If you love Stereolab and Tortoise and any other kind of mellow, drone-ish Euro-pop/rock than you’ll definitely be interested in hearing Fog In the Shell.  Their newest CD is entitled Private South and it is just full of high brow low-fi - using mostly standard “rock” instruments:  guitar, bass drums and a bit of synth here and there to tweek things up. 

This amazing album is only six tracks long but each cut is of epic proportions for a pop band - the average song clocks in at about 8 minutes and the end song, “I Hate Euclid” is 13:30.  So there is a lot of meat in each of those carefully chosen and wonderfully written and so wonderfully evolved with the synergy of the whole band.

The album starts out with “They” a song that is emblematic of the rest of the album, if not a little better, like most great songs that start off great albums, “They” has a certain hook that reels the listener in and has grabbed you by the end and then, of course, you have to keep listening to hear what’s next.  Like a good book you can’t put down because you just have to keep reading to see what happens next, so it is with Private South:  each song is a wonderful thing in itself, not just a continuation of a theme and there’s no wasted material here, it all is so dramatic and captivating. 

This album, Private South, would have to be classified as “rock and roll”, but that is not a bad thing if it’s done well.  To be sure, there are many “subgenres” of rock - maybe 20-30 years ago this would’ve been labeled “progressive” or a few years later, “alternative” and then after the homogeneousness of the term had come to cheapen its meaning, categorically, then there had to be a new “tag” for music that was independent, not under the thumb of any A & R guy trying to give the kids what they are supposed to want to hear to be cool, but music by people who were true artists and the music actually matters to them more than the groupies and the paparazzi and selling your song rights to sell cars or beer or whatnot (that makes me sick and lose respect for that band/artist).