Phantom Planet, The Guest
I admit that I, as probably most everyone did, only first checked out Phantom Planet because their drummer, Jason Schwartzman, played the lead in one of my favorite movies, Rushmore. But, they surprised me by bringing some pretty solid pop rock songs with great production that would make Ric Ocasek proud.
Their first album, Phantom Planet Is Missing was a very obvious freshman effort, with many of the songs showing their lack of refinement, but despite this, the album was very listenable. The Guest offers a more refined Phantom Planet, without sacrificing any of their pop sensibility.
Among my favorite tracks are the opener, California, which is a pretty straightforward track that is very reminiscent of their first album; Lonely Day, which just plain rocks; and Turn Smile Shift Repeat, which is a very sophisticated, well-arranged song with a sort of Radiohead-ish haunting feel to it, without being too overbearing and pretentious.
All in all, I love this album. Presently, I can’t stop listening to it. Check it out, if you know what’s good for you.
[...] rather broken attempt at comment-spam for the past few months. The results of which are on this post — a review of Phantom Planet’s last album. I haven’t [...]
Funny…spam disfunction (SD). Let’s hope the pharma spam people don’t discover a pill for that *grin*.
Are you sure you’re not accidentally filtering out his URLs Chris?
Let’s try that! Meow meow meow ebola Zaire meow meow meow yellowcake meow meow King Friday meow.
All that spam is extremely annoying. BUT, with that said… Phantom Planet has definitely got some great songs. But I confess… I didn’t get it because of the Rushmore-bit. It was the fact that OC used one of their songs as the little theme thingy. Either way, they are lovely. ( =
And a little side note… I like how I can watch my words come up as I type beneath this comment box. Nifty.
I decided to finally delete all the pseudo-spam. Though I had grown attached to it, it was time for it to go.
Well done.