It helps that Daniel Folmer's a pretty funny guy--he signs all his emails to our offices "Love, Daniel"--but his quirky pop tunes are just up our alley this time of year. You know what I mean, right? How it's almost, kinda summer and you're antsy about it, and your mind's filling up with the season's possibilities, but you can't really do anything about it 'cause it's not summer just yet?
(Does that make sense? Basically, I'm saying the weather's messing with my mind lately. That's all. And that Folmer's music, for some reason, fits...you know, because of that. Because it's goofy.)
Anyway, his lyrics--about weird, one-off love affairs and things that go bump in a graveyard--are a nice counter-balanced to the pretty classically structured pop instrumentation of his tunes. "Robots," off his new A Leaf (which Dave Sims reviewed in this week's paper), is a perfect example: It's a fairly quick-paced pop-rock ditty that's put together quite well (well done, Echo Lab-ers) and, oddly enough, is about, well, robots. But robots in love with, so far as I can tell, their own dying technologies.
Bonus mp3:
Daniel Folmer -- "Robots"
Or, at least, I think that's what it's about. I could be wrong. Either way, sounds like a Pixar movie story line. And that, I'm always OK with. --Pete Freedman