Lush and listenable - A perfect CD for summer, a night out, or a rainy day. Full of great songs highlighted by simple yet amazing rhythms and Dominique Durand s voice.Ivy shine at the mid to uptempo stuff. The highlight track has got to be I Get the Message, a three minute pop gem. Strengths are The Best Thing, You Don t Know Anything and the summery mid tempo tracks Quick Painless & Easy and I ve Got A Feeling.Some of the slower tracks don t work quite as well for me, still Apartment Life deserves a wider audience.
Undertow - I heard Undertow on one of the Ultra Chilled CDs. It is a gorgeous song....the perfect backdrop for a chick surfer movie!!!
Great Stuff - Ivy has become one of my favorite listens. This is really probably their best CD but Long Distance is also excellent. The biggest compliment I can pay this CD is that it has not left my car CD player for a long time. I ve got lots of CD s to play and a very short attention span so staying on the platter is a major feat. Apartment Life is less cutesy than Long Distance and while it is still basically pop music (whatever that means), there is a depth to it that transcends the obvious. Like clear warm water, the depth of the music is not apparent from its transparency. Ignore the fact that one song was used in Something About Mary - it just means that the producers of that movie found some good music. While Guest Room still leaves me uninspired, I have to give my highest recommendation to this CD and to a slightly lesser degree Long Distance. While pop music is not normally raised to this level there are other examples, most notably to me Todd Rundgren s music, where it can achieve extraordinary heights by being that tune - or here tunes - that keep you moving through life.
A VERY NICE APARTMENT - Buoyant soft indie-rock glides smoothly under the lilting euro-lounge vocals of Dominique Durand, a 90s Claudine Longet-like spoken breath singer. Apartment Life sounds like a day in one s apartment staring out the window musing about the cat on the sill and the meaning of life. Get Out Of The City is a catchy pop melody hopefully escaping a stillborn psyche and Back In Our Town is a haunting three part vocal that adds an ominous tone to this otherwise breezy scene.
Brilliant sophomore effort - Hmmm, let s see, I think I played The Best Thing about 863 times soon after buying this album. That s the power of that song. One of the greatest opening tracks ever... But the whole album is filled with other excellent tracks - in fact the last four tracks are some of their BEST work, especially Get Out Of The City. Many people new to Ivy may recognize This Is The Day from There s Something About Mary soundtrack. Ivy has always been able to shift gears and moods with songs almost effortlessy. One minute a song may make you bop around the room and the next have you contemplating a broken relationship. This band has has great hooks and melodies up the wazoo. Ivy knows a thing or two about classic pop song structure and the music world is all the better for it.