Music: Apartment Life

Today, I'm mixing up the usual "song-of-the-week" format and running through a whole CD. Thanks to LexisNexis' rewards program, I just received "Apartment Life," the sophomore full-length album from Ivy. Ivy's one of my favorite pop bands, with a sound that has been likened to "The Sundays" and "The Cranberries" (though to be fair, I think Harriet Wheeler and Dolores O'Riordan are much better singers than Ivy's Dominique Durand).

Here's the tracklist:

1. The Best Thing
2. I've Got A Feeling
3. This Is The Day
4. Never Do That Again
5. I Get The Message
6. Baker
7. You Don't Know Anything
8. Ba Ba Ba
9. Get Out Of The City
10. These Are The Things About You
11. Quick, Painless And Easy
12. Back In Our Town

Most of these are about as radio-friendly as pop gets. "This Is The Day," for example, features bombastic brass flourishes that would be revisited later in the song "Lucy Doesn't Love You." In this CD, as in later albums, the band tends to alternate catchy, dance-able tunes with slower lounge tracks.

In truth, it can be a bit formulaic, but these albums are more like loose collections of themed songs than a single coherent story. "Apartment Life" seems to have a lot of material dealing with the urban experience, including songs like "Get Out Of The City":

Summer days are long and lonely.
Cars are moving slowly.
The streets are filled with air so still.

I'm trying to get out of the city.
Trying to get out of the city.

On almost all the tracks, Durand's floaty, French-accented voice is a good complement to the guitar and bass of Adam Schlesinger and Andy Chase (although the mix is nowhere near as jangly as bands like the Magnetic Fields).