It’s the Holiday Season which means the next two weeks of your life will be spent driving to the mall, buying junk, and then going home to wrap it in shiny paper.  It also means you have less time to browse through this website and read our long winded reviews.  In light of this, here are a 1,000 (or less) quick reviews to keep you warm this winter.

31 Knots
ep:Polemics
Polyvinyl Records

While they are busy recording their full length follow up to last year’s Talk Like Blood, Oregon’s 31 Knots have pushed out this 5 song EP of sprawled out and noisy rock.  The EP kicks off with ‘Sedition’s Wish’, a four minute track that floats in and out of funky bass lines and distortion heavy choruses.  It shows the bands’ skill at building mood and momentum in a song, but when you take into account that the next two offerings, ‘Vanish’ and ‘Black Ship Auction’, sound awfully similar to the first track, and the two intro/outro songs are mostly ambient noise, ep:Polemics loses a lot of its appeal.   Hardcore fans might rationalize spending $8 dollars on 19 minutes of 31 Knots’ dark, experimental rock, but most everyone else is better off waiting for the full length to arrive.

[mp3] 31 Knots - Sedition’s Wish

[buy] 31 Knots’ ep:Polemics at Amazon.com

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Damien Jurado
And Now That I’m In Your Shadow
Secretly Canadian Records

It’s been a long time since Damien Jurado released anything as timeless and sharp as Where Shall You Take Me?.  His follow up to that record, last year’s On My Way to Absence, had three or four notable tracks but as a whole it lacked the weight of his previous albums.  I began to wonder if I was watching the downhill journey of an artist who hit his peak with hauntingly simple folk tales like ‘Matinee’, ‘Amatuer Night’, and ‘Abilene’. 

Anyone who picks up his latest release And Now I’m in Your Shadow might be compelled to join me in this sad speculation.  Don’t get me wrong, there are some hidden gems among this thirteen glacier paced ballads, but the audience will have to exhaust a great deal of effort to find them.  ‘Shannon Rhodes’, ‘I Had No Intentions’, and ‘There Goes Your Man’ are all fine songs on their own, but bunched between other, slower, more drab selections, their redeeming qualities are deafened. 

In the end it’s better to wait for Jurado to release his full band sister album to And Now I’m in Your Shadow.  Perhaps if you combine some of these sleepy numbers with the up coming record’s rock songs, you can put together one mighty fine album worthy of the Jurado name.

[mp3] Damien Jurado - What Were the Chances

[buy] Damien Jurado’s And Now I’m in Your Shadow at Insound.com

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Bonus Links!

Jesse Lacey is Humble - An unparalleled move in the contemporary emo world, New Jersey’s Brand New have announced they won’t be doing interviews to promote their latest record The Devil and God Are Raging Inside of Me.  Well, no. Scratch that- they’ve actually done two.  Here is one of them.

Anagram Fever.  Catch it! - Why impress your friends when you can impress yourself with this nifty anagram generator!  Great for lonely parties!

Can You See the Year End Lists? - The peeps at Can You See the Sunset have just posted the second installment of their top 50 albums of 2006 feature.  Go read theirs while we work on ours.

Merry Christmas Podcast - Tim Young and his Contract Podcast have just debuted part 1 of their Christmas themed podcast.  Pull a lawnchair next to the fireplace and press play.  There are some great holiday themed tracks from The Eels, My Morning Jacket, Low, and the Smashing Pumpkins.