On Motion City Soundtrack

I really enjoy listening to music by the band Motion City Soundtrack.

It's very poppy, electric, high-energy sonics mixed with the incredibly depressed, vibrant lyrics of a brilliant drunkard. Basically, I imagine it's something like what you would get if you were to give Morrissey a case of Red Bull and an English degree.

But the funny thing is I only ever end up listening to half their music.

I don't mean collectively, I mean that on each of their four albums I religiously play only one half before getting bored/busy/distracted.

It's weird that this is so consistent, true, but it's weirder still that they're not all the same halves.

Of their debut album "I Am the Movie" I only ever really play the first track. I am familiar with many of the other ones, but this is not an album I typically listen too. If you were to pick which part of the album I am most familiar with, it would be the middle half.

Their second album (and my favorite) "Commit This to Memory" I thoroughly enjoy almost all of. Unfortunately, the time in my life I listened to this album fairly non-stop was also a period where I was walking quite a bit and on a fixed schedule. The result was I would play the slightly happier first songs as I walked out the door and generally stop listenning at some point though the day before the second half of the disc. Even though my favorite MCS song is on the second half here, I usually just skipped to it when I was in the mood and then start over. I liked the first half best, though to be fair if you replaced the last two track with the couple I like from "I Am the Movie" I probably would have a full album.

"Even If It Kills Me" was released in 2007 and I'm not sure I've ever listened passed the first half. Their are a few good bits but nothing very astounding.

However the new album "My Dinosaur Life" is pretty hilarious. The brilliant lyrics are back without feeling to stilted. It's a less forced album and, again, I could do without most of the middle half. I have the deluxe edition with iTunes exclusive track and bonus disc, so I've stopped listening to pretty much the entire first half of the album. Now I start at the end, finish it and then go straight into the bonus acoustic versions of the first tracks I did like.

Essentially, I like Motion City Soundtrack up, down, inside and around the edges.

But if you put on an entire album I might shoot myself.