we believe in music, not money. we're here to keep your ears alive.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Can't go back
Man oh man...
Winter has hit Jo'burg here in South Africa and as always I am not prepared at all! Well my own personal little soundtrack to warm up with is sorted as always, just the usual day to day venturing into the cold is the hard part. Luckily there are (as always) some fantastic releases I am catching up on that makes it all just that little bit easier...
Jason Quever is the man behind The Papercuts, a young man in love with all things analogue and spreading a gospel well... according to him... And there are definitely no complaints here. His new album for Gnomonsong, (Devendra Banhart and Vetiver's Andy Cabic's label), Can't Go Back is a retro pop gem of timeless tunes that is sure to warm you up some...
Just another thing to dust is something of an ode to Led Zeppelin's Going to California... The album in a nutshell? Retro chamber pop for the hazy days...
Collaborations with Casiotone For The Painfully Alone and The Skygreen Leopards just adds to an already impressive resume...
Do yourself a favour and listen to these and then go buy it!
Never mind an SMS, what you need is a sweet caress
As Lady Byrd says, apologies that we've been awful at posting of late. I have an excuse though, last Saturday I was driving from Colorado Springs, CO to Stillwater, OK, and the following day I was flying from Oklahoma City, OK to London Gatwick! Now I'm back home though, with a bunch of free time on my hands, so I should be able to do my Saturday posts with more of a regularity.
Right, onto the music. First up, I've been adoring this track from Chromeo.
However cheesy that title sounds, give it a listen. It's amazing. It's got all the ingredients that I adore in a song, Singalong chrous, check! Videogame synths, check! Ridiculous guitars, check! Chromeo are wonderful, and their new album is at least 95% pure awesome. While researching this post I was on their Wikipedia page, and discovered that one of the duo is Arab, while the other is Jewish. They claim this makes them the only successful Arab/Jewish collaboration since the beginning of time. It's well worth checking out the rest of the new album 'Fancy Footwork'. While I'm at it, in fact, the Guns'n'Bombs remix of the title track from the album is amazing too:
Next up, for completeness' sake, here's the Franz Ferdinand 'All My Friends' LCD Soundsystem cover mentioned in the last post. Thanks to an anonymous commenter, I found it on the LCD Myspace page. At the time, I said I thought I preferred it to the John Cale version I put up two ago - but in the cold light of early afternoon I don't actually like it that much. It's near-impossible to top the amazing original. Franz's version just feels incomplete. Like they just churned it out one afternoon in the studio without giving it much time or thought. There's no feeling in the vocals, the guitars totally fail to recreate the glorious piano riff from the original, and there's no urgency whatsoever to the proceedings. Why am I posting it then? Well - you should make up your own mind. Franz Ferdinand make decent guitar pop, but when they try to cover other genres their weaknesses become painfully obvious.
This is a song I've been adoring lately. I think it's been out a while, but with all the international travel I've been doing (and CO2 I've been emitting) I've been a little out of the loop. The chorus makes my heart into a melty gooey mess every time I listen to it - "You make me want to measure stars / in the backyard / with a calculator and a ruler, baby". Au Revoir Simone's recent album 'The Bird of Music' is just delightful. If nothing else, and I'm talking to my gentleman readers here, buy it for your girlfriend/wife/lady that you're stalking. They'll love it, I promise you. Unless they're into death metal or something.
Here's a couple of tracks from a Swedish band called The Embassy. The former features ladygrunts as a form of percussion - which is ALWAYS a good plan, especially when the music is shoegazey loveliness. It helps defuse a bit of the seriousness of the shoegaze element. The latter track features a more summery vibe, with gentle acoustic guitars washing over a bongos-y rhythm with overlaid synth-strings. In all honesty, and I mean this in nothing but admiration, it sounds a little bit like Scot-poppers Texas.
Finally, for those of you who slogged through that post, here's the Royal Brass Band of the Central British Legion covering the Klaxons. Yes you read that right. Yes it's as wonderful and ridiculous as it sounds. Check it out:
That's it from me for this week. Enjoy Bank Holiday Monday!
Yo kids, Lady Byrd here. So you may have noticed that we are all kind of tragically sad at updating lately. Me especially. It's not that we don't care or have run out of things to talk about, it's just that this time of year brings a lot of allergies, activities and responsibilities. And apparently... also a lot of migraines. (In this month alone, I've booked 6 DJ gigs and clocked in 2.5 migraines. The half was a lucky day.)
Next month proves to be more difficult with even more events, but I assure you that I plan on making it all up to you by Monday. There are plenty of great things I've picked up or gotten in the mail recently, so prepare yourself for a massive update.
In the meantime, let me throw some shameless self-promotion on you.
If you're in the NYC area this weekend, I have a couple events going on that you may want to fit into your already busy schedule:
- The first is Rip It Up tonight (Friday, May 25th) at Lotus Lounge, with the fantabulous Mark Ryan from Foreign Islands guest DJing. It's also listed with adorable commentary in The L Magazine, so be sure you come check it out. I even made sure to request that more room be made for all your dancing shoes.
- Then on Saturday night (May 26th) is, as Going.com put it, "the closest thing to a hipster country club you're ever going to get." And that, my friends, is my new event Black + White at High Chai. It's $5 to get in, with free tea infused martinis from 9-10pm. You don't have to dress up, but you may want to be in your black and white best because the best dressed wins a bottle of champagne at midnight!
Despite society's repeated attempts to convince us otherwise, outer beauty can sometimes be a greater curse than it is a blessing. A girl I went to high school with - a gorgeous specimen of unfair genetics my friends and I dubbed "Pretty Girl" - was perhaps one of the smartest, most talented ladies I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. But because of that perfect face and almost paralyzing shyness, "Pretty Girl" never got the opportunity to show folks what she was truly made of. Instead, she will forever live on in our collective high school memory as the prettiest person we've ever seen up close.
Such is often the case with music's most adept yet tantalizing female singer-songwriters. Take someone like Fiona Apple, a powerhouse of sight, sound and pure passion: It took years for the pint-sized singing sensation to prove her pipes far outweighed her heroin-chic sex appeal. Minty Fresh's newest import, Finlandian stunner Astrid Swan, might encounter similar hurdles thanks to a buxom figure and come-hither stare. But her playfully husky voice and crafty lyricism, juxtaposed to a rough-around-the-edges-Nancy Drew image, could help squelch criticism before it even starts.
Her debut album, Poverina, out May 22, is sure to startle and delight with its Kate Bushian sensibility and sweeping piano melodies. Not that she's easily compared to other female artists before her, but stylistically and vocally Swan recalls K Records mainstay Mirah, only a little less saccharine sweet. And she possesses the infectious gusto of Tori Amos, without resorting to pretentious, eccentric theatrics. If that's not enough to convince you Swan has got all the right stuff, you can even preview Poverina in its entirety before you buy it on the Minty Fresh Web site.
Or, if you're too lazy to link, click on the choice picks below. There's even a cover of the Killers' "When You Were Young," which of course, she does far more justice to than its creators ever could have. Pretty girl's got some chops.
Apologies for missing last week's post - I was in the wilds of Oklahoma and Kansas on a stormchase. It would have been fine if we'd got a tornado, but sadly we only got a couple of funnels. Damn. Never mind, hope these tracks make up for it.
The informed among you will know that the next LCD Soundsystem single in the UK is 'All My Friends' on May 28. Bit of a bizarre choice, if you ask me, but ah well. Backing the single are some covers of All My Friends, and one remix. The covers are by John Cale and Franz Ferdinand, and above is John Cale's version. It doesn't deviate hugely from the original, but puts a different slant on it. I'm looking forward to hearing the Franz Ferdinand version, so if anyone knows of a place I can get it, then do let me know.
I played this to my girlfriend. She didn't like it. I think it's awesome. Amanda Blank's rap is crazy awesome, especially when it doubles in speed halfway through, and backed by Justice it's mindblowing. I'm going to be dropping this at every possible opportunity when I get back to the UK and someone lets me in front of some decks.
EDIT: I should mention that (completely unintentionally) this post is nearly a carbon copy of this post on Headphone Sex. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and in this case that's certainly true. Headphone Sex is an AMAZING blog that never fails to post good music. If you like WNR?, make sure you check out Headphone Sex too.
If you take the green line of the Stockholm subway and go as far west as you can you will come to a suburb called Hasselby. Once there you can stroll around the houses and maybe, but just maybe you can catch a gleam of some sixteen year olds who probably has spend their days with with way too much of Pipas and Field Mice on their Ipods
Tea for three!!! is a newborn band with obvious influences but I don't hold this against them. With their lead singer sounding way too shy to properly hear the lyrics they make oh-so-cute all acoustic twee pop. Back to basic, non-pretentious catchy melodies, just go ahead and enjoy!
I used to listen to The Radio Arts a lot some years(s) ago back when they were a band on the rise, touring both Sweden and Europe. Sadly enough I haven't heard anything about them for some time. I know they hade a couple of tour dates last year but for the last six months, nothing. They realesed an EP 2005 on the great Swedish indie label Parapluie (from where you can also buy the record) which started a spark but it did not evolve into any fire.
The Radio Arts make somewhat pretentious but still accessible pop songs. Worth listening to beacause of the great melodies and the catchy riffs/beats, but unfortunately the not very good pronunciation takes some focus away from the intriguing lyrics. But their songs mediates pure energy and ecstatic feelings which becomes truly explicit in "New Waves To Come". This song is what spring means to me.
Music - it's what moves us.
It's what mends broken hearts
and adds joy to new beginnings.
It's what brings expression to
our movements and rhythm to
our feet. But if we're not
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of the green, and to that we
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