Song Of The Day 7/3/2014: Ought - "Habit"



New Music Week: One of the albums that's been trickling slowly from the engorged abscess in my head that sucks up all the new music I hear, storing it anonymously like whale blubber during months of hibernation until one of them finally breaks free and enters the bloodstream through normal orifices is Ought's More Than Any Other Day. (Yes, you can totally use that blurb in your press materials!) They are from Montréal, loosely formed around that city's radical political movements. But there's really not much politics on More Than Any Other Day. There's a lot of medium-to-long songs that are fairly stripped down. Tim Keeler plays guitar. I can't figure out if he's Verlaine or Lloyd but hope he's happy with either. And listen: There's an electric piano in there! Not one of them ghastly DX7 bell-like electric piano patches that feels like a brown vinyl casing filled with damp, sickly-smelling old foam. (What is it with the bulbous imagery tonight?) But an actual, analog, tastefully deployed electric piano. I think it's a Wurlitzer. I don't know. For a musician I'm one of the lousiest gearheads you'll ever meet. But it sounds lovely.

As a singer Keeler has already shouldered a lot of favorable comparisons to David Byrne, but they're pretty inescapably paired. They also have this lyrical trait of trying to find some sense of stasis in a place with a lot of flying objects, but dare I say Ought plays and sings with a little more at stake. "Habit" is my favorite song on the record, and reminds me positively of the displaced preacher of "Once In A Lifetime" (which is what Spotify is currently playing whenever I try to play Faces' "Cindy Incidentally" for some reason -- metadata much?).

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