A Weekend Spending Spree

After managing to survive more than four weeks without a visit to JB, I succumbed finally on the weekend and made a few purchases. Apart from an extremely cheap copy of The West Wing season 6, I also picked up two CDs— Architecture in Helsinki’s Places Like This and the High Fidelity soundtrack. I’d been looking for the latter album for months but it was out of stock so it was difficult to resist when I actually managed to find it. Also, that evening at the Gotye concert I purchased Boardface, his first full length album which I didn’t know existed.

So I’ve had a fair bit of new listening material with which to acquaint myself. The Architecture in Helsinki album is living in my CD player. It’s rather addictive, even the song Heart It Races which I thought I’d never like. Highlights include Hold Music, Underwater, Like It Or Not and a few other tracks I’m still trying to distinguish from one another. Apart from an overuse of ‘yah!’ (or perhaps ‘ja!’ if you’re South African) in many of the songs as a backing vocal, it’s a great album. Lots of energetic, upbeat tracks featuring interesting instrumentation.

The Gotye album requires a more in depth listen before it can be properly analysed. There are already a few stand out tracks… Out Here in the Cold, The Only Thing I Know, What Do You Want to name a few. There are also tracks featuring different vocalists including one female. I don’t see the point in this when Gotye himself has a haunting, amazingly beautiful voice especially showcased in songs like Hearts A Mess. But I suppose he is fairly experimental. The tracks with different vocalists are great, but less memorable.

Finally, the High Fidelity soundtrack is the album I’ve played least so far. It features a great Beta Band song called Dry the Rain (from the part in the film when Rob says he’s going to sell a whole pile of their singles because he plays the song in the shop) and the Stevie Wonder song over the closing credits is also great. On the whole though I need to work my way through it a few more times before I can come to a conclusive judgement.

In related news, there’s an article on Gotye here from last Friday’s Age.