{"id":39927,"date":"2006-09-08T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-09-08T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/listen-learn\/"},"modified":"2006-09-08T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2006-09-08T00:00:00","slug":"listen-learn","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/listen-learn\/","title":{"rendered":"Listen & Learn"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s hard for those of us\u00a0of a certain age not to recall the classic Saturday Night Live<\/em> bit about the jam with the almost-obscene name (\u201cWith a name like Fluckers, it\u2019s got to be good!\u201d)\u00a0when reading that the Heise Brothers\u00a0used to\u00a0play in a group called Munkey Juice.\u00a0 No Munkey Juice on this album, though — just brothers Nelson (the older singing and guitar-playing one) and Robert (the younger bass-playing and background-vocalizing one) giving up 15 tracks of slightly earthy, slightly tricky jam-band-ish folk-rock. <\/p>\n

These cuts are earthy in that the arrangements are loose and the production is uncluttered and organic; tricky in the sense that their shambling back-porch fuzziness serves as cover for some fairly probing songwriting.\u00a0 The album gestated from\u00a0a song\u00a0the brothers wrote\u00a0about the passing of their grandmother (the touching closer \u201cAlma Marie\u201d), and the resulting set touches often on the complexity of relationships with family and friends (\u201cI don\u2019t feel bad if I tell you the truth \/ And I won\u2019t feel good if I lie to you\u201d).<\/p>\n

The Brothers\u2019 style reminds me of Ben Kweller sitting in for a set with the Pernice Brothers — acoustic-based songwriting with quirky electronic accents, dreamy melodies under incisive lyrics, and a manic rawness that belies the artistry of many of the tracks.\u00a0 A perfect example is the \u201csong\u201d that frames the entire album.\u00a0 The minute-long fragment \u201cFigure Anything Out\u201d appears in three arrangements — \u201cMystic,\u201d \u201cSoft\u201d and \u201cStomp\u201d — and in every case the brothers wring something entirely different from its single extended chorus, without ever losing the melodic thread and core of confusion and self-doubt.<\/p>\n

The Brothers also profess admiration for the Kinks, and it\u2019s easy to see in the way they attack the rare full-on rock number \u201cFor Me,\u201d which finds Nelson unleashing a heartfelt confession\/thank you at the mike while Robert keeps things thundering forward with the British Invasion fervor of a modern-day \u201cYou Really Got Me.\u201d \u00a0There\u2019s a milder strain of the same cheeky classicist rock and roll to be found in \u201cNames\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t Say Goodbye.\u201d<\/p>\n

The album was cut with help from fellow Twin Cities scene veterans including Joshua Stuckey (guitars) and Michael Velasquez (drums), and the music definitely has the feel of old friends getting together in a buddy\u2019s garage and playing their hearts out.\u00a0 There are missed notes and sloppy changes here and there, but it\u2019s all part of the atmosphere.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Listen & Learn<\/em> isn\u2019t going to burn up the charts, but doesn\u2019t feel meant to.\u00a0 The Brothers themselves have declared this one was for friends and family, and its most appealing aspect is that it has no pretensions of being more than that.\u00a0 A quality piece of work that\u2019s worth checking out<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":28474,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[7802],"rating":[5615],"class_list":["post-39927","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-the-heise-bros","rating-rating-b"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/39927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/39927\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=39927"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=39927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}