Iji – In Celebration – Album Review

My discovery of Iji is one I feel pretty good about. Like any other regular music blogger, I listen to a bunch of new stuff every week, easily more than half of which I’ve never heard of before. My inbox and mailbox regularly fill with albums by bands and musicians I could spend the rest of my life name-dropping to smug satisfaction, even to the aloof aesthetes who run the baddest-ass of indie record stores, fully secure I got the drop on them.

I can’t really take credit for, well, any of those discoveries. Rather, these gifts of obscurity are the fruits of someone else’s labor, usually some publicist whose taste I’ve started to respect or an ambitious drummer from Brooklyn or Minneapolis that sent me the link to download their new EP on the right day and at the right time and it caught my ears just right. Point is, these “discoveries” are the result of someone, whether hired or not, putting the music in my hands and, more often than not, including a p.r. one-sheet for me to help short-cut my references to their influences and ideas.

Sometimes, though, and far less often than I wished, I go out to see a show and come home with a brand new album from someone I’d never imagine existed. Such was the case with Iji. I saw this Seattle group during their recent marathon tour of the U.S., as they played 58 (yes, fifty-eight!) dates across the country, from places like Missoula MT all the way over to Providence RI, and down to Birmingham AL and back westward to Santa Cruz CA with  tour pals, Watercolor Paintings. I caught Iji and Watercolor Paintings at a cute little cafe in a near-western suburb of Cleveland on a night out to see a friend of mine play in her own group. My friend’s band rocked, of course, but I already knew they would. It was Iji that came in like a ninja of love and kidnapped my calloused indie rock critic’s heart. (You can check out the review I originally wrote about this show here.)

I was so taken with the band I bought up what I could from the merch table and likely embarrassed myself asking the lead singer and his various bandmates questions and feeding them compliments. I like to play things cool, but when I lose my shit it is completely lost. Fortunately I walked out without buying a t-shirt, magnet, sticker, and sew-on patch gift set or some other such over-the-top purchase. Waking up with effusive praise remorse is easily assuaged when you glance at the new musical booty you scored the night before lying on your kitchen table.

Over the next several days, driving about town as I made the most of my summer off from my professorial duties, I realized just how fantastic the band’s latest record, In Celebration, was, and just how much I dug the vocals and song-writing chops of the main dude behind the project, Zach Burba. The album begins with “Kick Drum,” an utterly sweet transposition of romantic and band instrument metaphors. Right off the bat, you are provided Iji in its distilled essence, 59 seconds of clever and cutely poignant. Burba has set the stage well and just about everything you hear for the next twenty-five minutes will fit that description, usually in packages just a minute or two longer that the album opener.

To leave you with the impression that this is a single-dimension pop band would be inaccurate, though. On the very next track, “Giant Bite,” Burba comes with the heavy pop, interspersing silly lines like “I’m making myself dinner” and one of the only examples of recorded screaming I’ve ever found enjoyable (or, at least, amusingly tolerable). “Street Light,” however, begins in a manner eerily reminiscent of Junta-era Phish, before bringing in a diverse sound more like a straight pop, upbeat interpretation of Pinkerton. I love the jazz sax almost as much as I love Burba’s crooning as the song fades out, “And if we don’t sleep tonight, it’ll be alright, it’ll be alright.”

“Long Branches and Roots” is, by a mile, my favorite track on the album and one of my favorite songs of 2009. It is mellow, languishing instrumentally behind Burba’s singing, which includes the sweetest offer to make a sandwich (nothing special, just tomatoes) by a dude in the history of mankind. “Open Curtains” is almost as good, a wonderful song about belief that grows increasingly anthemic as the seconds tick off the moments until Burba comes with the lyrical core of this track (“I am sorry for not working harder for you/twice for two”).

“Recovery Bed” is probably the most diverse track on the record, with its scattered percussion, ukelele, and vintage HHBTM-style guitar work. The song itself is a delightful analysis of a bed-ridden narrator’s immediate surroundings, offering commentary on the stucco placed on the wall and the patterns in the carpet before breaking down and demanding “please remove me from this setting!”

The transition into the gentle calypso of “I Can’t Believe It” is as abrupt as it is seamless, and the listener finds him/herself drawn immediately into another fey narrative, this one of rhetorical questions and whimsical doubts. “Every Song,” on the other hand, is one of those rare songs where I’d love to buy the writer a beer and learn the backstory behind its composition, my own low-end VH1 personal program.

Not a lot on this album makes me thing of other bands, but when a song does, it does so in a big way that makes the rusty gears in my brain start squeaking. “Blanket Visions” carries with it a canny lounge vibe, somehow reminding me of Wilco and, even more implausibly, managing to not raise my blood pressure while doing so. This here blogger has little good to say about Mr. Tweedy, yet I could see a young Jeff, maybe 10-12 years ago if he’d started a serious anti-anxiety meds regimen 10 additional years before that. The song is soft and patient with scattered moments of impassioned up tempo, and is one I’d love to hear every vocalist I’ve ever dug take a crack at. “How We’ll Know” brings to mind entirely different musicians, ones that never make my soul growl, and is entirely deserving of the Lucky Sperms-esque comparison I’ve been making to my friends and public transportation acquaintances the last several weeks. Listen to this track with your eyes closed and tell me you can’t just see Jad Fair singing “Tempos changing, but we don’t mind, if it feels right, and it feels right, yeah it feels right” as Daniel Johnston bangs out some simple piano chords, I dare you.

In Celebration ends as it began, with a song eminently affable, charismatic, and brief. “4 Counts After the End of the World …”  A wonderful little ditty on the record, it plays all the better live as it becomes a hipster campfire etude. In fact, this was the song that made me stand up and walk over to the merch table those several weeks ago to get a copy of this album to stay with me long after Iji got back on the road.

Iji’s In Celebration was released independently and, unless you are fortunate to catch Iji next time they visit a little cafe or DIY all-ages indie venue near you, you aren’t likely to find it in any stores in your neck of the woods. Unless, of course, your neck of the woods happen to rhyme with the words Weattle, Sashington and then you might be able to find it somewhere. Otherwise, your best bet is to click here and order that sucker the new-fashioned e-commerce way. It’ll only put you back 8 bucks and bring you a whole lot more pleasure than that. If this review didn’t sell you quite yet, however, check out the tracks below. I’ll have my stopwatch out to see how long it takes you to click that link above.

Iji – Long Branches and Roots

Iji – Open Curtains

Iji – 4 Counts After the End of the World …