Arcade Fire & Ben Kweller + January Recap (Day 31)

Arcade Fire - The Suburbs is a tremendous album.  I could not stop listening to this thing when I first heard it almost a year and a half ago. I love the vibe that I get from these songs.  'Modern Man' is all about the increasing domesticity of life.  I really like the female vocal harmonies and the orchestration of this entire album.  The guitars sound very "My Bloody Valentine" on 'Empty Room'.  The transition between songs is well done, especially on tracks like 'Half Light I/II' with the bass drum stomping in as the songs shift.  'Month of May' is the rocker from this batch of songs, but it's so good because of all the strong songs around it. 

My wife and I listened to the first two Ben Kweller albums as we rode around in the car on Sunday.  The indelible mark these two albums left on both of us is remarkable.  We haven't listened to these CDs for probably 4-5 years and yet we still remember most of the lyrics, the drum licks, and track order.  I still remember hearing about Ben Kweller at a Dashboard Confessional concert in 2002.  His CD had just come out and he had been touring with Dashboard up until the night before.  There was a buzz amongst all of the other bands on the bill about this guy and so I quickly found my way to a CD store and picked up his first album "Sha Sha". There's not a bad song on either of his first two CDs and I have listened to them both enough times to know. 

Here's a recap of my listening progress in the month of January...
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Summary Report: 
Here's the link to the post that started this whole series -- The Death of the CD

To accomplish the goal I set at the beginning of this whole thing, I will have to listen to upwards of 650 CDs in 1 year's time.

Albums listened to so far: 31