Cast it at the setting sail

Ever since adopting Opera as a replacement for my trusty, but, let's face it, out-dated Internet Explorah, I've been creeped out by how deeply this tabbing thing affects my psyche.

Yes Jams, I know Firefox has that too.  Opera is still better. I researched this.

The thing is, what do my tabs say about me?  I've been thinking on this.  Opera saves my tabs when I close them, y'know.  I open up my browser in the morning and find my previous night's surfing waiting for me, like a young puppy eager to go for yet another walk.  Today, I find that I have:

Scary Go Round
Cokemachineglow, open to their archive of reviews of artists beginning with the letter P.
A recipe for curried pumpkin soup that both intrigues and appalls.
My Google homepage, which is an escherian landscape of newsfeeds and wine advisories.
My last.fm, which I refresh feverishly ever time a song finishes to 
bask in the permanent record of how awesome I am.

Also, I want to know what my weekly artists are, last.fm.  Hurry up with it.  My ego requires its peculiar nourishment.

Danielson is ridiculous.

I assumed from the deep blue abstractness of their album's cover, and this album's bleak, monosyllabic moniker, Ships, that the sound would be something like a post-rock Bright Eyes. I could imagine how it would proceed, all glacial instrumentation featuring some plucky, bearded troubadour wailing overtop about how he misses his shanty and rubber dingy. These things would've met destruction at the hands of a particularly stiff Atlantic gale, or some other nautical villain. Perhaps a whale.

Wrong, Josh.

Though it took me a while, and several intarwub sites, to figure it out, Danielson is not a man but a family. Their last name is Smith, and they are exceedingly far removed from any kind of dreary Newfoundlandian weather. As near as I can figure, they in fact come from a land containing nothing but sunny days and kittens. They wind up sounding like Sufjan Stevens if he were seven people and had never hit puberty, or the Decemberists if they focussed on making listenable music instead of altars to their own fictitious superiority. They most assuredly sound like The Fiery Furnaces if they were happy instead of insane.

The instrumentation is dense, rich, and inspired baroque-loving pop. There are flutes, and banjos, and fiddles, and more old-timey sounding instruments I can't confidently identify. Acoustic guitar and Daniel Smith's astonishing squeak form the spine of these songs, an intensely charming pairing of completely honest camp. His siblings' noodling with their attic of antique sounds fill things out nicely, an airy mass of sincerely catchy twee that would be sugary if it weren't so gleefully bizarre. Song structures wheel and jump in whatever format these people wish, verses giving way to sudden shouts and chorusses as one member or another feels the need to express how great they think life is.

It's tempting to call this family band silly, but that'd be unfair. Danielson sing songs about trumpets, ducks, girls and boys, lions, movies, and, yes, ships with such simple cheer and uncomplicated enthusiasm that one shouldn't sell them short in such a way. They're free-spirited and energetic, but they'll make you skip and clap, not send your breath racing. They're weird. Holy crap are they weird, and they're genuinely fine with that.

Did I Step On Your Trumpet is one of the catchiest, most listenable songs I've ever heard come out of this particular corner of indie-pop. In a subgenre bloated by monuments to songwriters' egoes, an unjaded romp like this is an absolute gem. A rollicking, old-West acoustic guitar rythm frames the Smiths' simplistic, bouncy bass, bare tap-and-plink percussion, and what I am positive is an exuberant xylophone. This all joyously underpins a call and response singalong about totally unrelated and barely comprehensible events. It's impossibly entertaining, and the smart, perfectly orchestrated music here betrays a massively talented band.

My Lion Sleeps Tonight is the closest approximation to a slow song on the album, but its beautifully mournful melody does not afford a moment's complacency. Daniel jerks and starts in his role as vocalist, his prepubescent throat not content to sing at any one tempo or rythm for more than a few bars. The lady-Smiths inject a lovely, wordless sigh into the background, a perfect counterpoint to Daniel's insanity, and a pretty method of tying his loose-brained wigging into a cohesive, gorgeous song. I do believe the low-end is held down by a single, grinning oboe.

Kids Pushing Kids carries this tactic further, into an upbeat, piano-laden number which I'm certain was recorded while Daniel was gesticulating wildly at the microphone. Small groups of strings, which appear on most tracks, never fully supercede vocals in the mix, but frolic with bass and piano to complete a frenetically colourful backdrop to the more overt bombast of the vocals. It's something akin to a country marching band following a lunatic hobo around town. Of course, they're an extremely creative marching band, and it's a hobo with uncanny musical sensibility.

Each song is a wholly unique expression of smiling nonsense, a cogent, unfettered ode to the sunnier feelings of being alive, and I could never rightly remark on the album as a whole without doing injustice to any number of songs. He Who Flattened Your Flame Is Getting Torched sounds exactly like The Arcade Fire playing an impromptu number about cowboys and pillbox hats at a country fair. Ships The Majestic Suffix punctuates a children's symphony on a caffeine high with heartbreakingly beautiful, medieval balladry, then it throws the two together and makes them sort out their differences.

Main bullet points? It's pretty, it's happy, and it's the best realization of orchestral twee I think is possible. It's not ironic or self-conscious, a welcome breath of fresh air in the indie world where both traits breed like rabbits.

Tonight I am going to eat bison and read Machiavelli. How deliciously evil.