Nov 17, 2009

Heatmiser - Mic City Sons

Heatmiser - Mic City Sons


Youtube User 1:
I feel like I mss the 90's, even though I wasn't born until 95. Like I was there or something.
Youtube User 2:
same here, we were born as the era ended


Still from Heatmiser music video "Blackout"

I think those comments speak for themselves because I am somewhat speechless.


When people talk about musicians that they were sad to see go young, I think that Elliott Smith is at or near the top in my Top 5 [required High Fidelity reference]. His music has the ability to impact emotions very distinctly and with pinpoint accuracy in a very concentrated way. There have been times that I would pick up my mp3 player and scroll through albums to listen to and happen upon Figure 8
, Roman Candle, or Either/Or and think that "Man it's been a long time since I'd listened to that". Immediately I'd cue it up and within a song or two switch to another album to avoid becoming somber, but it'd never deter me from wanting to hear more of his work or ever go back and revisit it.

Heatmiser was formed during by
Neil Gust and Smith during their college years in Massachusetts. I had no implication to think that it would be much varied from his local fare and picked up Dead Air and Mic City Sons intent to hear more of Smiths breathy-soft vocals. I was hit from the side by a Mac Truck mixture of pop/rock/grunge/punk. The vocals were shared between the two as were the songwriting credits. I had to push back from Dead Air and use Mic City Sons as the pool in which to dip my toe in the water to get used to this change in perspective on an artist that I had enjoyed in one way for so long.


The strongest songs on Mic City Sons in track listing order for me would have to be Get Lucky, Plainclothes Man, Eagle Eye, See You Later, and Half Right. Plainclothes Man is reminiscent of Miss Misery and the arrangement of Half Right is more full than Smith's solo recordings that I've heard previously.


  1. "Get Lucky" (Elliot Smith)
  2. "Plainclothes Man" (Smith)
  3. "Low-Flying Jets" (Neil Gust)
  4. "Rest My Head Against The Wall" (Gust)
  5. "The Fix Is In" (Smith)
  6. "Eagle Eye" (Gust)
  7. "Cruel Reminder" (Gust)
  8. "You Gotta Move" (Smith)
  9. "Pop in G" (Gust)
  10. "Blue Highway" (Gust)
  11. "See You Later" (Smith)
  12. "Half Right" (hidden track) (Smith)
Overall Rating- 75%
averaged between 66% and 83%

Album Approval Rating System
I've created a way for me to gauge my approval of an album by passing or eliminating the songs after multiple listenings. It goes as such; if I listen to the album over and over and on repeated listenings a song doesn't get skipped it obviously passes. If I get in a habit of skipping a song, it fails. If I listen to it sometimes and other times skip it, the score is figured once with the songs skipped and once without the songs skipped and then averaged for an accumulated score. Figure this though, for the majority of pop albums that even achieve gold record status, there might be two songs on that nine or ten song album that are heard or are even passable. [that's a 20% to 22% approval rating]. It's easier for me to quantify to others how and why I like an album.

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