Smog
Knock Knock
(hear it)

This is one of my favorite albums, so I'm only going to say one thing about it: this album has almost no information beyond lyrics listed in the booklet, or printed on the CD tray - even online there's very little. That's awesome. I really think it is part of why the album works so well.

When I first got this, it was because I was a huge Cat Power - Moon Pix fan. I guess I had heard that Cat Power's Chan Marshall and Bill Callahan of Smog had been on friendly terms, and so I bought it without further thought. The music didn't impress me at first - if I had known it was a Jim O'Rourke production, I would have paid a lot of attention, and heard all the awesome detail that puts this album next to Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Airplane Over the Sea, OP8's album (Calexico, Howe Gelb and Lisa Germano together at Wavelab studio in Tucson in 1997), and the Beatles' Revolver. As it is, however, ignorant as a mucus-mite, when I finally began hearing the music I heard something much more incredible than the buried background vocals you can hear in the sample above. I heard the songs, one day with my wife, after she discovered Knock Knock in my collection of CDs which I knew were great but hadn't discovered yet.

That was a good year.

bb, 9 jan 08