Department of Eagles

Although I love lis­ten­ing to Break­fast of Cham­pi­ons each morn­ing, there are actu­ally very few times I’m com­pelled to take note of any par­tic­u­lar thing they play. But this morn­ing I heard “Fam­ily Romance” by Depart­ment of Eagles, and had to call in make sure I got their name.

Depart­ment of Eagles is a duo com­posed of Daniel Rossen (of Griz­zly Bear) and Fred Nico­laus. The song, while amaz­ing, didn’t rep­re­sent the full range of what they do. I was able to snag a copy of The Cold Nose; it’s a sur­pris­ingly var­ied blend of odd sam­ples (strings, piano, spo­ken word), elec­tronic manip­u­la­tions, drum machine, acoustic/electric gui­tar, vocal cho­ruses, and prob­a­bly sev­eral other things I’m for­get­ting. The per­va­sive hip-hop lean­ings — which tend to be dark, DJ Shadow-inspired dal­liances — are prob­a­bly most exem­pli­fied in “Forty Dol­lar Rug,” a tongue-in-cheek glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of bach­e­lor life (“Forty dol­lar rug/ Twenty dol­lar lamp/ Playsta­tion 2/ Tony Hawk 4″).

Mean­while, they don’t mind sound­ing like Radio­head at times, in their creepy, Kid A–like har­monies, albeit backed by weird things Radio­head would prob­a­bly never touch.

The Cold Nose was orig­i­nally released in 2003 under a dif­fer­ent title, and was just reis­sued this year with some bonus tracks; for my money, it’s bet­ter than any­thing Rossen has done with Griz­zly Bear, and I’m sorry to have only come across it so recently. The project is, as far as I can tell, defunct.