Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Overlooked classic, 10 Aug 2006
It took a few listens to click with me as it is a rather downtempo album, but I would thouroughly recommend this cd, especially to fans of Radiohead. It has some lovely Amnesiac era spidery guitar lines and some deliberately basic casio cut and paste noodlings to keep things organic but with plenty of invention. Absolutely superb album and hard to categorize as it covers a good deal of styles.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Cold Nose, 8 Oct 2007
I would be tempted to describe this album as a 'lost classic' since it started as a minor independent release by two college roommates in 2003 and has steadily developed a cult following. People will continue to look back to this album while one half of Department of Eagles, Dan Rossen, continues to garner acclaim for his wholly different latterday project Grizzly Bear (who release ghostly, psychedelic folk on Warp). The Cold Nose is one of several guises and monikers for this record which was also released as 'Whitey on the Moon UK', the name of the band before they were forced to change it owing to copyright infringement. The various versions of this album are available on Amazon, though the best must be the imported version on its original US record label, Isota, which includes a handfull of bonus tracks - experimental diversions which are worth having from a completist point of view even if they don't quite match the strength of the album tracks.
'The Cold Nose' is a strange brew of musical styles ranging from lush, partly vocal electronica, to tripped-out folk, garage rock and hip hop. Initial listens suggest these disparate styles are ill-suited but that is to ignore the overarching abstraction and sonic pallette that melds them together. Even when they are seemingly paying homage to a musical style they have no right to be messing with, the music seems imagined from afar, from some weird shared sense of perspective. There is some extra-terrestrial electronic doodling that is part early Mo Wax, part CLOUDDEAD, but adds little to the album except - perhaps - the sensation of changing stations on a space shuttle radio. However, it's not just an exercise in genre-hopping goonery; but by turns playful and sonically daring, psychedelic and emotional. Department of Eagles seem to excel at every genre they tackle and still manage to make it seem like a legitimate part of the whole.
'Sailing by Night' builds on a melancholic guitar loop and a beautifully crestfallen vocal that recalls a low-key (or less histrionic) Thom Yorke. Set to a scuttling lo-fi drum & bass break, it swells into something subtly grandiose, replete with frenetic orchestral samples. 'Noam Chomsky' is fine Warp-style electronica that builds brilliantly around some splices of found vocal. 'The Piano in the Bathtub' betrays some of Rossen's more folksy leanings, displaying the closest affinity to his Grizzly Bear project. Spectral voices hover over a blurry, kaledoscopic swirl of organs, guitar and other sonic ephemera - like an acid sequence from some lost 1960s film.
'Romo-Goth' is garagey rock but sounds somehow reprocessed, broadcast back through time and space from some post-rock tradition and distorted in the transmission - both abstract and irresistably catchy. 'Origin of Love' is Pavement-esque lo-fi folk, and may be the only time you will have tapped your foot or chanted along to a song about incest, while 'Forty Dollar Rug' is a head-nodding rap parody with a role call of crap student furnishings. Both are much better than my descriptions make them sound.
'The Horse You Ride' revisits the melancholica of 'Sailing By Night' but peaks with an unlikely cacophony of sped-up sub-continental exotica into an outrageous breakdown - a peerless sonic curveball. Finally, 'Ghost in Summer Clothes' is a drifting somnabulant closer, the perfect end to a great album. If you like Animal Collective, Radiohead, Grizzly Bear, Boards of Canada, Caribou or the Notwist, you will love this. Unmissable.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Buy this if you buy nothing else this year., 15 April 2007
At first listen this album sounds rather cluttered as if trying to move in too many directions at the same time. However you can sense that there's quite a lot to it, and it grows on you real fast.
There's no filler here. Each track is worthy of praise in its own way. I would however single out 'Sailing by Night' for its imaginative odyssey relections set to a quickening beat soundscape, also 'Family Romance' - a McCartneyesque (circa 1965-9) ballad with a beautiful and simple chord sequence and a casual incest-based theme.
'Forty Dollar Rug' is a playschool rap, keepin' it real in a maketeanotwar kinda way. (Look out for your biscuits lads!)
The standout track however, is 'The Horse You Ride'. This is a jambouree of musical styles and exotic samples that fall into each other so effortlessly and describe the pre-telephone-call-jitters associated with relationships in a crucial phase. It ends with the phone being picked up and answered but everything has already been said.
Highly recommended.
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