Various Artists – Saddle Creek 50 CD

Saddle Creek 2003

Saddle Creek is celebrating their 50th release here with a two-CD sampler with two songs from each of their eleven bands - Bright Eyes, Cursive, and The Faint among them - one old song, and one new and elsewhere-unavailable one. Before listening to this, I was at least semi-familiar with many of the bands (okay, probably a little obsessed with Cursive), but most of them I didn’t really know beyond names, reputations, and various Omaha-worshipping articles. We had gotten a few of these albums over the years, but with the flood of CDs we get, and the McDonald’s-level turnover rate of reviewers we suffered early-on, most never got reviewed. Well, that’s a tragedy, because we obviously missed out on reviewing some amazing CDs, if this sampler is any indication.

Not only are the album tracks here often brilliant and chest-collapsingly melancholy, the new tracks are in no way throw-away - witness Cursive’s absolutely fearless experimentation on “Nonsense” and the repetitive folk of “One Foot in Front of the Other” from Bright Eyes, like a dog circling and circling a carpet before it finally lays down. In fact, this album not only made me want to go out and immediately stretch my wallet beyond it’s capacity to buy every single CD sampled here (especially Desaparecidos), but it also plays as a satisfyingly complete album in and of itself.

- Michael Houghton