elephant parade

Someone buy Elephant Parade a cake, they seem to need some cheering up. 10 seconds into "Friday Night" and you will see what I mean. It's the single saddest feat of guitar playing I have ever heard. Estelle and Ido's back and forth vocals rarely rise above a whisper, which allows the subtle clicks of the tongue and in-takes of breath to become more pronounced and add a ridiculous amount of intimacy to the Album. To say that "the timbre of their voices compliment each other quite well" would be an understatement. Their sense of vocal counterpoint and harmony hold the album firmly together and allow the minimalist instrumentation to come across as honest rather than kitschy.
Songs like the Piano based "Riding in Your Car" (I am convinced) was achieved by channeling the ghost of Erik Satie via some sort of black magic voodoo. The song is sung so sadly that the subtext seems almost to be "we just swallowed enough pills to kill 40 people" despite the only actual lyrics being "I like riding in your car".
The Entire album clocks in at just over 20 minutes and before you know it the whole shebang is over. In that respect the album is quite punk rock ... except ... not sonically.
If the Soundtrack to Amélie and Sufjan Stevens had a love child it might very well be Elephant Parade.

head on over to their myspace to hear 4 songs and do the whole myspace stalking thing