After the outstandingly terrible 2005 release of Odditorium Or Warlords of Mars, The Dandy Warhols have stepped up, re-energized, and now have a new album available entitled …Earth To The Dandy Warhols… (stream the entire album here). This time, the Portland, OR based band have abandoned the dilapidated subterranean haze their sound recently encompassed, and reconfigured themselves once again for the best album they’ve put out since 2000’s amazing Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia. This is the first release with their new label Beat The World Records, and I really think this one will take off. Maybe it’s just the brazen attitude and androgyny of lead singer Courtney Taylor-Taylor, but when I listen to the Dandys I get a strange yet comfortable sense of being groped. That, in tandem with the large soundscapes their albums cover (Dandys Rule and Thirteen Tales, specifically), make for totally pleasurable listening experiences. (more…)
Check out the San Francisco duo The Dodos. I up and bought a 12″ of their new album Visiter this morning, after hearing just a couple bars of the opener. They’re incredible–at most songs, it feels as though Donovan Frankenreiter or Sufjan Stevens hooked up with Rodrigo Y Gabriela to create some amazing rhythms. With his Weakerthans-like boyish voice and love for fingerpicking guitar strides, singer Meric Long brings both atmosphere and placement to his counterpart, Logan Kroeber. And Kroeber is what launches this band up and outwards. The way he so easily slips throughout time signatures and backbeats slams the album with thunderous percussion, but his control keeps a bouncy taste of quirk. ‘Fools’ is definitely on my morning playlist now–it’s totally happy, kind of if Jeff Tweedy were to remake some ELO slasa-style (and had John Bonzo Bonham’s reincarnation on drums). Have a listen to ‘Paint The Rust,’ to get a White Stripes-esque grunge with pure psychedelic bang (there’s Bela Fleck love peeking through Long’s plucking on that one too!).
Kroeber’s stomping tambourine bangarang really recalls The Velvet Underground’s Moe Tucker, and her ass-kicking violence towards instruments; he embraces his progressive metal background, and meshes it with Meric Long’s trippy bluegrass attitude.
Sorry for not posting in a while, I’ve been captivated by Frontline’s awesome underview of the Bush Administration in my extra time at work this week. In terms of my last post, I’m just going to link ya’ll to Columbia lecturer Scott Horton’s excellent distillation of Obama posted to Harper’s the other day. The cat is pretty much in the bag in terms of the cast for this year’s reality show ‘The US Presidential Election,’ and Clinton’s death throes (here, here, and here) are going to make a hilarious montage for our non-Idol contestants, John and Barack. But I digress. Speaking of Judases: Battlestar Galactica had a two-page spread ad in Rolling Stone this week that parodies da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper,’ with Six as christ and Apollo as Judas. Eight days!!! OoOoooOoh!
The cultural insularity of music today is not simply the consequence of deficient pedagogy or propagation. It would be too facile to groan over the conservatories or complain about the record companies. Things are more serious. Contemporary music owes this unique situation to its very composition. In this sense, it is willed. It is not a music that tries to be familiar; it is fashioned to preserve its cutting edge. One may repeat it, but it does not repeat itself. In this sense, one cannot come back to it as to an object. It always pops up on frontiers.
-Michel Foucault
Yeah, so on that note, link dump:
Believe it: Four glorious hours of In Rainbows‘ haunting closer “Videotape”, committed to an obsolescent media format, with accompanying visuals from Philip M. Lane and some pretty swank cover art designed by Jacob Blandy.
Shejay: A world-wide network of female DJs, producers, vocalists, promoters and musicians in the field of electronic and dance music. (MP3’s here)
Dave Matthews tickets go on sale this Saturday! Matthews and Bob Dylan are shockingly some of the only two mainstream live acts that offer tickets for a ‘reasonable’ fee (usually between $45-60). So why on earth would someone pay $85 to go see these fucktards play? Can’t we just start a national recycling drive to hand out old copies of boybands of yore to the twelve year old girls that will go see them? God I can’t wait until Hannah Montana has an abortion scandal because of them. SOS, really? ABBA should come and slap the shit out of them. Someone please give them some LSD.
Obscure Sound posted about Jim Noir yesterday! It’s a great write-up and the streaming songs included are making me itchy for 8 April when Noir’s new LP is released!
And Liz: that Facebook music player is annoying as fuck. I recommend using Songza–it’s fast and able to extract audio from Youtube, so you can find some really obscure recordings easily. Just a heads up for ya’ll.
I just downloaded a sick cover of ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ (Velvet Underground) by the Belgian band Été 67! The group primarily sing in French, and channel a Dandy Warhols/Cafe Tacuba approach with contours that bring to mind Kings of Convenience. Definitely worth a listen if you’re looking for something new and guitar-crunchy!
Unfortunately, I can’t locate any way to access their music without iTunes. An interview with the band on French radio OUIFM with an acoustic set can be found here, and SHIFT magazine has an (English) interview with them here (includes some fascinating bits about language and trans-national performances in that corner of the EU).
Check out the bootleg excerpt from their live show last May–the singer is really fucking cute! That, and the band launch into the song completely
Yes! One the bands I was introduced to while living in the UK, Jim Noir, are releasing their new album April 8! Their first album, Tower of Love, is an incredible feast of psychedelic happy music. When my friend Ryn had me listen, it felt like someone had wired a jukebox to ’summer afternoon’. Jim Noir channels a mellow-pop electronic sound that’s rife with the sonic repertoire of Cat Stevens, The Beatles, Beta Band, Heart (total guilty pleasure), and Mama Cass. Noir makes all the music himself except at live shows where he brings in some mates. Plus he wears a bowler hat constantly. *swoon* For this new album, self-titled Jim Noir, I’m grabbing a copy in 12″ vinyl as soon as they press it because there are no copies available anymore for their first album, and I expect this one to do the same.
His Manchester-based label, My Dads Recordings, has a terrible website, but pop by their State-side distributor Barsuk Records to download the single ‘Don’t You Worry‘ from the new album (also available at Spinner.com). Or you can check out a few of the songs streaming from their MySpace page. One of the things I love most about Jim Noir is how well he unexpectedly layers the sampled grooves and builds the tracks as a DJ might–including the ‘break-downs’–yet still retains a folky/Help!-era Beatles atmosphere. It’s a stunning surreal instrumental timbre, and yet it sounds effortless–as if you had just happened to pluck out a sweet radio station. With only a cursory listen to what’s available from the new album, I’m elated that there doesn’t seem to be any sophomoric ego infusion on his part. It’s truly light-hearted mood-lifting music. Full review when I get my hands on a copy for sure!
I love the video of ‘My Patch’ from the original album (ARISE Chicken!):
