Echoes

VINYL FORMAT. This album is positively monumental. At one moment you're in a punk-rock house party in Brooklyn; then you're transported to a Berlin nightclub at 3am; and then you wake up with a hangover on a Sunday morning as sunlight hits your face. The DFA-supplied beats are perfect, the tinny Gang-of-Rapture guitar is artful, and the basslines are incessant. But what really makes this album important, and more than just a Williamsburg art-rock document, are the slower tracks. There's a lovely power-pop song that is pure Big Star, a slow ballad that could fit in on 'Plastic Ono Band,' and a lost-love cry-along that sounds like something Nick Drake wanted to write. Records like this don't come along that often.