Days For Days

I'm trying to cover all five Loud Family albums during this week -- no rest for the wicked. The year and a half between Interbabe Concern and Days For Days was marked with more personnel changes for the Loud Family, with the last "original" LF member, keyboardist Paul Weineke leaving the band (replaced by Alison Faith Levy) and drummer Gil Ray rejoining the Scott Miller Express after an eight year absence.

This new lineup made for a more organic and band-like album than Interbabe Concern. For the first time on a Scott Miller album, the songs were credited to all four band-members (Kessel, Levy, Miller, Ray), giving the other members a 25% share of the lucrative publishing royalties, and suggesting that they were all more than backing musicians.

The eighteen tracks on Days For Days are divided into nine "regular" songs with titles (even numbered tracks) and nine untitled soundscapes (odd numbered tracks).

The titled tracks are all longer than usual by LF standards (mostly between four and five minutes, with "Sister Sleep" at eight minutes), but still sound like pop songs with regular verses and choruses. The odd tracks are all listed as "Untitled", but are usually known by their track numbers (#1, #3, #5, etc.). They're all really short (one minute or less), but after awhile I started programming them out part of the time, and didn't rip them into iTunes with the rest of the tracks.

My regular Days For Days has been the 32 minutes of the nine regular tracks, but it's a completely different experience with the nine untitled tracks in-between them. Unlike Scott's previous soundscape experiences (the shards on LN or PABARAT), these tracks are all sonically related to the next or previous titled track, so playing the CD in shuffle mode doesn't really work.

Listening to the Loud Family albums in order, Days For Days feels like a more successful attempt at The Tape Of Only Linda, the work of a band fully collaborating in the studio.

They didn't make any promo videos for the album, and there aren't any performances on youtube, so here's the new Weird Al video. Now Al has a "Craigslist" song to go with his "Ebay" song.



It's a Doors tribute/parody with Ray Manzerak on keyboards. For a tenuous connection to the Loud Family, one of the songs on Days For Days ("Good, There Are No Lions In The Street") takes its title from a lyric in the Doors' "Celebration Of The Lizard".