Ricotta Park

Don't You Wonder Sometimes?

When I was 20, my girlfriend printed me about a hundred black and white profile images of Bowie from Nic Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth. Can't really remember why now, but it was a radical gift.

The album Low Profile (the sleeve cover of which is an image from the Roeg film) is one of Bowie's most successful attempts at textured and adventurous pop music. Most of side A's  jams are punchy, three minute-long affairs, with guitar taking a backseat to pounding piano, guttural saxophones, industrial noises and synthesizers. Lyrically, it's a lonely and lovelorn, with a cynical sort of introspection.

Side B is comprised of four instrumental tracks that vary from bleak and foreboding to the sort of curious, unemotional music that became New Age.

Bowie - Low Profile: http://www.sendspace.com/file/v67x7y

Fiery Furnaces - "The End Is Near"

"Keep Me In Dark" brings a warm wind near the end of the Friedbergers' mostly plaintive, piano-driven new joint, I'm Going Away. It's got double octave, quasi-Brian May hammer-ons and offs (doubled by a tack piano, natch!), fingers snapping a cool no you din't!, woodwinds and synths staggering through a solo like half-drunk day laborers, and some particularly pleading choruses ("please don't tell me nothin' / I'd rather ya tell me nothin' / keep me in the dark with the opposite of anything") butted against the typically worldly references to international travel and intrigue. It's some of their best work yet.

***Update***

Thrill Jockey wanted me to replace this jam with the official single, "The End Is Near." No probs. They're an awesome label and it's a sweet jam.

Fiery Furnaces - The End Is Near

(I'm Going Away is out 7.21.09 on Thrill Jockey)