Doleful Lions
Shaded Lodge and Mausoleum (2005, Parasol)

It’s an odd thing indeed to stumble across a maliciously titled song, as say the Doleful Lions 'Satanic Blood', which actually turns out to be an ironically mellow, but stubbornly hook-driven psyche-pop zinger. The kind in fact that stays wrapped around your metaphorical fork for days, if not weeks. Then again, you rarely happen upon a conglomeration like North Carolina by way of Chicago’s Doleful Lions. If the majority of Robert Pollard’s offshoot projects (e.g. Circus Devils, etc) were actually substantive, you’d get a decent approximation of the Lions. The fifth entry in a ten year-saga, Shaded Lodge and Mausoleum, showcases this duo’s mélange of Merseybeat leanings, dogged mid-fi aesthetics, and most ubiquitously a continued fascination with the metaphysical and surreal. Personally I’d take a shaded lodge over a mausoleum any day, and would be content to adopt the Doleful Lions as my soundtrack of choice.

-Neal Agneta 9/21/05