Oh my God.

Datarock is easily one of my new bouncy favorites. The only way I can describe them is disco acid pop. There’s prob­a­bly a better way of explain­ing them, but that’ll work for lack of the cre­ation of new words.

As an aside, I want to apol­o­gize for the title of this post. I’m using the normal format, but their first album is actu­ally called “Datarock Datarock” so it makes for some crummy arti­cle titling.

Break Of Day is one of those albums that every time I come across it I don’t real­ize who the artist is, but I always think the songs sound fan­tas­tic. Then I’ll check my iTunes and real­ize that once again, it’s a song from Break Of Day. Then I say to myself “I really have to review this album! It’s so good!”

Then another month passes, and no review has been writ­ten, at least not by my own hands. Well I’m chang­ing that today, because I ended up lis­ten­ing to the entire album from start to finish and I am not totally in love with this album.

I have to start by saying that I’m not a huge Cold­play fan. Short of some of their more well-​known songs (Green Eyes, Yellow, Clocks) I’ve never been much of a fan; a fact my girl­friend has never quite under­stood why. Cold­play as a rule, have never really done it for me; their music tends to border on the hyper-​sensitive, and though I like sen­si­tive music, theirs was a brand I just couldn’t stand behind.

Then they came out with Viva la Vida.

I’m a bit of a sleeper fan of Motion City Sound­track. I had their albums avail­able to me for over a year before I lis­tened to them. The only reason I really gave them a chance was because I was dri­ving through a snow storm and the radio couldn’t pick up any­thing. I was really shocked when I went through both albums that I had of theirs (Commit this to Memory and I Am the Movie) and was crav­ing more. Their bouncy, feel­good sound had me totally hooked. I lis­tened through them all again, and I real­ized that in con­trast to their sound, much of what was said bor­dered on major depressing.

Panic! At the Disco actu­ally made a second album? I totally thought that they were going to burn out after their first album “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out” but appar­ently I was mis­taken. I mean the first album was self-​contained, and it’s fairly obvi­ous that you can’t really go any­where from it. If they released another album that sounded like it, they’d be accused of repeat­ing them­selves and it wouldn’t have the impact that the first CD did. Tack on the fact that ‘I Write Sins Not Tragedies’ got played to death, and you get a mix­ture for dis­as­ter should they con­tinue on the path they were on.

They didn’t, which shocked me.

I very recently came across Ben’s Brother due to Den­tynes newest com­mer­cial. I like many, many others were drawn in by the addict­ing song selected. ‘Stuttering’ is the name of the track, and it’s per­formed by Ben’s Brother. I’m sure this track alone will launch them into new realms of star­dom. As I tend to give bands the ben­e­fit of the doubt, I decided to get my hands on their latest (and only) album “Beta Make Fairytales”. As it turns out, they are not a one-​hit-​wonder. They are, in fact, a rather tal­ented band that reminds me faintly of Cold­play, Maroon 5, and even Snow Patrol.

I was recently at the El Mocambo with Theresa to watch Ingrid Michael­son, and one of the open­ing acts was David Ford. As soon as this guy hit the stage, he won my heart with his shear moxy at having many instru­ments that could record and repeat audio. He played them all, which involved him dash­ing around the stage singing into a micro­phone, or mash­ing the piano, or play­ing the guitar, or the mara­cas, etc.. He easily won top marks for the tech­ni­cal por­tion of the night. He was actu­ally fan­tas­ti­cally funny, and very, very Eng­lish. Com­plete with the swanky accent and a wit so dry that you could start a fire with it, he won over the crowd with his banter and his craft.