Nine, goddamnit, Nine

Cloud Cult - Living On The Outside of Your Skin
Cloud Cult - What Comes At The End
Cloud Cult - You Got Your Bones to Make a Beat
Cloud Cult - Transistor Radio
[From their Happy Hippopotomus LP]
Brook Veeg is right, you gotta hear this shit in its entirety, but, even so, songs alone are just agonizingly adorable and brilliantly forthright. First to last, HH nearly plays like no other record this year. And, unfortunate, that's the frustrating thing about compiling these lists I talked about yesterday -- factoring in reach-slash-(sub)cultural sway and the like. If this album got enough push it'd be huge, like OC-but-not-just-OC type. It's still going to stick near the top on m'priase-o-thons: perfect melodies and perfect fun in the confines of perfectly constructed pop songs make for one mother EFF of a record. It's like if Sugar Ray considered "Fly" an excuse to make excesspop that dint exactly cater to largertaste. (And, god, that analogy is reductive and ultimately hamfisted). But this shit is gold in a way that a lot of indie-pop can't be -- like the kind of colorful a-o-l away messages jerks like yo smile at when we know airybody could just put up the 'neric "this game takes up my whole screen" shiz. There's care here. There's spark, in a completely organic and artifice-less sense. Each track on the record is a meticulous piece that -- while able to stand alone -- works effortlessly to create an inspiring and entirely (+ adolencently) invigorating whole. It was impossible to pick just four songs to post. Really you could listen to anything on the album and be an immediate convert. Think a Modest (mouse) Beck's quirk tempered by mr. mangum's adoration for unhinged melody and a pinch of Pause's ability to take the organic and infuse it with electricity and binary code. Then there's the str8 rock tracks (like "What Comes At the End") that strike like &serenading-style Mineral, all fuzzed out and used to commune-living. What the Hap Hip amounts to, in a sentence, if you'll allow me to be so limiting, is a twenty plus track argument for the legitimacy of lite-as-a-feather, earth-moving pop that is both intimate and ornate. I'd be surprised if any surprises like this surprise me the rest of the year. PopMatters said it flirts with genius. They're wrong. It is genius. [PLEASE, buy it here].