Whoa, this is a nice surprise to get to see Austra get an AOTW post!

So far, I’m not sure that I like it more than Feel It Break, though that was one of my favorite albums of 2011, so that’s some stiff competition in my book. (Also, I don’t entirely agree with Tom’s point about it being monochromatic… I can see where he’s coming from, since the mood is fairly consistent throughout and there are some sonic similarities between some of the songs, but I feel like there is a fair amount of variety between songs, with songs like “Shoot the Water,” “Beat and the Pulse,” and “The Beast” coming to mind. Anyways!)
I’m still getting used to the new sound the band is putting forward on Olympia, and it’s growing on me as I type this. “Home” and “Painful Like” may have indicated that this was not going to be a rehash of Feel It Break, but somehow those songs did not prepare me for how much Olympia departs from their previous work. It does seem like they’ve matured a lot as a band, no doubt partially due to the addition of the touring members to the songwriting/recording line up, so I’m excited about that growth… even if all this does make it sound a lot less likely that Maya will be contributing to Trust anytime in the near future…

I don’t even need to comment on “Get Lucky,” but I can also get behind “Doin’ it Right” and “White Noise.” But no other AlunaGeorge up in here? I would also throw in “Attracting Flies,” and “You Know You Like It” if it qualified, which it probably doesn’t since it’s been around awhile… but I will still be dancing to it aplenty.

I also feel like throwing in “Home” by Austra, but probably only because I’m not good at these lists. (And it’s great. So great.)

Yeah, that threw me off too about it being in the city of Revere… but apparently the festival is in City Hall Plaza again. I, personally, am liking this line up a little more, though I’m not entirely yet if I’m going. And is Bearstronaut the only local band on the bill? There’s a few on here that I’m not familiar with…

Yeah, I was in 9th grade too when Tidal got big, and Sleep to Dream was my favorite for the longest time. I think a year or two later I would up reciting part of it in Spanish class, though I can’t remember why. High school, you guys.
And that same Spanish teacher was the one who sent me to the Guidance Councilor, though I think it was also because I had scrawled lyrics from PJ Harvey’s Is This Desire and Tori Amos’ To Venus and Back albums over papers that wound up getting turned in, and this was enough to concern her about my mental state…

But yeah, Tidal still has some great songs, yo. And Jon Brion’s Extraordinary Machine needs some representation too…

It’s a joke, dude…

Hm, would it still be fight worthy if I said that I really hate how that song is mixed? Specifically the piano part. Like, yes, it is a good song, and I like how the one take, no looping approach adds character to the piano bit, but for fuck’s sake, it’s way too damn distracting from the rest of the song to have a two note melody that goes on for six minutes or whatever be the loudest thing in the mix.

Yeah, this whole song was a fun clusterfuck… the video didn’t capture the part at the beginning where they kept looking at each other, not being able to figure out where to start…

Wow, if I had listened to this earlier, this would have made excellent distraction (for four minutes, anyways) from the fact that there was a fucking bomber running around and turning a town only a few miles away into a warzone.
Granted, right now it still makes great “Thank God” party music…

Or it could be PJ Harvey!
…or that picture of PJ Harvey, Bjork, and Tori Amos from the early 90s. Granted, I don’t think that Tori and Thom have ever worked together, but we also don’t know how many left nipples this person has. My point is, THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS.

Huh. I didn’t download the album, but I still have that window open, and the stream still works. Guess I need to not close my browser for a while…

Yeah, I feel like that’s Olof’s voice. I’m not really sure *why* I think that, maybe in the one or two interviews with them I’ve seen they didn’t pitch shift his voice too far from where it is naturally?
I wasn’t expecting Karin’s voice to sound like that, though…

Also, is that the lady from the First Floor Power show at 11:26?

I would imagine it would vary depending on your computer… Pitchfork Advance strikes me as the sort of thing that takes up a lot of memory (I’m thinking the graphics are a big part, those seem to take longer to load for me), so I would imagine that would be why Tiago is seeing all the stuttering. Making a cutting edge site is nice, but it sucks sometimes when people in the tech industry just assume everyone has a really fast connection and a newer computer with plenty of RAM to spare…

Also, FYI, there’s apparently about six minutes worth of talking heads in this video, so if you want to just skip to the music go to the 6:15 mark.