Band: Shrimp Boat
Album: Cavale
Best song: "What Do You Think of Love, "Creme Brulee" and "Pumpkin Lover" are awesome.
Worst song: “Free Love Overdrive” isn’t much.
In introducing someone to my apartment recently, I tried to explain my general level of organization in my personal life. It’s not really easy to describe, as it doesn’t really exist. I’m particular about some things — contact lists, music in iTunes, file folder structures on my laptop, etc. — but other things are just a hodgepodge of a mess.
I remembered this recently in looking through my iPhone. I, like many people, use my phone’s notebook application to store ideas, information and such for later. The people that actually do this are impressive, because all those notes end up simply sitting in the app until I end up being bored and looking through them, as I did last week.
The process goes as such:
So, on my more responsible days, I find notes like this and realize what I was thinking when I wrote it:
As you can imagine, it’s an ingredients list for a pie.
On other days, there’s this:
I do not know what this has to do with anything. “I Feel Fine” is a good song, but why in hell was I writing that at 2:17 in the morning? Makes no sense.
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I wrote all of that as a quick way to say that I really had no good review to write this week. I’ve been listening a lot to albums I’ve already written about. And I really couldn’t come up with something good on which to write because I’m still trying to slog through a couple of longer-form pieces for this site. Pieces that may never see the light of day, but whatever.
In said disorganization, it would be apt to write a bit on an album I love, but can’t — in an organized fashion — put it into words. I can’t do this, because Cavale is kind of a mushy, disorganized record. Shrimp Boat is a band that preceded the Sea and Cake. The album isn’t really one genre or another, but it’s got the strangeness that TSAC sorta lost, while still laying the seeds for the Chicago art rock scene that TSAC helped created.
"Creme Brulee" is a cool-ass song, as is "Pumkpin Lover," but it’s hard to really explain why. The record is fun and complex, but really bouncy. Allmusic calls it "charming” and I don’t disagree.
