A friend cautioned me when I bought Ramona Falls’ Intuit that the album was hit-or-miss and he was correct. Brent Knopf’s solo album feels uncentered and lacks the cohesive elegance of Menomena side project Lackthereof, whose 2008 album Your Anchor was criminally overlooked.
However inside the embarassing high school cover art of Intuit is one of the year’s standout songs, “I Say Fever,” with a bristling payoff of layered vocals 3 minutes in.
You can listen to it on the KEXP blog and the animated video is pretty cool too.
Couple of other strong numbers on the album include “Belly Fulla” and the lunatic syncopations of “Always Right.” The reviews on Intuit are strikingly mixed but you know where I stand.
A better investment would be last month’s anthology of the home recordings of Lackthereof’s Danny Seim, most of which were never properly released like Your Anchor. You can buy A Lackthereof Retrospective 1998-2008, or I was a Christian Emo Twentysomething at Parasol.com or directly from Barsuk Records.
I’m still stuck in 60’s-70’s rock, but this photo of Ramona Falls is one of the finest I’ve seen. Nice shot!