recent prog metal opus Light of Day, Day of Darkness?  The band declined to subdivide the 60-minute track into movements, but there are clear demarcations between passages.  Is that one song, or several songs presented wrong?

Again, terminology can get in the way here.  Everybody knows the Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairies from the Nutcracker, but is it a song?  It is one of several “scenes” from a single multi-part composition that spans an entire ballet.  Labels are tricky, but I want to avoid focusing on them.

To the heart of it, then.  People like you and I aren’t bothered by the foregoing ambiguities (as some unwitting fools are) because people like you and I are born with a mental knife for separating the fog.  Well, if you can handle what comes next, you’ve got a leg up on me and every historian of music in academia.  Polaris is still asking: what counts as music?

Exhibit A: the absence of a (discernible) beat.  When someone says they “like everything,” my go-to response is Panasonic Youth by The Dillinger Escape Plan.  Screaming and harsh licks pervade this hardcore ditty, but what’s more jarring is the deafeningly technical mathematic organization of rhythm.  No casual listener has an ounce of hope of tapping their toe successfully to the precise, plotted shifting of the time signature.  Can you digest music without a pulse?

Exhibit B: spoken word tracks.  Is the first track of Family Man, a classic Black Flag record, a song?  Exhibit C: noise.  Did avant-garde Japanese noise rockers Hantarash ever make a “song” in their career?  Arguably a generalization of this is Exhibit D: ambience.  If you stick your head out your front door, do you hear a song?

You should be familiar with John Cage, the bogeyman of western musical tradition.  If you’re not, Google him.  From a long career of questioning where people set their borders – with music on this side and chaff on the other – his best known heirloom to mankind is 4’33″.  Cage presents 4’33″ as a song in three movements.  There just don’t happen to be any notes.  He calls it “aleatoric” and emphasizes that the song is what each person hears while it is being played; thus, 4’33″ is different for each listener and upon each new listening.

Fewer students become familiar with Cage’s sequel to 4’33″, known as 0’00″.  If the former was a bastard of a piece, the latter is its mongrel son.  Free from notes, tempi, and (sometimes) even sound altogether, 0’00″ consists of this instruction: “Perform a disciplined action.”  Its first live performance – unsurprisingly, by Cage himself – consisted of the writing down of that instruction.

If you consider 0’00″ to be music and claim to “like all music,” you must have a bone through your head, because this taste of the extreme provides a hint that there is an unfathomable amount of space left to be explored in music.  To claim appreciation of the entire infinite domain would show an arrogant lack of skepticism of what might arise from it in years to come.

If you think 0’00″ is a fine piece but not “music” per se, then you’ve placed it beyond your border.  We can all set our borders how we please.  But once you say that Aerosmith writes music and John Cage writes something else, you’ve admitted that a line exists.  So where is it?

Yeah, I don’t know either.  I’ve been introduced to some wacky streams of sound in my time.  I tried to refer in this article only to songs accessible through an easy Google or YouTube search to help you probe your borders.  If you need me to suggest more outliers, just ask.

Gerrymander music however you like.  Put up a fence around it.  Leave it open to the wilderness.  But whatever you do, don’t look me in the eye and tell me you like “everything.”  You’d be lying to both of us.

Pop rock is a huge umbrella. Elton John, Something Corporate, Kelly Clarkson, Fall Out Boy, and Jason Mraz all play pop rock. It’s pop music (melody-driven music with catchy hooks that prominently features vocals and follows expectable structures) with rock instrumentation (a lead guitarist/keyboardist and his sidekick rhythm guitarist/keyboardist riding over a bass guitar under the direction of a drummer). Pop rock is a perfectly good term that, while it truly isn’t the largest branch of music, encompasses a vast share of today’s radio playlists. By contrast, terms such as “alternative”, “emo”, and “indie” have been applied willy-nilly to anyone and everyone and thus stretched beyond utility.

Jupiter Sunrise plays pop rock. I gave the explanation above so that you could understand two things from such a simple classification — because a good description of any band will include labeling them with one or several genres, and it’s important to know what to do with that information. When I say Jupiter Sunrise plays pop rock, you should first recognize that they will probably sound “just like Band X” to you. They have elements in common with every other pop rock band. Odds are they’ve got 90% in common with at least one other band, if not bunches.

But this band’s name is Jupiter Sunrise, and copyright lawyers tell me that proves that this band is unique. So the second thing to realize is that they don’t play the same songs as Band X. Their songs might fit perfectly on an album by Band X and vice versa. But the bands have different members and different songs. Even having 90% in common means being 10% unique.

Without question, the most important lesson ever driven through my head was that people use music differently. Some people use music for energy while they jog, some people need a beat to bump ‘n grind to, and I study best when I’ve got the post-metal stylings of Pelican keeping me company.

In conversation, these preferences of use are often expressed as judgments of quality. Someone who never plays sports might say that Remember the Name by Fort Minor is “a bad song.” A teenage sophomore who drives her father’s mustang to high school in Orange County might say that “country is crap.” This is a misrepresentation below the level of consciousness. The truth is that the way someone uses music guides the parts of music they pay attention to.

Hip-hop does not stereotypically focus on building original melodies out of notes. (Not to say that it doesn’t happen; but notice that one common recourse is the use of sampled melodies to complement original content.) What if you like adding your voice to soaring soprano choruses on long road trips, not bobbing your body to the rhythm of a spoken beat?  Dismissing the genre as something short of real music is naive at best.  Recognizing that the strength of the genre lies in elements you instinctively ignore gives you insight into why anybody ever tunes in to that station.

So if the 10% that is unique about Jupiter Sunrise is the 10% that you are most aware of as you listen – because it is the 10% most relevant to a way in which you use music – then you will find them much more unique. If your personal focus lies elsewhere, then they might sound to you 100% like Band X, because the differences are not of a kind that naturally registers with you as you listen.

This same rule applies, of course, to whichever friend of yours (or whichever professional critic) is describing the band to you. This is the most crucial bias of which you must be aware, both in the speaker and in yourself. This puts things into perspective and explains how all of a band’s fans can seem so stupid and wrong when you hear the music for yourself.

It is the purpose of a review, or casual explanation, to draw up comparisons and contrasts and thus examine the whole of a band. But the most interesting part tends to be that unique 10%, so a lot of words are spent identifying something that a large number of people will autonomously overlook.

That is today’s lesson. Now, quickly, I present: Jupiter Sunrise – Under a Killer Blue Sky (or Heavy Things).

Mark Houlihan and Ben Karis each wrote about half of the songs on this album and each guy sings his own songs, giving Jupiter Sunrise a split personality. Mark has low songs with a gleam of hope and writes personal lyrics:

I went up to John St. Park and there I met an old lady feeding ducks. The back of her hand had been bleeding and she didn’t even know it. She told me I’d be more handsome if I smiled. So we talked about the weather, she told me about her family and she said I should meet her granddaughter, and I smiled.

Ben has happy songs with a twist of wistful and writes stories:

We’re wondering what you’re thinking, Arthur Nix. ‘Cause ever since you rode your bike into that car and were quickly whisked away by ambulance, you’ve been so pensive and quiet. Did your arm heal faster than your heart did, Arthur?

Each has his own distinct, but pop-rock-certified, vocal style. Jupiter Sunrise’s forte is in giving each verse and chorus a different feel through instrumentation and arrangement while the vocals show little variance within each song. Typically, not just the volume but the rhythm, style, or number of instruments playing will be dynamic during a verse, and the next verse will be a novel variation on the same organic idea. There’s plenty of instrumental play in intros and interludes as well. Oh, and it’s worth noting that this is a guitar band – keyboards make a minor appearance on each of two tracks and are otherwise absent.

Jupiter Sunrise laid low for years after UKBS, their only true album to date. Recently they’ve popped up for a few live shows. A Twitter acount christened in April 2009 and occasional new songs on their myspace stand as signs of new progress. However, the lineup listed on their website has two different categories for “current members” and “members who played on Under a Killer Blue Sky.” So it’s possible that they are an entirely different band now than they were five years ago when UKBS was made.

Who knows, maybe they’ll sound the same. Their currently defunct website once told me that all four band members were vegan, so maybe change is good.