Ambassadors - Litost

By: Joel Frieders

Anyone else fucking love it when a band you've never heard of puts out an album that doesn't have one shitty song to fast forward through, and every other day you have a new favorite track? What about when you forget the album for a few days and put it on absentmindedly and all of a sudden you're hearing it for the first time again? What about when you play it around your wife (or husband, we don't care where you deposit phereboners bro bros) and when it's over she asks for you to start the shit over again?

BUT THEN WHAT ABOUT WHEN YOU FINALLY GET AROUND TO REALIZING YOU'RE A FRUITBAT FOR A BAND... AND THEY JUST PLAYED YOUR CITY THE NIGHT BEFORE?

I fucking hate that.

Ambassadors have done all of the above to my luciously slender frame, and as my forearm muscles (pronouced musk-els) get girthier, I'm realizing these jagbags might just be one of my favorite bands of the past few years. I have slapped them right up there with Apollo Run, A Silent Film, Chamberlin, The Californian, Usonia, Walk The Moon, and Tribes as yanking from too many familiar band sources to name while remaining completely and independantly fucking original. So much so, I fucking love them unconditionally now. As long as they don't sleep with Del. People who sleep with Del get the gasface.

If you're looking for a new band to suck off, I gay-runtee (and I only spell it like that because I cannot splelle it the rite ways correctly bro bro) Ambassadors are open to you sucking them off like I have, am, and shall continute to suck off.

Litost is an eight song album, which in my opinion is the perfect fucking number to keep me at complete attention. Ten tracks is almost too much, twelve is a waste of two and a half EP's worth of music, and if you put more than thirteen tracks on one album, you're a fucking dicknecked turkey vulture fucker. Bouncing between a strange mutation of straight up guitar rock mixed with synth-heavy modernism and this bluesy vocal style that has you imagining dude is singing on a fucking New Orleans street corner instead of a dank and dark basement club in some unnamed metropilis, Ambassadors don't just turn over every rock, they're fucking kicking them shits like a three year old throws a tantrum. Oh, and then when you look up from your combat boots these fuckers are singing in perfect harmony on a proper and lush mountainside where we don't call hookers hookers, we call them ladies of the night and jack off to the idea of them showing a little ankle.

Opening track Weight/Lightness is a mish mash of Mutemath grit with the lead vocal penetrations of a Toad the Wet Sprocket with testicles, and it's catchy, and it's fucking fun, and it's exactly the right way to start an album in my ear. The minute I started playing air rhythm guitar I was baptized an Ambassador fanboy, and the minute I started making a throat noise on par with that slide guitar riff, well, people looked at me funny. But Fuck people. This shit is hell yea.

Tracks like Bodybag and (O Death) are demonstrations of a ridiculous understanding of the potential of the human throat, throwing vocal harmonies around like hipsters toss hipster scarves over their hipster shoulders, which are obviously malnourished, but damn they look cute. Ambassadors are like the fucking vitamin D supplement these pale, skinny-jeaned pissants wearing glasses they don't even need needs (AND DAMNIT, HOW COME IT WASN'T fucking COOL TO WEAR GLASSES WHEN I STARTED IN FIFTH GRADE HUH? Fuck YOU 2012.).

If I had to pick my favesies track out of the whole shit, I would have to go with Falls today. I say today because I've flip flopped like your presidential nominees in a tax discussion for over three weeks. The chorus on this fucking song is one of those where you hold both your hands around the invisible microphone and bend at the waist and sing at the top of your lungs, seemingly serenading your fucking ankles. The guitars are repeating an easy mantra of steady chunked distorted octaves and they're doing the right thing by letting this be a vocal fucking song because no matter how many times that chorus comes in I want to fucking sing along.

The one song that I wasn't sure I was going to love at first is now my second favesies on all of Litost, titled Love Like a Hole, which after listening to it I've deduced that it is sung to the female vagina. The acoustic, at first, sounds a bit too electric and cheap, but when the strings come in it's fucking annoying how perfect this song progresses. First the piano patiently supporting the gentle rhythm, then the subtle fucking percussion, but throughout the whole fucking song, that asshole singer is standing in the fucking corner fucking murdering this shit. It's as if he's just asking to get his ass kicked for being so fucking badfuckingass.

Ambassadors made an album I want to listen to for fucking ever. Someone kick these cockburritos in the taquitos for me. Def in my top albums of 2012, and if these dudes ever come back to Chicago, I'm totes getting them to play at my kids' daycare so I can act all fanboy and not get made fun of by my asshole friends.