Listen: Crush Songs

Here's a stream, via NPR, for those of you without Spotify:

http://www.npr.org/2014/09/10/347130810/karen-os-intimate-unpolished-solo-debut

Quick list:
five albums with traces of their DNA in Crush Songs

1. Is This It? sounds almost nothing like Crush Songs, but they have powerful common threads in the short track length, extreme lo-fi and feeling of intense emotion, barely suppressed.
2. Remember Metric's acoustic album, Plug In Plug Out? It's got five songs that are almost as long as the 15 here and you can't help but notice the emotional evocations that Emily Haines and Karen O share when they're whispering to you in a dark room.
3. Yeah, I know The Moon Song isn't an album, but in retrospect, it was obviously a preview of things to come.
4. Nick Drake's Pink Moon will always be the gold standard for quiet, powerful emotion, beautifully expressed and simply executed.
5. I was torn between Cat Power's best album, You Are Free and her debut album, What Would The Community Think. Take your pick. I think Community is a bit closer in spirit.


What else can I really say about Karen O at this point? Since the Yeah Yeah Yeahs dropped Fever to Tell in 2003, she's been on the bleeding edge of arty garage rock. No two Yeah Yeah Yeahs albums sound the same, but they're all unified by their raw emotion and energy. Karen O, with her stray cat yowl and silky purr, embodies that energy to the fullest. Crush Songs is a lo-fi fuzzball with an average track length under two minutes and a feeling of quiet longing. The energy is still there, but in different form. There's the occasional Karen O howl , but the album mostly feels like an acoustic love letter, recorded by a teenager on a four-track. Except this teenager is one of the most talented musicians of her generation.