This is the kind of week that I find myself excited for. We all have our favorite artists, but what about those bands that take a back seat to them? I still find their releases rewarding, but for some reason, they sometimes wind up a bit forgotten. And then when I do drop their tracks onto the iPod, I'm consistently stunned that I neglected them for so long. And that's what we've got this week - some artists who put out great music and yet slip through the cracks . . . okay, and one release by a pretty solid favorite of mine.
Jeremy Enigk - The Missing Link: The former Sunny Day Real Estate singer returns a year after his great second solo album, World Waits, with what is essentially a 4-song EP with 5 "live in the studio" bonus tracks whose original counterparts can be found on that previous album. I'm not quite sure why this release is the way it is, but for the fan, it should be something fun to fill the gap until the next full-length album.
The Flaming Lips - U.F.O's At The Zoo - The Legendary Concert In Oklahoma City: Another frickin' MVI. This is just a dumb format. Really, it's not a format at all - it's just a renaming of a current format, the venerable DVD. So we get some interactive extras - big deal, most people will play with those one time - and audio files of the music in formats for use on digital audio players (you know, iPods and the like.) That's kind of handy, but I am annoyed that they don't bother to offer wav format files so we can burn lossless copies of the audio. But I digress - I'm not just hear to complain about the format.
Bands always wait one album too long to record a live set. For whatever reason, they never seem to record the tour that is in support of the album that arguably will forever be seen as their peak, and the Flaming Lips are unfortunately no different. While At War with the Mystics isn't a terrible album, it certainly isn't the high point that is the preceding Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (or The Soft Bulletin, depending on how you view things.) Luckily, the band seems to be well aware of the many weak spots on Mystics and so this concert offering isn't so much in support of that album as in support of the later part of their career. I honestly can't tell you much about the contents besides that - the tracklisting is peppered with a bunch of stuff I don't recognize and I must assume they're instrumental interludes or events during the concert itself.
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