Saturday, August 13, 2011

An Actual Decision

Yes, folks, I am about to reveal to you our decision on Kanye vs. Sufjan, but first, a story.

Sarah and I were visiting my parents last weekend and we left our lovely little critter with them so we could go see the final Harry Potter movie, which I wouldn't call disappointing because it did wrap everything up, but it was nowhere near as good as Deathly Hallows 1 and Sarah said it was her least favorite Harry Potter movie. Of course we needed to process this movie, so we went to this amazingly good beer store/bar for such a small town (Chambersburg, PA). When they closed at 10pm, we asked the guy sweeping up where we should go next. He said he usually goes to the Moose, but since we're not members, we should go to The Cottage. If you've been to the similarly-named joint in Grand Rapids, it's like that only with brighter lights inside.

We decided to decide once and for all who would win our matchup and we pretty much came to the same impass: neither of us likes the other album enough to budge on our leanings (me: Sufjan - Sarah: Kanye). Sufjan is too twee and precious for Sarah and, while he was a bit of an innovator with a unique sound, it's just wearing thin on her and she will off herself if she has to listen to the John Wayne Gacy song again. I feel like 10 years from now I may still listen to the Sufjan album from time to time, but I'm not likely to listen to the Kanye album much. It's clearly good, but it just doesn't grab me and I'm not crazy about the production except on the Bon Iver collaboration song, which isn't really much like the rest of the album. Which reminds me of another thing Sarah said: Kanye does a lot of different things on his album while Sufjan kind of does the same thing over and over. Fair enough. I'd call it consistency and it's part of why I like stuff like Mountains and all of post rock. But in the end, none of this really mattered because, realizing we weren't going to agree on a choice, we decided to let the coins decide. We did a simultaneous best-of-five-read-it-where-it-lands coin toss and Sufjan wasn't the loser. In fact, Kanye wasn't the winner. And now, to make it harder to skim to the bottom and find the answer (I often put my hand over the text when reading these posts so I can't accidentally see) I'll mention something I listened to recently that I really liked: Skying by The Horrors. It's one of those albums that will probably be too much like what it's referencing (post-punk) for some people, but for me it's just right.

Also, Sarah's out getting ice cream right now because she lost another coin toss.

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