Slow tempo grandeur. Almost fitting for the final scene of a Wes Anderson film, minus the triumphalism. A twee sense of melancholy that would’ve felt like mourning for a dearly-departed millennium when the album dropped 25 years ago. What have we learned during the intervening years? Less than we should have. The Ladybug Transistor produced throwback chamber pop that must have sounded steeped in irony at the time. But after two decades of horrorshow social and political developments on the American scene, it’s the earnestness, the sincerity, of our highlighted track “Today Knows” that shines through. Off The Albemarle Sound. Via Merge Records.

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