I'll be fairly slack on the posts for the holidays. It's Christmas party season and I work in a restaurant. I'm sure you all come here every day frantically clicking reload in anticipation of an updated post so you can be the coveted first reader of it (like Perez Hilton), but you're going to have to be patient.
Someone suggested Lars Skoglund to me after I posted my blog on one of the message boards I frequent and I've spent the last week or so listening to his catalog. I listened to I Miss You I'm Pregnant, Laakso's debut album first, and it still stands out as my favorite. It's got a cool lo-fi sound but it's extremely dense with stuff like horns and synthesizers and I like it. The first track, Fight The Fight is a great opener, and Skoglund does this cool thing where he plays a straight closed high hat disco beat (buried pretty low in the mix) and comes in full force halfway through along with these huge horns.
Lars, along with the album in general, is much stronger when things are rocking. Songs like Clear and Aussie Girl, which picks up towards the end, have some cool mid tempo patterns. Rock beats, shuffles, 3/4 time, Skoglund keeps it loose but focused and steady most of the time and he keeps things from sounding too messy to be good. He even manages to make the over-used brush/snare train-a-chuggin rhythm sound perfectly in place on Sensation At Five, which is not an easy task.
It's nice to hear a drummer named Lars play in a way that compliments things like structure, melody, songwriting and dynamic and not just caveman pound his way through obvious patterns sped up to cover up his awful time.
Whoa. Where did that come from.
Audio/Visual Evidence* : Aussie Girl, Demon
*It should be noted that the singer in this band looks like an even wussier version of that guy from AFI.**
**After seeing that picture, no. No he doesn't.
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