Junip - Fields

Paul's Choice:

Junip - Fields

Friend Review:

I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THIS BAND OR ALBUM I JUST CHOSE. Since being in college, I’ve found that I’m very lost in the sense of music releases and stuff. So when in a jam I’ll just try to find one album that has come out recently and use that as my choice. The good thing about this is there’s some kind of excitement in listening to an album that you know nothing about and since you don’t really know what it’s about, it’s like going into uncharted waters, it might be the most amazing album ever and you don’t even know about it. I found some of my very favorite bands by randomly choosing to check them out (The Rural Alberta Advantage and Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, namely). Sadly, there’s also a counterpart to randomly choosing an album because it might just be something you hate. Place yourself in this situation, if you will: a market opens down the street from you, and you think, awesome, maybe they’ll have some berries and cherries I can eat. So you go down to the market and look around, and it turns out all they have is avocados. Ladies and gentlemen, Fields by Junip is a giant avocado.
I started listening to this album while working on calculus homework, and after three songs I was utterly bored. So bored that I had to write on Taylor’s Facebook telling him I was bored (if you’re not friends with us on Facebook, you should be! I’ll try to put up some links or something). There’s not much I can say to describe this music except that it’s dull. The instrumentation feels very repetitive. Usually if one instrument has a boring part it makes another instrument standout but it really sounds like a huge drone. What tops the cake for me though are the vocals. There’s simply no variation in them from song to song, it’s just really bland. I don’t feel like there is any individual song that stands out on this album, or really anything. It just feels like reading the same boring passage of a book over and over again. It’s boring. I think I’ve made my point.

Friend Rating:

4.8

Hipster Review:

Modern folk is kinda shaky ground for me. If a folk artist wants to get my attention, he or she has to shake the roots of the genre instead of doing the same, safe old thing, wading in the tepid pool of worn-out cliches. There's a handful that stick out (Devendra Banhart, Sufjan Stevens, Tallest Man On Earth, etc.), but overall it's a scene that I generally have little interest in.
So out of nowhere comes Junip, an indie-folk group that coats their acoustic compositions in electronic ambience in their debut(?) LP, Fields. Something on the album that really caught my attention- something that I didn't expect at all- was the beats. One can't accuse Junip's songs of lacking dynamics, as each of these eleven songs are arranged very differently from the last (there's even a bit of krautrock in "Rope & Summit"). It makes for an interesting experience for sure, and there's definitely a lot here that will pull listeners in for something truly unique. But the album does begin to drag near the end, with the compositions growing less inspired and more tossed off. But overall I found this album to be quite enjoyable, and I'm wondering where Junip are going to find themselves in the coming years. Fans of indie folk with definitely enjoy this, little doubt. It's far from excellent, but enjoyable nonetheless.

Hipster Rating:

7.5

Coming up next, Lisbon by The Walkmen!