****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
This is the best Posies album since Amazing Disgrace, and maybe the best since Frosting. Both Auer and Stringfellow saved their best songs for the joint effort this time, and they are back in full form with their soaring vocal harmonies.The "friends like you" chorus in "So Caroline" is amazing - no one else can harmonize like these two, and this trademark element of the Posies sound is evident throughout the album, also in full glory on "She's Coming Down Again!"Ken seems to favor the keyboards for his solo work, and manages to integrate that sound pretty successfully on this effort, though the Posies have always been primarily a guitar band. Jon also experiments a bit with a free-form structure and shifting tempos in "Accidental Architecture."The final tune is the one that stands out for me. "Enewetak" is a breezy pop song about a Pacific island paradise where the US government forcibly evacuated the natives to test the hydrogen bomb, paving it over afterward with a concrete dome. Stringfellow's moving lyrics describe a "radioactive trail of tears" for the displaced islanders living on a nearby atoll under the fallout cloud, that "the mothers loved their babies though they weren't like us no more." The ending is a sweet "endless summer" Beach Boys style vocal coda suggesting what might have been if the place had been left untouched.Intelligent, witty lyrics, glorious vocals - you can't go wrong, whether you're a 20-year fan or a newbie, buy this one today.
