ANDERS SAYS: "Hey, pretty great!"

In school, I had this teacher, Thorpe Feidt (incredible name), who was adamant about students leaving their music devices at home when coming to the studio to work. He was this wild-eyed, capricious bastard who was, by no means, taciturn; and he was convinced that the constant stream of digital music being plugged into your ears was harmful for the artistic process. It was heinous! He was genius in his own way, but I hated being forced from listening to music while working.

I love painting, but I love painting and listening to music more. Most of the opinions that I form for new music come about in such a way that involves multiple listens to the same album while slapping color around for a few hours. As such, I love the idea of this club. LOVE. IT.

As for the album, my input is this: it's fun! I can't say that I fell in love with it, but it's a fun listen. It's an awesome dip into the 90s - not to mention, it's a band that I had no previous knowledge for or experience with. Fun!

For the first listen, I was in a drunken, charcoal, drawing frenzy. I was hooked to my laptop with a pair of obnoxiously large headphones, getting tangled in the wires and drawing a few nondescript portraits messily. I was having a blast, and my initial impression was that the album had some pleasantly surprising lifts away from the typical sounds inherent to 90s alt. My enjoyment of music, in general, being nothing but cursory, I'll spare you any specifics. Nonetheless, I found it engaging and listened to it a couple of times all the way through before falling asleep like a dog in my bed.

I picked the album up again a few days later, while doing some menial comp stuff in photoshop - an experience, I should say, that - while not entirely unlike the fun of painting - left something to be desired. I became bored with the first half of the album, but found it interesting again after that, restoring my initial opinion of the whole thing being fun.

The final listen was spent walking around the oceanside park down a few blocks from my apartment. I was able to pretty much zone out and let the music come, unadulterated by outside distractions. By the time I was done with it, my official opinion had formed that it was fun, but nothing I would explicitly go out of my way to listen to for any specific reason.

That's one of the leaves from my new plant, by the way. I still need to think of a name, but I'm thinking of going with "Frank". That's neither here nor there, though...