Words by Jacob Barron

It’s about 8pm as I’m writing this. If it was two weeks ago, my window would’ve been all urban darkness, struck with a few errant shafts of orange street light. As it stands, however, I can still discern not only the silhouettes of the buildings that occupy the crappy view from my apartment, but also their colors and windows and features. It is spring, my friends. The days are getting ever longer, and things are looking altogether brighter, from the colors of the clothes you’re probably planning on wearing, to the turf at your local baseball stadium of record. It’s a season we all look forward to, but it’s also a season that isn’t above screwing with us by tossing in a late March snow, or a day of unseasonable cold in April. It’s like a really cute kid who tells really awful, unfunny jokes, and we laugh and tolerate them because, come on, it’s a little kid. Look at how cute he is!

It’s always seemed like the youngest season to me, and not just because it reminds me of adorably unfunny children and allows for better recess games. Metaphorically speaking, spring has to do with rebirth and renewal, so while you may shake your fist at spring when it dips below freezing after Easter, it’s still a time to clean the slate, and regard the world through a lens untarnished by experience or cynicism, kind of like a lot of these tunes do.

Belle & Sebastian – If You’re Feeling Sinister

Belle & Sebastian / If You’re Feeling Sinister

Belle & Sebastian might have one of the higher median band member ages in indie rock, but they’ve always sounded perpetually young to me, and never more so than on If You’re Feeling Sinister. Lead singer and chief songwriter Stuart Murdoch always sounds a tad shy, but still seems capable of seeing things the way a child would, with an appropriate level of curiosity and exuberance. How a guy in his 40s manages to do this without sounding naïve or immature, I’ll never understand, but from the mournful “Fox In The Snow” to the jolly “Get Me Away From Here I’m Dying,” the album’s a uniquely carefree listening experience that’ll put a grin on your face and have you briefly considering whether or not to dot your i’s with smiley faces.

The Shins – Wincing the Night Away

The Shins / Turn On Me

Any album from the Shins could probably fit on this list, but Wincing the Night Away seems to constantly be dancing between coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb. Their other releases are all lamb to me, so Wincing has a better lion/lamb ratio, I guess is what I’m trying to say here. Anyway, as spring bridges its extremes, so does Wincing the Night Away, which finds a happy middle ground between indie quirkiness and produced listenability. My reflexive reaction to hearing this album a sudden, uncontrollable urge to roll the windows down, in my car or in my apartment, no matter the time of day. If it’s dark out, “Black Wave” and “A Comet Appears” have me covered, whereas “Turn On Me” would make for great background music in a movie montage depicting a protagonist happily driving to work. Every song sounds fresh, and when considered with James Mercer’s always-rich lyrics, the whole thing becomes something akin to that light coat you’ll wear until May, which warms you up while letting you feel the breeze.

Colin Stetson – New History Warfare Volume 2: Judges

Colin Stetson / The Righteous Wrath Of An Honorable Man

Stetson has played bass saxophone (and many other instruments) for some of your favorite artists, including Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, The National, Tom Waits, Feist, TV on the Radio, and David Byrne. His solo work, however, clearly shows why he’s so in demand among indie’s upper crust; despite the dark-sounding titles (ahem…”Clothed in the Skin of the Dead”…ahem…), New History Warfare Volume 2: Judges is relentlessly giddy and alive. It’s largely instrumental (occasional vocal contributions come from My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden and spoken word interludes from Laurie Anderson), but bombards you with an endless array of bubbling saxophone bursts, all of them rushing together into an aggressive, life-giving storm. It’s new spring music you didn’t even know you were looking for, and you’ll be glad you found it.

Ed. note: no work of Stetson’s is reviewed without mentioning the fact that he records most of his songs in one take, by himself. When you hear percussion, that’s a microphone picking up the sound of his hands slapping the keys on his saxophone, and when you hear a voice on “Judges,” that’s him singing through his saxophone, while playing it. And if you never hear a break so he can take a breath, that’s because he can breathe circularly. Save for the times when Worden or Anderson are singing/talking, this is all one man, at one time, making the whole album even more invigorating and inspirational, to say the least.

Brian Eno – Another Green World

Brian Eno / I’ll Come Running

I mean, yeah, the album title’s pretty springy, but, more than that, every tune included on Eno’s non-ambient magnum opus can soundtrack some spring scene, from the first gleeful moment when you find that you can walk outside without a jacket (“I’ll Come Running”) to a leisurely day out reading on the grass (“Another Green World”), to a still-too-early-to-go-swimming trip to the beach or body of water of your choosing (“Everything Merges With the Night”). The album is best known for its revolutionary production techniques (it has credits like “snake guitar,” and relied heavily on Eno’s “Oblique Strategies”), but it’s still overwhelmingly listenable, revealing its technical virtuosity only after the repeats that it more than deserves. A great introduction to Eno and his impossible-to-overstate influence on modern music, as well as a perfectly experimental prism through which to watch the thaw.

Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes

Fleet Foxes / Ragged Wood

I know I said I consider spring to be the youngest of all seasons, but I think, if it were an adult, it would totally be the unwashed, incense-burning sibling and/or palm-reading spinster aunt of all the comparatively buttoned-down other seasons. I was going to say it’s a hippy season, but that’s kind of a vague term, and I also can’t decide whether the correct singular spelling of hippie is “hippy” or “hippie,” so I decided against it. Proper suffixes aside, spring is nature at its most nakedly, agreeably gorgeous, and, not to get too poetic, but an annual reminder that, as dark and as cold as it gets, it will always get warmer. Fleet Foxes’ self-titled debut full length (and their equally impressive debut EP, Sun Giant) is all these qualities manifest, each song a newly opened bud, or the welcome return of a bird you haven’t seen since early October. Everything is endlessly vibrant and new, but the echo and the harmonies all sound like they could’ve come from any moment in the history of recorded sound, giving the album something of a timeless, quintessentially American vibe to it. Listening to “Ragged Wood” or “White Winter Hymnal” or “Your Protector” takes me back to a time when spring meant more than just a lengthy dearth of federal holidays. This is the music of a good harvest, of green leaves and colorful flowers, whether real, hoped for, or anticipated.

What songs sprout flowers and leaves in your head as soon as the weather gets warm? Is there a particular song you just have to put on the stereo as you drive home from work with the windows open? Leave us some comments and let us know.

Filed under: Lists, Mind Blowing, Not Blake, Jim, or Brendan