Customer Reviews

Time Travel Is Lonely

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The first time I reviewed this album I only gave it 4 stars. It took me awhile to realize what an amazing piece of work it is. Its now my favorite album in my collection, and John Vanderslice is by far my favorite artist. I'm actually shocked I only gave it so few stars but my mistake highlights what a complicated intricate record Time Travel Is Lonely is. Its something hard to appreciate in just one listen.

John Vanderslice is by far one of the best musicians currently opperating in the indie rock world. He is a brilliant song writer (and from everything I have heard, an incredibly nice guy to boot!) While all three of his releases are awesome, Time Travel is Lonely, is by far, his best. The album reflects it's title, the sound is somewhat lonely, in many cases distant and longing. These feelings are reflected in both the lyrics and the music. Many tracks are layered with thick guitars, samples, and keyboards. While it does have its "rocking" moments, overall Time Travel is Lonely is a mellower album. I find it the perfect thing to listen to when I am studying...it has enough energy to keep me from falling asleep, but I never find myself so distracted by it that I can't concentrate.

Star singles from this track include: You Were my Fiji, Time Travel is Lonely, My Old Flame, and Everything Changed.

I heard a JV song on this Internet radio station (3wk.com, who Amazon should have a business relationship with because all I do is hear music there and come buy it here) and loved it. Got the CD and this thing is just unstoppable. Great, great album. JV has a great sense of melody and a great sense of humor. Highly recommended.

I saw Vanderslice with Spoon at the troubadour with Spoon over the summer. I was toally blown away by the live show so I bought a cd. You know how often these thing disappoint you...Well I have listened to this record about 200 times since then. I rank it up there with Grandaddy, Badly Drawn Boy, and Kid A.

This is my favorite of JV's music prior to 2004, and is frequently in my playlist even now. John has such a great gift at finding the perfect combination of synth, guitar and drums, coupled with his razor like lyrics and wonderful voice he produces some of the greatest (and dare I say timeless) music. I love seeing him play in Chicago in 2008 and still rocking the songs from this album as hard as he did back in 2002.

One of my friends gave this to me and once I started listening to it, I was intrigued and amazed by it. The record is crazy and peculiar and sad and happy and everything at once. Some songs tell stories, others are simply poems of moods and ideas. One song "If I live or If I Die" is a poem like Blake moderized and made into a song, a fact i stumbled upon reading Blake's Song of Experiance.
John Vanderslice;s music is allways interesting and fascinating, drawing you in, and even if you might feel repulsed by it at first, there is somethign which draws you in and won't let go, his music is basically some of the best music to come out the rather dull current Indie scene. I highly suggest this record and all of his others to anyone who likes strange indie music, or even music in general, please buy, you will be amazed.

I wander thro' each charter'd aisle,
Near where the indie'd rock does flow
And mark in every album worthwhile
Marks of love, marks of "whoa"

Wandering through the misbegotten aisles of a cherished music store, in the "used" section where diamonds await to be found like buried treasure in the muck, I found such treasure just about a week ago.
Having seen the name, it caught my eye. I know this guy- he's friends with The Mountain Goats, otherwise known as John Darnielle. Some type of relationship there, probably from "We Shall All Be Healed," The Mountain Goats most recent that I reviewed last year. That's about all I knew- well, I did sneak a listen to one of Vanderslice's albums on the internet a long while ago and left him all but forgotten (one of those times where it sounds alright, but it just isn't the right time or mood).
So, at $6.99, I made an extraneous impulse purchase and am now able to pat myself on the back once again for my incredible taste in music, even concerning music that I have completely no idea what it really sounds like. Now, it's your turn to pat yourself on the back for reading this because you can go buy it and impress all your friends and they'll tell all their friends, and so on, and then this three year old album will become some type of runaway hit just because I came across it in a record store in Ohio.
Back to the top, once again, and you'll notice I fudged one of William Blake's little written things to describe my experience in finding this album. Vanderslice does the same on a song called "if I live or if I die," although he doesn't even bother to change the words from Blake's "Little Fly, Your Summer's Play," he just rips it straight off and adds music. AND IT ROCKS! Not rocks like hard rock or anything because that definitely doesn't rock, but rocks like sweet minor chord piano with unpronounceable percussiony blippy blurps and bleeps sprinkled throughout.
Then Vanderslice rips off some of his brother Jesse's stuff that he sends him from his little hideaway in the Antarctic where he works for the National Science Foundation and begins going all "Polar Madness" because he experiences spontaneous trance states and alternations in consciousness induced by his exposure to the Antarctic's isolation (and I tell my students not to write run on sentences...).
If those letters are to be believed, then this is a charmingly and geniously crafted album loosely based around these letters his brother sends home expressing his loneliness and isolation and the things he writes about (including William Blake and the Internet). If not, then he sure did go take a lot of time to fake a lot of letters, and therefore he should spend less time writing fake letters to himself and making more sweet indie rock for us to idolize.