Customer Reviews

Everyday I Said a Prayer for Kathy & Made a One

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

For fans of the album prior to this (Per Second) you'll find Wheat has gone BACK to a less structured song format on this album, which once again proves to be beneficial. This album has a stylistic approach similiar to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot of Wilco fame but isn't quite up to the par of that album. This less structured approach however always seems to serve Wheat very well as it lends itself to the bands talents of taking a sound and making it serve a song well.

Wheat fans who felt burned by Per Second, come on back. Per Second fans, take heed this isn't the same kind of Wheat.To me, i always enjoy well thought out music which is done in a different manner as this album is.

This music is headed for some sort of well-deserved fame or a much bigger oblivion than the rest of us will get. Hope and Adams impressed me greatly. Per Second...had a smart touch of pop. Everyday I Say a Prayer...interesting as it is will require lots of prayers. Maybe I've changed. Maybe I only thought I got it. They've adopted a very strange posture. The tuneful abilities are still there and it all loosely holds together, but it sort of sounds like they're on break.

I have to admit, I was really looking forward to Wheat's return after their last album Per Second Per Second Per Second... Every Second. That CD was fresh, interesting, and implied either a next step into Indie greatness or maybe a fizzle into nothingness. Instead, they've gone for something ambitiously different and badly missed. None of the songs are compelling; many are unlistenable. The music is atonal and nihilistic, the melodies are either bland or bad. This will be last Wheat CD.

"Per Second, Every Second", was like a diamond in the rough. "Every Day I Said a Prayer..." is more like a rock in your shoe. I thought from the clips that I heard, that this album would have the same refreshingly different, "uptempo slowjam" kind of feel that started with "I Met a Girl" and was well maintained through "Don't I Hold You". I was wrong. By the time I reached the end of "Courting Ed Templeton" I had come to the grave realization that I wasn't going to get my money back.

Listening to this album after "Per Second" though, I couldn't help feeling condescended, as if someone felt that the subtle nuances in the profound yet simple lyrics of "Per Second", and the casually evolving melodies that encapsulated the vocals were too much for me, so I needed to be brought down to a droning synthesizer and and a few mumbled sentences. True, the previous album's lyrics were not verbose, but their simplicity could be described as "elegant". This album seems just plain lazy, with words being overused ad nauseam. And while the former album's scores were not complicated, yet still creative, this album offers listeners little more than a handful of cadences wrapped in newspaper, no card. Maybe the album is called "Every Day I Said a Prayer..." because it sounds like it was made in a monastery, with lyrics repetive enough to rival any prayer book, and melodies redundant enough to move one to prefer silence.

Wheat is a band that has beguiled me for 10 years now. They've never made the same record twice, and it's impossible to anticipate what they'll do next. Of course I'm a fan.

"Everyday..." is, IMHO, their masterpiece to date. This album is two years old (almost), and I still listen to it often, hearing things each time I didn't hear before. It's overall otherworldly melancholy casts a spell that's very hard to describe but impossible to shake.

Rather similar to "Alas" by Idaho in its singularity and in the way it uncoils and weaves through, "Everyday..." is pretty important - very enigmatic, and a minor landmark.

Wheat lost a little spring in their step on "per second...", but are back in a big way with this release. I was hesitant to even pick this up but am very happy I did. If you were a fan of early Wheat, buy this CD.

You really can't fake this stuff. If they did they did a really good job. Dimishing returns? Shut up. This is one of the most interesting albums I have heard so far this year. I read the poor reviews and I was like "what?"--A million hell YEAHS to this.

if you go into this record expecting the same record as "per second...every second," you'd be wrong. you have to go back to wheat's first two indie records, and then listen to the "per second" demos to understand what the band originally started out as.

this is a sonic experiment, similar to wilco's "yankee hotel foxtrot." it has its accessible songs, and it has its beautiful dissonance. "a prayer for kathy" is a slow builder, and it works towards something big.

i think it is a moving statment. so just listen.

This is the best thing they've recorded since they made "test tones" for The Lips.