you can't turn your cheek when you're falling asleep

it's an album decorated with pots and pans, spanish mama's, and simple rhythms that you'll curse yourself for eternally humming. it's the sounds of a hippie summer and a fling with nature in 10 short tracks. i'm not completely sure how the sounds of a camping trip and an old spaghetti western collaborate, but alex ebert seems to have mastered it in his solo album, alexander. formerly known for his fame of being the assumed edward sharpe in the edward sharpe and the magnetic zeros, alex ebert is stepping out in the music realm alone. his recipe of twang-meets-tenting is spicier than his last works, equipped with more blasphemies and a more visually interesting album cover (if you consider a small child in stripes holding his rainbowed name more visually interesting). there's still the childish sing-a-long aspect to many of the songs on this album that captured our hearts when alex was posing as edward sharpe; he's just more at liberty to scream or whisper or let us peak into his musically-concocted mind on this album. his songs are still littered with back-up choirs composed of off-tune hipsters, beats made up of heavy breaths and yelling spaniards, and whistled tunes thrown into the mixture with kazoos. alex continues to wow his audiences with the melodies he can create from a melancholic pile of instruments. give his single "awake my body" a taste test, and i'll pay you money if you don't picture yourself roasting marshmallows around a fire and shotgunning beers to this song.

i'm pretty sure if alex ebert's soul was an instrument it'd be the tamborine.

i mainly wanted to write about this just so i could use the word tumblewoof in a sentence

if you love the hipster induced trance that phoenix's wolfgang amadeus can put any sole vancouverite in, then you're going to love nothing more than the combination of this trance with being a 6'7 gangster. even for those self-proclaimed hip-hop "haters" that so notably have been mentioned in more rap songs than the actual fans, there's simply no way you can turn down a lil wayne meets phoenix remixed date. you can hate his egotistical, says-pussy-too-often attitude, or you can hate their indie fad overuse of plaid and triangles, but together they are like a mixture of oppositely tasting, overly hating deliciousness that you can't not love. there has to be at least one track from this album that i can guarantee at least one fan from each end of the spectrum is going to like. (okay, i can't guarantee, but i'm trying to attain some form of global, hipster-hiphop peace here, so just work with me so we can create a new niche of nike-wearing, plaid-with-bling teens).

the electronica meets autotuned swear-words is perfected by tumblewoof, who as far as i'm concerned was neither a tumblree or a dog in his past life. either way, it gives you a small sample of each world, and the remixes are so flawless that it sounds as if phoenix and weezy actually made peace between the two genres and rented the same studio space. my favourite song from this album is the last one, geniusly titled armillistice - a dubmix between wayne's "a milli" and phoenix's "armistice". it's a perfectly tolerable version of the song, which has replaced the irritating "a milli" repeated background with a phoenix instrumental. check it out, as well as the entire album as a free download, at tumblewoof's website: