Department of Eagles
In Ear Park
Release Date: Oct 7, 2008
Genre(s): Indie, Rock, Electronic
Record label: 4AD
Music Critic Score
How the Music Critic Score works
Album Review: In Ear Park by Department of Eagles
Great, Based on 3 Critics
Based on rating 8/10
Department of Eagles' work from when they were still known as Whitey on the Moon UK was repackaged so much that when In Ear Park was released, it felt like the band had a much bigger discography than they actually did. The Whitey on the Moon UK LP (which became The Cold Nose after the band's name change) was based on the same core set of songs, give or take some bonus tracks, that Daniel Rossen and Fred Nicolaus recorded in college with their friends as their only intended audience. In Ear Park is Department of Eagles' first full-fledged, self-contained album, and it shows just how far the pair has come since their early days.
Based on rating 4/5
Daniel Rossen and Fred Nicolaus's enchanting 2003 debut The Cold Nose sounded like the work of a post-graduate Beastie Boys. This second album (featuring Grizzly Bear's Chris Bear and Chris Taylor) is a sumptuous sequence of symphonic meditations on memory and loss that somehow manage to give a more expansive twist to the already elegiac mood of Arcade Fire's Funeral. .
Based on rating 7/10
In Ear Park is an album that unaccountably slipped through the DiS net last year as far as getting a review went, but it's been winding itself ever tighter around our hearts since its release in October. Department of Eagles began as a way for Daniel Rossen and Fred Nicolaus to fill the days one spring semester at NYU. This undergraduate mucking about with tape loops and songwriting resulted in the scrappily appealing 2003 album The Cold Nose.