Customer Reviews

Know Better Learn Faster

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

 

 

It's like a funky sweater you might not like at first glance, or even the first time you try it on, but every time you slip into it, it gets more and more comfortable. Then you start noticing the little details and perhaps admiring them, and you start to warm up to it, and before you know it, you're humming it while you're grocery shopping, and the next time you hear it you realize you've somehow fallen in love.

I just... can't understand how someone could listen to this more than three times and not think it's magical. Yeah, I think it is mostly about a breakup, but I've never heard such fun, sing-along breakup songs. I mean, you could play this album almost end to end at a low-key gathering and no one would bat an eyelash; it's not morose. And it's really not the subject matter but the tone and the attitude and the musicianship that make the album, in my opinion.

This is definitely one of my top five albums of 2010. If I lost it, I wouldn't hesitate to buy it again; that should tell you something.

I love the first album (Brave...), and I'd give it 4 stars easy. Know Better has maybe 3 solid songs on it, such as Cool Yourself, Swam, and Know Better. The rest of it is just very weak. The songs didn't grow on me over time. "The Give" is annoying, and "Trouble Was For" has an incredibly tedious melody that makes you wish it would just end. The rest of the album doesn't do anything for me.

The album has a more produced sound, if that makes sense, and seems to get away from the raw, solid content of the more bare tracks on the first album. Overall this was a huge disappointment for me, as I was really looking forward to it.

Sorry Thao! Your stuff is great, but this album let me down :( But you were awesome at Troubadour in July 2008!

Fantastic listen all the way through. I was very pleasantly surprised by this album. Great summer album or just a good driving record if you're in a cheerful up-beat mood.

I love this album. Every track is not perfect, but that's okay. Perfect is boring.
And in response to the other reviewer, I do not agree that you have to be going through a breakup to enjoy this album?
While the lyrics may be about heartache and the struggles that you go through while ending a relationship, the songs are ultimately upbeat and simply just make me feel good.
I cannot stop listening to this album.
I highly recommend it.

I'm so glad I decided to have dinner at chipotle or I would have never heard the open your hips song. I was looking at my husband and asking him if what i was hearing was a happy yeah yeah yeahs. Decided to look up the song and gave it another listen. She sounds like karen o and bjork merged into one. Luv the sounds- it's noise candy.

Love it; what else can I say. It's the next step in a great musical career. And a cameo by Andrew Bird; it doesn't get better than that - crazy whistler! If you're a fan of her previous album you're probably going to like this as much as I do.

When compared with the slick, cleverly turned lyrics and melody lines from her solid, quirky first album, LIKE THE LINEN and it's breakthrough follow-up WE BRAVE BEE STINGS AND ALL, Thao Nguyen's KNOW BETTER, LEARN FASTER falls a tad short. Oh, all the right elements are there. Perhaps too many, in this case. Thao and the Get Down Stay Down band receive so much help from other musical luminaries on the album in fact that Thao's unique style--- her sparseness, where just her voice and guitar are enough to get the point across--- gets buried beneath a wall of sound accompaniment. The stripped-down, honest simplicity of Thao's live performances is what keeps her fans coming back to see her, time and again, not an overuse of studio bells and whistles.

Thematically, the album suffers from focusing too much on a one-track story line, namely the end of a lousy relationship and all the bitterness that accompanies it. While this works well for a few of the songs, it's not strong enough to carry an entire album. Whereas, on her prior two albums, Thao talked about relationships with families, friends and lovers, with a little social commentary thrown in to showcase her awareness, this new album is all about sadness, loss and bitterness on a personal level.

THE CLAP, a short, slick gospel-inspired tune serves the album as a hand-clapping intro and before you can ask yourself the question, `well, what`s all this about?' it breaks into COOL YOURSELF, perhaps my favorite cut on the entire album. I was taken aback a bit when I first heard it, because the opening guitar riff sounds darn like that of BAG OF HAMMERS, Thao's most popular and most commercially viable song off of BEE STINGS. But, not to worry, COOL YOURSELF is its own song and tells in an upbeat boppy manner how the other person should just go F themselves...in a nice way, I mean. In WHEN WE SWAM, another bopper, the singers is aware that her partner in bed is just going through the motions without any emotional involvement. KNOW BETTER, LEARN FASTER, the album's title track, flows along on smooth guitars and violin. In it the singer has been emotionally fighting in bed with her lover all night until both parties end up just too weary to continue and the 'victory' of meeting on common ground is never reached. In BODY Thao asks her lover point-blank if she's just a convenient body in bed, or more than that. Whatever the answer, she still admits that "it's too good to see you." While she hates the arrangement, she also doesn't want to leave. Musically, THE GIVE hearkens back to WE from Thao's first album where she practically bites off the words and repeats phrases. It's a sort of grasping at straws song where the person is willing to take just anything to keep the other from leaving. GOOD BYE, GOOD LUCK seems to be about the sacrifices in their private lives that members of a traveling band have to go through for their audience. Being on the road all the time is not a good way to nurture relationships. It just gets old after a while; then it dies. In TROUBLE WAS FOR, what also gets old is the wild binge parties after all the gigs that serve in part to help the band members forget all the things they've been missing while out on the road. OH NO is a sad, mournful continuation of this same theme about meeting lovers on the road and then leaving them behind and moving on. It's about regrets. In FIXED IT, the singer is telling the ex-lover that she'll survive even if they never get together again. It's an "I can still make it without you' sort of song where the singer is not really so sure about it, after all. Repeat disappointments in love can harden the heart and make one not so willing to accept love the next time it comes around. BURN YOU UP is an offhanded plea for the other party to come back and give the singer a second chance, because she's sure she can still have a profound effect, if given the chance. Trying to resurrect this relationship though is like beating a dead horse and BUT WHAT OF THE STRANGERS illustrates this oh so well. The couple has become strangers in their own skin and though they`re in the same room together, a vast desert separates them. It's probably a hard song to sing and Thao sings it with a cry in her voice. The albums closing tune, EASY, is a rousing dance number where the singer tells the other party to `make it easy' and not waffle with thoughts about coming back. She wasn't the one who left, after all. With this song and the albums close, Thao seems to be getting her life back on track and that's a good thing. For while KNOW BETTER, LEARN FASTER is a good album for people in bad relationships, it's a hard listen for those who aren't.