Pick a Year

Alias
Angeles of Light
Capitol Years
The Clean
Crooked Fingers
Do Make Say Think
Earlimart
Elefant
Erlend Øye
Film School
The Fire Theft
Fruit Bats
Hella
His Son Elroy
Kid Dakota
Lali Puna
Larsen
Low Res
Milton Mapes





The Moore Brothers
Ms. John Soda
M. Ward
My Little Cheap Dictaphone
Nik Freitas
John O'Brien
Part Chimp
The Robot Ate Me
Rogue Wave
The Postal Service
Pothole Skinny
Puny Human
Revlon 9
Styrofoam
Shipping News
Shout! Comp
The Standard
The Starside 8
Summer at Shatter Creek




Summer at Shatter Creek

S/T
Absolutely Kosher
2003
[05.03] To put out an original, movingly beautiful pop album after so much has already been done to death is quite a feat these days. To do it on your debut release, and by yourself, is truly remarkable. And to be quite honest, to pigeonhole this release as merely a pop record is doing it a great injustice.

The curiously named Summer At Shatter Creek (SASC) is the work of one man, a Mr. Craig Gurwich, and what a man he is. I think we've all heard albums by one-man bands that might be enjoyable, but sound exactly like you might expect when only one person is playing all of the music—very one dimensional, single personality-type stuff.

Somehow Mr. Gurwich manages to transcend this phenomena, creating a three-dimensional sounding album that oozes electronics, but still sounds quite organic. There are lots of warm, classic sounding organs and keyboards along with the prerequisite drums, guitars, and whatnot. But the real story here is the man's voice—and my god, what a voice it is. He possesses possibly my favorite falsetto since Jeff Lynne of ELO, and that's not something to be taken lightly. I've heard and read people mentioning it in the same breath with words like "heavenly" and "angelic," and I'd be remiss to put up any sort of argument over the pairing. —Jake