Song of the Week: "Baby Missiles" by The War on Drugs

With such a culturally loaded name and obtusely abstract couple of album covers, I felt that I currently lacked the intellectual stamina to tackle The War on Drugs. Imagine my surprise when I finally gave it a go and discovered a much more approachable and nostalgic type of music. Exuding a kind of working class spirit and rustic energy, The War on Drugs is hard not to like. "Baby Missiles", first debuted on his EP Future Weather last year and has been repackaged in his new recent LP, Slave Ambient. This song in particular has very natural, tall tale style of lyricism with a lush celebratory rhythm comprised of equal parts synth and country style rock. Furthermore, holy cow, how much does lead singer Adam Granduciel sound like Bruce Springsteen!! Check it out.

Review: Little Dragon- Ritual Union

July kind of sucked in Vancouver- weather wise. It was cloudy, cold, it goddamn rained. But right towards the end of the month, things turned around. As if Mother Nature in all her venomous and contemptuous wrath decided to show some mercy. At right around the same time, Ritual Union, the third LP from Little Dragon dropped; to those familiar with Little Dragon headed up by Yukimi Nagano, they would agree that the timing could not have been more perfect. Little Dragon's mysterious, quirky, delightful, and uplifting brand of electro pop goes perfectly with my favourite season once it's in full effect. When I listened to Ritual Union for the first time, it was obvious that I liked it, but I wasn't sure if it was better than their previous album, the excellent Machine Dreams. If I was going to answer this question I needed to understand in what ways it was different, and if those differences yielded a better or worse album.

Upon initial inspection, Nagano's voice is immediately familiar to those who spent any time with their previous album, Machine Dreams. Instantly alluring, silky smooth, and paced elegantly and logically with the music it accompanies, listening to Nagano throughout Ritual Union reaffirms my belief that she is one of the premier vocal talents out there right now. My first few plays of the album had me more or less convinced that Ritual Union, at least in terms of Nagano's vocal contribution, was a logical and sensible continuation of the ground explored in Machine Dreams. While that is certainly satisfactory to some degree, there is something slightly disappointing about a group like Little Dragon, who I found so vibrantly unique at first, to stumble tragically into redundancy and repetitiveness. I wanted to give Nagano more credit, so I forced Ritual Union through a much more rigorous and borderline anal analytical wringer; I'm pleased I did, for I believe the findings to be most positive. It took repeated listenings, but I'm now certain there are some pretty key differences between how she sang on this album versus the last.