Bums vs. Donuts

While I own and have at various times enjoyed both of these albums, they’re just not doing it for me right now. I keep thinking that, instead, I’d rather be enjoying actual doughnuts or nakedness. Generally speaking, I enjoy doughnuts in the morning and nakedness at night, but I suppose I have occasionally enjoyed nakedness in the morning and doughnuts at night (in both cases with Karl I believe). Either way, that just leaves afternoons for listening to these records.


The Sigur Ros album (I’m not even going to try; I’ll just call it Bums), starts off promisingly. A reviewer wrote that it sounds like Sigur Ros channeling Animal Collective, which is pretty awesome (both the channeling and the comparison). In my mind, the first two songs are easily the best on Bums, and the album does keep up steam until we hit the beginning of “Festival”. Let me first state that the end of the song--you know where that bass kicks in—is pretty rad (that’s right, rad). But my goodness, the first four and a half minutes are a slog to get through. Even though he’s singin in Icelandic, the beginning of this song sets off my “this sounds like it could be in a musical” alarm. The next tune, “Aksdfjdk” (okay, that's not the real name, it's just the keys my fingers hit) isn’t bad, but it begins the second phase of the album, all of it slow and not nearly as Animal Collective-like. We continue on with the worst song on Bums, “Ava Batur”, which definitely sounds like it could be in a musical and is so overdone with the boys choir and whatnot that it becomes almost a parody of itself. The last few songs are all individually pretty, but together they just drag. I think Bums would be so much better if the they had done a better job of sequencing the album or recording one or two more peppy songs to include towards the end. I can understand their thinking--“Let’s put all the super-amazing songs together at the beginning so it totally grabs the listener, and even if they listen to the rest of the album, they’ll probably just remember that”—and that might fly most of the time, but not if you want to make it in Death Match.



Whereas Bums is pretty uneven, Donuts is about as even as you can get. It consists of thirty-one tracks, each of which lasts on average about a minute and a half and which sound, at least to my ears, almost identical. The whole album is full of interesting and well-put together samples. On the whole, this reminds me of DJ Shadow, but while DJ Shadow takes time to develop ideas, Jay Dee/J Dilla (whatever) seems to delight in moving to the next sample before you’ve had time to really hear the first one. I personally feel like I have ADD when I listen to this record, which I suppose gives me more empathy for some of my students. Basically, I really enjoy this album if I only listen to a few tracks at time.

One final note: this album definitely has a cool factor. You know what I mean. If I were twenty-four, driving around on a summer day, wanting to impress the ladies—this is totally the album I would be bangin. I bring this up because my hesitation on this record might just be because I’m not hip enough to get it. I know that may sound like a back-handed criticism, but I really don’t mean it that way. What I really do mean is that this album might be over my head. I mean, here I am comparing it to DJ Shadow, but I really have no idea if that’s an apt comparison or not. I’m just not familiar enough with this genre to know how cutting edge or how derivative Donuts is. Sometimes I think, who cares? You either like it or you don’t. But other times I think that it’s worth taking the time to try and figure it out.
So I’m passing on Bums and I'm passing Donuts on. First of all, then Sarah or someone can explain to me why Donuts is great (or not). Second, sometimes you just got to go with the underdawg. Third, Bums is on Karl's list.