The past week I've been listening a lot to the (in my opinion) really fine debut Reverse by Danish alternative/indie rock band Bahnhof and as I always do, I checked a couple of reviews, but was quite surprised to see that neither Gaffa nor Soundvenue liked the album. What really stroke me when reading was that both reviewers seemed to focus far more on the press material in which the band compares itself to The Raveonettes, Mew, Kashmir, Figurines, than they did on the music. And of course it is quite something to compare yourself to those highly regarded bands, when you're about to release your debut album. But rather than being irritated, I think they should have simply ignored this confident statement and instead reviewed the album on its own terms (which they hopefully tried, but clearly failed to do)...A highly original/groundbreaking album it isn't (being familiar with the band for some time now, I certainly didn't expect it to be) as the music sounds like a huge (but very good) mix of bands like Kent, Muse, Interpol, The Killers etc. But most importantly all of the songs are enjoyable with catchy melodies, and as a whole the album is a lot better than those reviews gives it credit for.
+ A Brighter Day
On a completely different note, I still don't like the way some albums are (over-) hyped, but Boxer by The National is really, really great and deserves all the nice words and fantastic reviews. Fake Empire is one of those unique songs that just seems to be getting better and better - despite that I've already listened to it a 100 times. And another fabulous track of the album is Apartment Story, which can be found here.
+ Fake Empire
