Albums are graded on a five-point scale of "Awful-Eh-Good-Great-Classic". I'm highly biased, so don't take it too seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Irving

[#] Death in the Garden, Blood on the Flowers (2006)

In my room, in the afternoon, until the garden blooms. Or suchlike.

Reviewed October 30, 2019

Love is dead. At least, I think that's what I'm supposed to take from Death in the Garden. Whether or not these crewmates of Aaron Espinoza's Wacky Wild Shipride did it in seems irrelevant; they're rather downcast about it anyway. Irving's correctly realized the way you get hipsters to enjoy pop music is to monotone your way through it, to be as detached as possible from the heavy stuff. Thankfully, the characters in Irving's world are all having detached breakups and detached sex, rationalizing lies through sour grapes, fearing commitment, fucking midday, and occasionally throwing themselves through shower doors. In some cases, love is literally dead.

Funny, then, that it's not the loud-ish "Situation" that bridges the distance (it's too stiff to let loose much), but "Jen, Nothing Matters to Me", where Brian Canning's weary mumbles betray the propulsive bassline and jangly guitars. On at least half the album, Irving pulls through with their candidly jaded, summery tunes, at their best recalling a less debauched Dandy Warhols ("I Want to Love You in My Room", "The Longest Day in the Afternoon") or maybe a little bit of Spoon. The issue comes towards the end; Death in the Garden is bottomloaded and midtempo, making the last third essentially redundant. At times, you wonder if love's not the only thing that's dead, but mostly, Irving stays afloat.