A Year of Music

Stuck in my head this morning: "Swingboat Yawning", the lead track from Rollerskate Skinny's second album, Horsedrawn Wishes. Horsedrawn Wishes is a strange extrusion of echoing beats, aimlessly wandering melodies, mooing guitars, overpressured psychedelia, and lyrics that make no goddamned sense at all, and "Swingboat Yawning" is of a piece with the rest of the album. The album's strangeness and consistency has weird consequences, because when I hear any song from this album in my head, it almost imperceptibly shades into any of a number of other songs (in particular "Swab the Temples" and "Speed to my Side" – two of the most brilliantly deranged pop songs I've heard) on the album.

Horsedrawn Wishes is like an ornate Brian Wilson album informed by My Bloody Valentine's noisy excesses (Jimi Shields, Kevin Shields' brother, was in Rollerskate Skinny), only made on a shoestring budget. Rollerskate Skinny get compared to Mercury Rev, the Flaming Lips or Spiritualized when anybody mentions them at all – they haven't been a going concern for quite a while – but this album sounds mostly like itself. I love it but it always makes me feel a little creeped out and queasy after I listen to it, due to its swaying, seasick nature.