The album starts to go downhill from there. The opening line from the next song, "Bunny Gamer," "This feels retarded" does not give me hope for the future, and the song becomes a rambling piece of ambience. I lose all hope on track 5, "Support Our Troops." It is a spoken word piece, a la "Fitter Happier" (but read by a person), about our troops. It starts off:

"Did you know you were going to shoot off the top of a 4-year old girl's head and look across her car seat down into her skull and see in to her throat, and did you know that her dad would say to you, 'Please sir, can I take her body home?' Oh wait, you totally did know that that would happen. 'Cause you're a jock, who is too stupid and too greedy and too unmotivated to do anything else but still be the biggest and still do what other people tell you to do. You did it to still be a winner."

Skip Xiu Xiu, unless you really really like melodramatic music with a slight avant-garde feel to it. Also, if you thought the spoken word paragraph was brilliant, buy it. If you want to listen, I'd say "Brian the Vampire" isn't terrible and strikes the best balance between all the songs.

Max Richter, from what I have been told, is usually an electronica person, so the "forever looping building ensemble" is understandable. I can't decide if this is a good thing or not, but the album basically riffs off itself, providing us with variations on the two or three main themes in different modes. As a result, the album sounds almost completely homogenous but without any of the complexity of say, a classical composer like Mozart or Bach. Interspersed, of course, is the mysterious woman typing, and you can't really make out what the heck she is saying unless you crank up the volume to the point of hurting your eardrums. If it's meant to be there as ambient talking, too bad, because from the first track which I did turn up real quick, the talking sounds more interesting than the rest of the album.

It basically sounds like the score to some lame avant-garde independent film about an unstable, misunderstood author. And that's what this album is: mood music. But it's a very specific kind of mood: it's the kind of music you listen to if you want to put yourself into a "mysterious deep thinker" kind of mood. Unfortunately, this album provides the mood cheaply: kind of a "Pure Moods" for indie-style college kids. That being said, it's not entirely without merit: the album sounds ridiculously professional (except for not being able to hear the spoken parts), and it seems very well-thought out and well conceived. If you're planning to make a brilliant piece of artsy-fartsy film for Cannes, I suggest using this as your soundtrack.

But for me, I say skip it unless you hoarde music. Not because it's bad, but because I know if I burn it, I'll forget about it, and then one day find it somewhere and listen to it and go, "Huh. That's moderately interesting." For listening, check out "On the Nature of Daylight" for the happy theme, and "The Trees" for the sad theme.

The only problem is that this album sounds too much like Johnny Cash. "Women's Prison" I think sounds a lot like Cash's version of "Delia's Gone." I think the album is a little bit derivative, and it loses points there. The lyrics also rehash the classic old country themes, but to complain about that would be like complaining that blues players should play different chord progressions. (They should.) Her voice also has the 70's Nashville twang, which slightly irritates me. But in her favor is that it does include a lot of rock influence, espeically influence from the blues. I'm not sure if this is a country standard or not, but many songs she incorporates anywhere from 1-3 key changes, each in between the Chorus-Verse space. It isn't a bombastic "My Heart Will Go On" kind of key change, but just a little boost to keep the song going after so much repetition. It sounds very natural when it happens. The centerpiece on this album, for me, is a really cute spoken anecdote (true or not I'm not sure) about a little 5-year old girl (the singer) who gets hit on the head and is too poor to own shoes or medical care. Whether it's honest and personal, or written and preplanned, it sounds spontaneous and is fun to listen to.

Van Lear Rose is certainly an accomplishment when the only people making these kind of music are the same people she is being derivative of. But a few new ideas definitely surface, so if you like country music, this is worth going out to get instead of the Hank Williams Sr. album you don't have it. It also has that "Southern woman sass" kind of humor, which I hate, but you might like it. Also humorous but not detrimental is that her duet partner on a couple songs sounds like 70s era Rod Stewart.

Burn it unless you hate country music. Buy it if you own more than 10 albums by Hank Williams (any one of em). "Women's Prison" is representative of the album as a whole.

This album made up mostly of repeated riffs with super fancy guitar solos with crazy effects and maybe some trippy Korg in the background or something. The vocals that are there are the lead singer doing his best impression of Pete Townshend doing his best impression of Robert Plant singing when he's not singing any actual lines (Whoo-ooh yeah! Whoaaa!). Some of the slower songs kinda sound like that band from Almost Famous. Some of them sound like they would be completely in place on Jethro Tull's full album "Thick as a Brick" (an album which you should listen to at least once in your life). None of the songs, however, are memorable.

But, if you love listening to bands jam at a fast, driving, tempo on the same riff for 7 minutes and just go all out crazy on the guitar and effects pedals, this is the band for you. In their benefit, when the band calms the hell down at a certain point on "Whiskey River" and breaks it down (~3:45), all of a sudden it sounds like a real song, and my ears perk up and I start getting into it again. 3 minutes later, and I just zone out again and start wondering if I have laundry to do at home. Which kind of feels to me, as a songwriter, like this band really has the talent to write good songs - they just get lazy and jam out the same riff for hours. Don't get me wrong, they're great riffs, and they definitely have a lot of talent (although the drummer is decent, he tries to do a Keith Moon impression and comes up short), but I don't need to hear the same riff over and over again (with variations) for 7 minutes. I don't care how many wacked out guitar wailin' solos or trippy ass Korg effects there are.

For me, skip it. If you are really into jam bands or just like to get high and throw somethin' "totally tits" on in the background, I say buy it and I give it 5 out of 5 pot leaves.