Guksu’s new album — it’s emo-tastic!

I recently started listening to “High and Dry” by Radiohead.  It’s a pretty catchy song, and since several friends in high school and undergrad had highly recommended Radiohead to me several times in the past, I decided that I would do some research and see if I could actually get into Radiohead’s music. I was thinking I could maybe find a “Greatest Hits” album at the library, listen to it in my car for a week or so, then maybe purchase some of their music if I liked it. In the really short run, iTunes seemed like the easiest way to check out little snippets of songs, and see if a greatest hits album even existed. I found that Radiohead does have a “Best Of” album, but the iTunes synopsis informed me that this would be a “perverse” way to experience the group, because Radiohead was “one of the few bands in the 1990′s and 2000′s to use the album as a cohesive artistic statement”. I decided to read on, and perused several of iTunes’s album synopses, and what followed was a steady stream of hyperbole and big words that made about as much sense to me as postmodern literary criticism. It is possible that I just haven’t listened to Radiohead’s music enough for such critiques to really sink in and make sense to me, but it’s also possible that such critiques are just artsy fluff that would be fun to berate and make fun of.  I would like to give my best effort at being a music critic, evaluating the new album by my family band, Guksu.  Here goes:

Guksu has finally burst on to the alternative music scene with their bold and inventive new album, “Paretto”. Their music is so spiritual, you might see God listening to it. It is so visceral, a girl could have her first orgasm listening to it. It’s so cerebral, it’ll have you feeling like Garry Kasparov  in Round 7 against Deep Blue. Equal parts melancolique, ennui, and joie de vivre, after listening to the album in its entirety, you may run out of stuffy French words to describe it. While the album boasts several  pop anthems such as “All Falls Apart” that stand alone as strong, histrionic singles, the grandiloquence of their album as a whole shows that the finished product is both greater and less than the sum of its parts. The subtle, soothing tones of Curtis’s tenor voice carry you to distant corners of your mind where images are Burton-esque, and melodies float by on the currents of his wistfulness. Claire’s violin is pure “dulce”, which happens to the title of track #7. Evan’s steady, rhythmic thrusting of bass notes into the mix build in strength and intensity until the songs burst in a climax of cathartic catastrophe. If you haven’t listened to “Paretto”, then you haven’t experiecned Guksu.

Maybe if this vet school thing doesn’t work out, I can make a supplemental living as a music critic. Tootles.

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