Miike Snow

Peter Gabriel - Solsbury Hill(1)
by sebstation

There's a very good chance you have already heard this band. Nonetheless, I'm posting the album because it is a good listen. But also because I finally put my finger on what some of these electropop bands remind me of - Peter F-ing Gabriel and Phil Collins. Maybe others have made this connection, but I finally got there and it's like now I have seen the light. Abstraction and melody, dynamic changes and satisfying tempos - listen to Solsbury Hill or Take Me Home and then Burial or Animal on this album and you'll see. Passion Pit has some of the same shit going on for sure, in fact it may have just hit me how completely saturated today's music is with these guys and I had never really thought about it. Sure Brian Eno gets credit, and the Talking Heads, but I think Gabriel and Collins get overlooked. I can't say I'm much of a Genesis fan (especially the Gabriel years - way too prog rock for my taste), but I've always kind of enjoyed each man's solo stuff. These dudes knew how to write a catchy tune that always managed to come across as epic - something the Arcade Fire does extremely well these days.



Anyway - back to Miike Snow. I don't know, well, anything about this band, other then they're Swedish and they have some street cred in the biz as producers. The pace and general exuberance of the music masks how melancholy some of the lyrics are. When the songs are good, they're really good, when they miss, it's like they went a little too Maroon 5 or Pink - this tends to happen more as the album progresses. It's sort of like if Passion Pit got overcooked in the Rainbow Room on a few of these tracks and came out of the Brill Building instead of Brooklyn. That said, I'd say the first half of this album is solid and there are moments on the latter half.

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