The Best Thing I Heard This Week: Fort Lean

Rarely have I been so floored by a four song EP, but Fort Lean's self-titled debut is simply fantastic, and the best thing I heard this week. Fort Lean sound like someone gave them a Walkmen starter-kit and they really just fuckin ran with it. It's all there--the jangly guitars and tomahawk percussion--but with an infectious energy that makes it less derivative and more kinetic than anything I've heard recently. "One Beach Holiday" opens the EP at a breakneck pace, with a guitar line that is simple, catchy, and perfect for a song about a beach holiday (fast forward to 1:13 in the video).



After "Dreams (Never Come True)," which comes off like a more soulful Morning Benders song, "High Definition" picks up the pace once again. The song, and sorry to keep harping on this, recalls the Walkmen's "In the New Year." The guitar opening, the restrained crescendo as the song moves along, and, finally, the release after 3 minutes as singer Keenan Mitchell allows himself the resolution that the song begs for.



More than anything else though, this EP is simply fun to listen to. The EP's closer, "Perfect," is nearly that. When Mitchell tells me "there is a place that we can go / where it will never rain or snow / we go outside / the weather's perfect all the time," I'm ready for that journey and even more ready to hear a full length record from this promising Brooklyn band. I strongly encourage you to go here and listen to the songs and buy the EP, it'll be the best $4 you spend today (unless you really, really needed that coffee this morning).

Staples-The Harlem Shakes' Technicolor Dreamcoat

Sometimes, you get lucky, truly and strangely lucky, and you listen to the right record at the right moment and it'll be with you forever. Granted, some records are so great that they're going to do that anyway, but not every record is Let It Bleed or Abbey Road or Blonde on Blonde, so you gotta appreciate that shit when it happens. I heard the Harlem Shakes' Technicolor Health at the best time possible. The record is hopelessly positive and forward-looking, so much so that it caused critics to wince, yet it was the best thing for me to hear at that moment. I listened to this record on repeat during a six hour drive from the Appalachians to Chapel Hill, and it became a staple of my music collection.

The Best Thing I Heard This Week-David Wax Museum

OK, so first things first, there’s a lot of Avetts (not literally) on this album, and I feel like that can color things for a person these days. For me, if someone tells me that a record sounds like the Avett Brothers, I’m running the other way (with half-hearted apologies to Mumford & Sons). Honestly, I don’t want to hear things that sound like the Avetts, I want to hear the Avett Brothers or something completely different. That said, David Wax Museum’s Everything is Saved is a fantastic album, and I’m glad no one made an Avetts comparison before I heard it. But the influences are all over this record.