Music Tapes for Clouds & Tornadoes

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
This album spotlights Julian Koster's songcraft and distinctive vocals, his almost religious devotion to the singing saw, and numerous contributions from other musicians in the Elephant 6 orbit. As on previous efforts, recording was done using an array of antique hardware, giving the record a timeless, texturally rich sonic palette.

Customer Reviews:

4 out of 5 stars

After 9 years, finally a follow-up to their debut August 25, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful

Compared to their first album (an intricate pop masterpiece), this new one is more stripped-down and folky. There are some catchy tunes and some with long, drawn out melodies that take their sweet time to unravel in your brain, but after numerous listens every song is worthwhile and distinct. The production is awesome and organic -- instrumentation piles up without ever sounding too busy or cluttered, and the use of antique recording equipment imbues each song with an otherworldly appeal removed from time and place.

I would whole-heartedly recommend this album for any Neutral Milk Hotel fan looking to check out other related bands, or to anyone who enjoys reveling in the works of eccentric artists and their idiosyncratic worlds of sound.

4 out of 5 stars

Freedom for reindeer August 21, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful

Somehow the Music Tapes' first album "1st Imaginary Symphony for Nomad" never grew on me -- it sounded like a brilliant album that was picked before it could bloom.

But the most blandly-named band of the Elephant 6 Collective succeeded in snagging my ear with the second time round the musical saw. "Music Tapes for Clouds and Tornadoes" is an unpretentiously weird little album with a slightly unearthly sound, and lots of lo-fi folky instrumentation. It sounds a little like a folk band is being haunted by a singing ghost, if that makes any sense at all.

"Saw Ping Pong And Orchestra" introduces us to the singing saw right away, which ends up warbling alongside Julian Koster and some violins. And "Schedrevka" is much the same... except with no violins or singing.

And then finally we get to the actual songs -- a slow-moving banjo tune, overlaid with Koster's off-key voice ("Tiiiired of reindeer/sporting Santa Claus...") in a song about, um, freeing the reindeer. Then the band goes all out into a hurricane of clanking instruments and woobling windy sound effects, making it sounds like a bunch of musical spirits are joining in a chorale.

"Nimbus Stratus Cirrus" is a bouncy piano melody draped in bells and woobling, leading into a string of even weirder songs -- an accordion tune also called "Freeing Song By Reindeer" (note the "BY"), a languid banjo-folk tune, a crackly lament, shimmering minute-long interludes, energetic horn-filled stompfests, and a vaguely tribal finale full of bells, cymbals, and rhythmic drumming.

"Music Tapes for Clouds & Tornadoes" is about as lo-fi as a psychedelic album can possibly get, and about as weird as one would expect an Elephant 6 album to be, even from one of its lesser-known bands. The Collective's bands are known for embodying a post-Beach-Boys psychedelic sound, but the Music Tapes honestly sound more like an out-in-the-sticks band just jamming around. With a ghost, of course.

I honestly don't detect a single shred of actual keyboard in this album -- it's all about the singing saw, which alternately sounds like high-pitched whooping and warbling synth. This is used to add a ghostly, otherworldly sound to the otherwise down-to-earth instrumentation -- a steely banjo, accordion, clattering drums and the occasional round of shaken bells.

And Koster -- whom I suspect is a bit mad -- is the finishing touch to all this. His voice yowls and wails and murmurs, slightly off-key and warbly. And the lyrics are no less odd -- at various points he demands reindeer freedom, yells the names of various clouds, and contemplates the descent of the ocean from above ("The ocean is falling/out of the sky/grand piano sinking in the surf/turning in the waves....").

Rather the sunny psychedelica and colourful experimentals one would expect from the Elephant 6 bands, "Music Tapes for Clouds & Tornadoes" is a bittersweet and slightly humorous little folk experience. Just weird enough to be endearing, just pretty enough to be instantly likable.

1 out of 5 stars

Flying Too Much Over the Cuckoo's Nest August 24, 2008
1 out of 7 found this review helpful

I don't get why it is suddenly acceptable for indie music to feature singers who aren't really good. Sure, sometimes these off-key voices can be a bit enchanting and intoxicating, as with Jeff Magnum or Wayne Coyne: their vocals seem to fit into their respective productions, adapting them with magnificant arrangements or sounds that completley captivate the ear. Even Johanna Newsome more than makes up for her own wails with lush, wonderful musicianship and orchestrations. Yet, with those people you always seem to find frontmen like Alec Ounsworth, who are so terrible that they really ruin that entire song.

Of course, The Music Tapes -- apart of The Elephant 6 Collective, (now defunct?) -- are, at their core, a very simple folk band. So, we're not really expecting a lot to happen musically. Throughout the record, there's a scattershot of piano, an occasional violin, and a predominating presence of a banjo; all of it accompanied by a "whoo-oohh" wind blowing that sounds as if it came straight out of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". As a folk band, The Music Tapes aren't dense, complicated or out to wow us musically; they just want something that comes from the heart and is meaningful to their environment and people, as any folk band would want. Yet I cannot find anything to really drag me in and Koster's vocals are incredibly off-putting.

The songs have some good ideas behind them -- I particularly liked the sudden drums on "Majesty" and the Native American tribal rhythm of "In an Ice Palace", but all too often the songs don't do anything, they don't go anywhere, and the music and lyrics are quickly forgotten. "Tornado Longing for Freedom" and "Freeing Song for Reindeer" just seem to be there but after listening to them, there's nothing to deferentiate between them. Pieces like "Song for Oceans Falling" go on far too long, featuring seemingly-random plucking and an overwhelming amount of off-key katerwalling, making it difficult to not press the skip forward button on the CD player. A lot of it also seems as if The Music Tapes were totally prepared to sell some of these tracks to a quirky indie film.

The biggest disappointment comes with "Cumulonimbus", which is one of the better songs and embodies the potential this album had to be. The arrangement is interesting enough, almost captivating, and though it gets close to overstaying its welcome, the song really feels like what this album was trying to accomplish, judging from the idiosyntric artwork and story excerpts in the main booklet.

In the end, "Music Tapes for Clouds and Tornadoes" sounds like an apprentice musician learning how to play the score to "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", and after so much fail, giving up and simply pounding out random chords on various instruments. It didn't work for me; I'd suggest skipping it.

5 out of 5 stars

One of the best and most joltingly affecting and honest albums in the last few years. November 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

I had known of The Music Tapes for a long time. Knowing them as what they are best known for, "That band that the guy from Neutral Milk Hotel is in". I, like thousands of others, had my NMH phase where I spent months devoted to exclusively listening to In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, learning all of the songs on guitar, and wondering about the same things all other fans of that album wonder about.

As time went on, I found myself more immersed in the other bands of E6. I stand to this day as saying that Dusk At Cubist Castle by OTC is a better album then Aeroplane, but that's just opinions. I basically found Aeroplane to be the most obvious and accessible piece of what E6 does: Take Folk and 60's Pop and add two cups weird and one cup noise.

After the first time I listened to this album I knew it was important. The third time I knew I loved it. The fifth time I thought it might be the best thing of the year. The tenth time I thought it might be one of the best of the last couple years. The twentieth time it was one of my favorites ever.

I don't know, maybe it's timing, maybe it's the honesty in Julian's voice. People who complain about people having "a bad voice" is something that doesn't make sense to me. They don't have a bad voice, they just have a differente timbre to their voice. And in my opinion people who have different timbres are just like strange newfound instruments, they draw your attention and interest you more, because it's something new. Much like the Singing Saw, an instrument Julian loves dearly.

I met Julian when he Caroled at my house. He isn't pretentious, he's just an odd guy who is in love with magic and the world. I feel that more then anything he just enjoys making people happy, and making people feel that childish wonder that they lost so long ago.

Music Tapes for Clouds and Tornadoes was described by him as being a family, with each song being some sibling to a larger parent, and that's about the most perfect way to say it that I could think of. It is a world that you lose yourself in, and it is one of the most freeing and impacting pieces of music I've ever heard.

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