Anticon
2007
Book Of Bad Breaks
About This Album
Recently signed to Anticon, San Francisco's Thee More Shallows take a slightly more dynamic, drum-filled approach to their third record, Book of Bad Breaks. The same processed guitars and layered keyboards are still here, but the album is less atmospheric music than quirky indie rock. There's a fair amount of experimentalism, with plenty of synthesized and effected sounds, songs breaking in and out of themselves from time to time, intermissions that lead into full pieces which then fade halfway through and become something else before returning to what they were originally. It's not actually as confusing at it might seem, mostly because Dee Kesler, the main force and singer behind Thee More Shallows, still concerns himself with song structure and melody. "Night at the Knight School," for example, while not exactly hooky in the traditional sense, has clear-cut verses and choruses, fast drums, crunchy keyboards, and catchy rhymes ("at the night school, night school, you doodle and you draw/anything, anything except what you're taught"), while "Oh Yes, Another Mother" has Rilo Kiley-esque lyrics over sparse beats that build into complicated, busy layers before ending in a 30-second neo-new-wave groove.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9)

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