Hi folks, Patrick Ripoll here. I’ll be up-keeping this here blog every Friday forever and ever, until I die. Maybe even after, if I ever get my BA in Necromancy. It’s a 6 year program, so I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that my scholarship money from “The Joey Ramone Foundation for Tall, Lanky, Ugly Bastards” comes in soon. The lady who took my application said I was a shoe-in.

As the weather got warmer your arms fell out/And I watched from the window and I thought it out- Shelby Sifers

As the year draws to a close, all those damnable end of year lists pop up everywhere. Pretty useless, right? By now you’ve already heard about the big albums, and you don’t need more reasons why Neon Bible is great. Well, my top 10 list for 2007 would mostly be the familiar safe “great” albums (Kala, Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, etc) with one major exception: Shelby Sifers’ Run Around Run Around. The only reason it’s not on everybody else’s lists is that they probably haven’t heard it yet.

Well I have, and it’s a thing of beauty. I’m already a fan of lo-fi pop, but Shelby Sifers manages to make every element of her music come together to evoke strong emotional reactions from simple childhood struggles. Her voice is very cute, like a 6-year old girl, but it’s got a sadness to it, which is heightened by her very sparse and lonely arrangements. She really makes lines like “I can still tell you’re unhappy, we’re all just a little unhappy” come to life because she sings with such an emotional commitment. She may sound like a 6-year old girl, but she’s the only 6-year old girl in class that wasn’t invited to little Susie Johnson’s 7th birthday. It allows her to sing incredibly bleak lyrics like “God the indifferent, he doesn’t give a damn” without coming across overly mopey.

And even if she has a young voice, she’s got lyrical prowess beyond her years. “If I had a dime for each person I loved/I would buy a big house with rooms for all of us” she sings, capping the melancholy “Blackberry” with a happy ending. All of the stories she tells in her songs walk that line of bittersweet with the skill of John Darnielle. It’s no easy feat to make subjects like freezing a snowman head to save it from melting affecting and poignant (”Snowman”), but somehow she manages it.

The arrangements for these songs are often sparse, allowing the vocals and lyrics room to shine, but enough additional instruments are added to keep it from getting monotonous. Xylophones, harmoniums, and even computer-generated distortions (how she made the sounds for the chorus of “Snowman”, I don’t know, but it creeps up on you something fierce) are employed to add just enough life to the tracks to engage the listener, but never so much as to distract. Make no mistake, this is a very sparse and intimate album, one that probably is best listened to through headphones.

My only real complaint about Run Around, Run Around is that at 30 minutes, it’s all over much too quickly. I think with 3 or 4 more songs, this would be a true masterpiece. As it is, it’s “just” really really great. I’m just waiting for everyone else to discover what I’ve already come to love.

Shelby Sifers is part of Oh Map! Records and Run Around, Run Around can be downloaded from CLLCT here.

MP3:
Shelby Sifers - Blackberry.mp3

Myspace:
www.myspace.com/shelbysifers