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15 October 2003
King of Prussia, Blood Rains Down on My Hometown (Best Friend)
The template for this album seems to have been the old lo-fi Guided by Voices records that used a concentrated musical palette to create concise songs with catchy, familiar hooks. But this sounds more like a one-man studio effort than the work of a band, which actually helps to humanize what with GBV can sound formal and remote. King of Prussia, a Pennsylvania town renowned for its shopping malls, is precisely the sort of place a sarcastic, clued-in indie-rocker such as Sam Henderson, who wrote and sang all the songs on this collection, would likely despise. His selecting it as his moniker gives a sense of the irony at work here, as well as his implicit faith that bland, suburbanized people, places, and things can be rehabilitated through being adopted artistically. Henderson's subjects tend to be self-important, self-conscious people and their ambitions, perverted by their upbringing in stale, stagnated places into a predilection for needing to be at once cool and conformist. His lyrics are laced with mundane details yanked out of context to lend them a faintly surreal air. Though sometimes smart-alecky, they are often genuinely affecting in the elegant way they reframe the quotidian.
— Rob Horning
.: posted by Editor 11:03 AM
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