Shake Your Fist

Update

2010-04-02T08:56:00.001-05:00

I'm now blogging about music (as well as books, art & other interesting things) at Anything Could Happen. Please join me.

Fin

2009-05-18T12:50:00.002-05:00

It's time. I always said that when Shake Your Fist became more obligation than pleasure, I would quit. Even if I could make time to write posts, I don't have the hours to deal with all the peripherals (emails, hosting, site upkeep, PR people, blog networking, etc.). And four years is enough.

Thank you to my dear friends Jon and Joe for their early contributions and continuing support. Thanks to those fellow mp3 bloggers who, to my astonishment, took me and this little site seriously. I can't possibly express how much I appreciate the affirmation and friendship. Thank you to the artists who make the music that constantly inspired SYF. And, most of all, thanks to those of you who checked in regularly and read the stuff and nonsense I posted, downloaded the mp3s, commented and generally made the whole endeavor worthwhile.

Don't worry, I'm still around the web, writing album and track reviews for Pitchfork and blogging (just images) about art/craft/design/style at just three things.

Thanks again and best to you all!

The moon tonight

2009-04-28T22:00:00.002-05:00

Image: Your personal moon

River's Edge - Great Lake Swimmers

Put There by the Land (live) - Great Lake Swimmers

Great Lake Swimmers is a maddening band to invest anything-- time, money, energy-- in. For the several here-and-there brilliant, breathtaking songs ("Moving Pictures, Silent Films," "Where In the World Are You," "Your Rocky Spine") there are many times that number in bland mediocre tracks that attempt to get by on atmosphere alone. The problem is that the band works with such soft, soft materials, shaping sandcastles from dry sand eager to revert to beach. Their latest has a little more gusto and gumption, a few bends and sharp edges, sounding heavily influenced by Out of Time-era REM (ok, not exactly rockin'). Ironically, though, it's one of the doughy numbers, "River's Edge" that's caught my ear. It sounds like a hymn and, um, like a Great Lake Swimmers song. Go figure.

And to show the band sounds pretty much the same live as in studio (I know, you didn't ask), one of their really good songs: "Put There by the Land."

From Lost Channels (eMusic, Amazon) and Live EP, Myspace

Your Control (w/ Neko Case) - Crooked Fingers

Sleep All Summer (live w/ Emma Pollock) - Crooked Fingers

I guess I'm on record as not liking Crooked Fingers' last release so much. I respect Eric Bachmann's songwriting but, man, he can make really confounding lyric and production choices! His duo with Neko Case, "Your Control" is Forfeit/Fortune's best track (despite the cheap gilt shine) and after seeing him perform it last week opening for Case with minimal instrumentation, I've learned what an unlodgable earworm it can be. (Aw, I'm a sucker for a song with rounds.) Lumbering, laconic and sort of shy-seeming, Bachmann's a solid stage presence and performer, so if you never have, see him live in band or solo guise.

The couple years old live duet with Delgados' Emma Pollock is of negligible recording quality, but a very nice performance nevertheless.

From Forfeit/Fortune (eMusic, Amazon) and Sleep All Summer 7" (eMusic), Myspace

Winter's end

2009-03-31T19:00:00.002-05:00

Image: Christopher Davidson

Iceland - Bark Cat Bark

It's been a long, hard winter. But I don't need to tell you that; it's been a long, hard winter for you too. And even as gray rain slushes my windows to say spring has (sort of) arrived, I don't think winter is over just yet. You know what I mean. So does Bark Cat Bark (Josh Todd), a man of no decided abode who calls himself after an improbability and plays his piano on the dotted line between today and yesterday, here and not-here as dust motes wink in the weak late afternoon sun.

From A Lifi. Myspace

Candy Cigarette - Boy in Static

I love the part where static boy (Alexander Chen) sings "let's lull divorcées from their households" with a hint of Antony's tremulous tremelo and the promise of something illicit, but also totally right. What could be more natural than swinging open windows and doors on a warm spring day and running into the street barefoot to a toy instrument orchestra? If Chen sings about childhood games, starting over, novelty candy (frankly, I'm just not sure), he delivers it like metaphysical verse, like a breathy, deep-felt pillowy pop poem.

From Candy Cigarette (eMusic), Myspace

Soul of the machine

2009-03-20T21:30:00.002-05:00

Hiroshi Sugito

Strider - Paper

I've heard the first album this year that I can say absolutely unequivocally will make my year-end best list. "Strider" is one of the awesome tracks from it. Just to show you how awesome: Cept for the first two seconds (the song starts like something from Suicide--but don't worry!), this track is vocals-free--and I'm almost always partial to the human voice. I hesitate to call "Strider" instrumental because, like a lot of good electronica (for clarity, "Strider" is more punk than anything), it seems to eliminate the very concept of vocals as a medium through which to convey overwhelming emotion. Its hammering headlong, yet running-in-place, rush does a very close approximation of that alarming moment when you realize you've done or said something incredibly stupid and are totally fucked and there's nothing you're gonna be able to do about it and everything seems simultaneously to be going in fast and slow motion. I've heard the band is really really loud in person, which makes me really really anxious to see them.

From An Object (eMusic), Myspace

I Want to Be Your Girlfriend - Bachelorette

Can't stop listening to this. Supposedly the New Zealander (with the pouty French robot inflection) has an album coming out sometime this year, and if it's anything like this lush, pillowy electropop number, I'll be all over it. So maybe I'll wait until later to drown Bachelorette in purple prose. In the meantime, you know what to do.

Myspace

No, I'm not jealous of y'all in Austin right now. Or wasn't anyway until I saw this listing (gasp x 4):

The Local: Sam Amidon, Alela Diane, David Thomas Broughton, Shearwater - 18th Floor at Hilton Garden Inn

And although a small part of me wants the Stone Roses rumors to be true, I was actually relieved to see this. You go, John!

Girls rule

2009-03-08T22:40:00.005-05:00

Image: Susan Seubert

Correspondence Course - The Hermit Crabs

You don't hear a lot of musical a-ha-moment stories, conversion narratives or even conversations in which music is an end to itself--as opposed to a gateway to friendship or romance or opportunity for personal branding--from and among girls. That might be changing, what with Lavinia Greenlaw's pointedly titled memoir The Importance of Music to Girls and, perhaps, a song like "Correspondence Course." I wrote about Glasgow's Hermit Crabs and their delightful "Feel Good Factor" two years ago and apparently that song wasn't a fluke: The newish Correspondence Course EP is start-to-finish pop delish. "Sing me something that I don't already know" is the song's key phase, a summing-up of this kismetted meeting of music-geek minds, "have you heard" exchanges and ok, yes, flirtation. Music is personal and social, natch. But name-dropping This Mortal Coil and plotting an instrumental combo ("I'll play guitar, she'll play cello") seems to signal a certain commitment to the thing and not just the relationship wound around it. The music's fantastic, of course. Sweet violin, chugging guitar, Melanie Whittle's great girlish voice and a chorus way catchier than anything I've ever heard from Camera Obscura's camp.

Buy from Amazon, Myspace

Foreign dispatches

2009-03-02T18:45:00.002-06:00

Image: Squareamerica

Sinkership - Sin Fang Bous

Economically speaking, Iceland makes the U.S. look like it only needs to borrow some quarters for the soda machine (pay ya back tomorrow!). I hope the financial meltdown doesn't pop these Icelandic kids' balloon, because Clangour is a, yes, clangorous bounty of breathless folk jangle and electronic pitter-pattered joy. It's a pop record. There's tambourine. "Sinkerships'" beats, harmonies and a certain kindergarten playground milieu will have you, inevitably, think of Animal Collective. Try not to. Don't get me wrong, Merriweather Post Pavillion is really good--it would be ridiculous to say otherwise--but Sin Fang Bous isn't trying to challenge anyone with anything. If there's math on this test, it's simple arithmetic. Jeez, times are hard enough as it is. (btw, Simon Reynolds has a worth-reading Guardian piece on AC's critical cultural juncture and why we're suffering a plague of [unfortunate, tiresome] AC polemics.)

From Clangour (Amazon), Myspace

Rattlin' Bones - Kasey Chambers & Shane Nicholson

My first thought: Australian country? But that's just my own shameful ethnocentricity. And if you think about it, who better than the hardscrabbled Aussies to pick up and rub through their calloused hands those home-ditching/homesick, sinner/saint, lost/found, dreamer/wanderer narrative threads? Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson perform this particular redemption tale with tons of professionalism (no rustic authenticity bullshit here), not to mention the hand-in-glove ease and relaxed chemistry of a happily married couple. Understandably, it was a radio hit in Australia. Also understandably, it will never be one here.

From Rattlin' Bones (Amazon), Myspace

Don't make me a target

2009-02-15T15:45:00.000-06:00

Image: Gush O.

Like other music bloggers, I've started to think about the best songs of the decade. After doing a fast, rough sweep, I culled more than 200 songs--and that doesn't include anything from 2009!. Many that won't make my personal top 50 or 100 or whatever are still excellent, and, more important when you're writing about music, interesting. So I'm hoping to jot down thoughts on some of them over the course of the year (and several top-of-the-list tracks too, of course).

No promises that these public musings will be anything you haven't heard before, and you're absolutely welcome to leave your own brilliant insights in the comments when these songs mean something to you too.

So You'll Aim Toward the Sky - Grandaddy

This song has always seemed to me Grandaddy at their most vulnerable. I think there was often some misunderstanding about how the band engaged its subjects, with plenty of listeners taking the cheesier synth lines and Jason Lytle's high lonesome cries for an elaborate game of irony (and yeah, the matching beards and flannel shirts were effective red herrings). But playfulness and hyperbole don't necessarily equal ha-ha. I've always heard more wist and even despair in Lytle's voice than he's usually credited with. It's the same problem, in fact, that plagued the Beta Band--their cleverness read as insincerity. Of course the two bands share a historical moment: the late1990s into the early 2000s. Arguably a time when the irony era yielded to the post 9-11 period of anxiety, earnestness and massive uncertainty.

The Sophtware Slump came out in June 2000, on the very cusp of the technology sector's implosion and decade's first recession, and about a year before the terrorist attacks. It's impossible not to view it, retrospectively, as prescient. But, to be fair, Grandaddy had been pounding away at these issues for at least a couple years, arguing the fragility of a human existence in which the technology we're no longer able to live without is in many ways fundamentally hostile to us. I'm no Radiohead scholar, but Grandaddy always seemed to take a more even-handed, humorous approach to these kinds of concerns. The beauty of this song (besides it's soaring, ornate, obvious prettiness) is that it doesn't come down hard on either side of the pro-tech/luddite divide, instead surfing subliminal anxieties while celebrating the magic inherent in technology's possibilities.

Using space travel as the metaphor (and given the mixed history of humans shooting for the stars, a well-chosen one), Grandaddy plays things particularly twee and diffident, with slow, trebley arpeggios, cymbal hissiness and an extra dollop of yearning falsetto. All of which you could read as a little mocking, if not for the poignancy of the song's lyrics, from the opening "dream dream dream dream" to the chorus' "fly away, far away, far from pain" to the final "goodbye." Is it a human drifting into infinite space, a robot or both? Or is this a robot's escape fantasy--one that really is just a dream from the factory floor? One of Grandaddy's favorite strategies for coping with the technological conundrum was to anthropomorphize machines. Not the way they're usually imagined--as evil and scheming--but as lonely beings with a human capacity for hurt. Whatever path you choose to follow, it's an awfully sad song.

Buy The Sophtware Slump (eMusic, Amazon).

White nights

2009-02-05T12:10:00.002-06:00

Image: holgabot

Thousand Crazy Nights - Music Go Music
From Warm in the Shadows (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Image: Byron Barrett

Keep a Secret - The Whitest Boy Alive
From Rules, Myspace

Image: sulaearts

Chain - School of Seven Bells
From Alpinisms (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Image: evesimone

Expectations - Cut Off Your Hands
From You & I (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Image: Li Orpaz

Young Adult Friction - The Pains of Being Pure of Heart
From The Pains of Being Pure at Heart (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Image: Martha Burzynski

Shampoo - Elvis Perkins in Dearland
From Elvis Perkins in Dearland (Amazon), Myspace

Image: Liad Cohen

Satisfied - Bruce Peninsula
From A Mountain is a Mouth (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Zip file

Plan for rain

2009-01-21T21:00:00.005-06:00

Image: Susan Schwake

Children of the Polka - Children of the Wave

This being Chicago and me being half German, I've obviously heard and, more importantly, witnessed--in all its pink petticoated glory--polka. Trust me, this isn't polka proper. Generated by a clutch of conceptual-minded Australians, it's more like hearing polka's lusty shuffle and twirl through a thick wall as it bleeds into the lackadaisical murmur around you, winds through the hiss and sputter of espresso machine, clings to a car slow-rolling by with its windows down, pouring its sweet syrup of country radio onto the sidewalk. "Polka" is the most "pop" song on Children of the Wave's album, but if you like experimental folk with stretches of ambient and field recordings (who doesn't, you ask!) you'll be quite pleased with it, I think.

From Carapace (eMusic), Myspace

I Lost My Colour Vision - Burning Hearts

So that last track wasn't for everyone. But I don't even want to know you if you don't immediately love--or can't come to love--this song. Seriously: Don't ever speak to me again. Sounding for all the world like Swedish popsters, Burning Hearts are, in fact, Finns. Finns who memorized the Magnetic Fields' giddy, gaudy and oh-so-melancholy The Wayward Bus and perform it back at twice the tempo.

From Alboa Sleeping (Amazon), Myspace

Retrofuturist fantasy

2009-01-13T19:35:00.004-06:00

Image: Dark Roasted Blend

You know that 2008 best-of list? I take it back--not gonna happen. 2008 was a rotten year for music overall and I'm not motivated to extend it any longer than necessary. But 2009--shaping up to be awesome!!! Aw, just kidding. You know better than to expect ADDed enthusiasm round here. Read on for the usual hedged rah rah and ambivalent approbation.

Tunnelvision - Here We Go Magic

Didn't really expect this coming from Luke Temple, whose previous work struck me as alright but kind of plodding guy-with-a-guitar prime-time TV drama fare. But this and "Fangela" are two of my favorite songs this year (all 13 days of it), so go figure. Temple sings a Lindsay Buckinghamesque falsetto to divine syncopated folked-up pop, and coats it with ambient drone. To make a visual art analogy, it's like an Edward Hopper/Agnes Martin mashup. Any representational/abstract tensions get canceled out by a shared appreciation for geometry and the American perspective of hard, flat, infinite space.

From Here We Go Magic (preorder), Myspace

Woodfriend - Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson

A con artist approached me recently while I was wrestling with one of those barely functioning parking garage ticket validation machines. He didn't start out as a con artist, of course--he started out as an 19-year-old or so kid who wanted directions to a Metra station. The tip-off (even before he produced the "police report" about his "stolen wallet")? He said his mom had told him to ask a nice lady for help. Lady, hee hee. Nice, har fucking har. First rule of the con: Know your mark. That's when I decided he was a) working a classic angle, and b) really, really bad at it. But I listened to his spiel with fake interest anyway and almost felt sorry for him when I asked if I actually seemed like someone who would hand over money to a stranger with a lame, completely illogical story. There's a sucker born every minute, etc. Now Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson recycles just as many chestnuts--of the guitar hero variety. But I'd slip him some cash to buy drugs, sure. He's that charming, in a slack-shifty sort of way. When he yells hey like a faded Gary Glitter and slurs something about everything being ok, to a ticking cowbell, you believe--because you want to. Good cons make you care.

from Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

Pick-up shots

2008-12-19T22:01:00.010-06:00

Image: Michelle Caplan

Some songs that won't make my 2008 list, but are still pretty awesome.

Shitty Little Disco - Arms

Guitars stutter then slide, keys weep, bass pogos and someone rides cymbals into the night. Moods and manners are all so cleverly synthesized that you don't realize "Shitty Little Disco" is as miscegenated, and in almost the same way, as all that indie dance music that was popular this year. Yet you wouldn't call it disco; you wouldn't even call it shitty disco. And if it starts with a party gone horribly wrong in all kinds of predictable ways, it ends, surprisingly enough, with a plea for the healing power of the human touch: "Oh brother lay your hand on me/ Oh sister lay your hand on me." A physical balm that mends the mind--maybe it is disco after all.

From Kids Aflame (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Song for Man with Pica Syndrome - Let's Wrestle

It hasn't been a good year for music in general, but it's salad days with toasted walnuts and blue cheese dressing for noisy garage pop (Sic Alps, Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, Times New Viking, Cause co-Motion, among many many others). I think this is one of the few rock niches where it's actually pretty easy to record a decent song if you aren't particularly talented. Weak melody? Bury it in noise. Too noisy? No such thing. Not that I'm saying Let's Wrestle isn't talented. Their band-naming skills suck, but their music is worth hearing. Here, revving guitar and bopping bass--like Pica syndrome itself--are compulsive, unstoppable. But the singer's emotional swings, between helpless flail and assertive rant, sorrow and bravado ("Have you ever wondered what rust tastes like?/Well I know! It's all right.") are totally sympathetic.

From In Loving Memory Of (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

The Most! The Best! The Greatest! - Blackblack

If you're one of the whiners complaining that Vivian Girls are spoiled, untalented, hipster amateurs, start sharpening your knives. Here come the girls of Blackblack (barely) singing lyrics you invented in the backseat of a station wagon when you were eight to a tune from that band you put together with kids on your block when you were 14. Punk has gotten so establishment (AARP ads, anyone?) that it needs to go back to square one and resurrect that original contrary spirit. In this case, square one is a chalked box on a hopscotch grid and contrary takes the form of bratty.

From Blackblack (eMusic), Myspace

Oops

2008-11-30T23:30:00.007-06:00

Image: Caitlin Atkinson

Yowzers -- didn't realize it had been more than a month!

As I've said before, I don't make excuses here -- blogs being totally optional and therefore not worthy of guilt, let alone hair-shirt-donning. But if anyone still reads this old thing, you might want to know what keeps me from punching "create new post" with any regularity. To a few of you this is old, old news, but I've been writing record reviews for Pitchfork most of 2008 (hey, it never came up). If you read music blogs, you read Pitchfork, and if you read Pitchfork, you've almost certainly bitched about some of my reviews on your blog (hi there!). That's not the time-sucker, though. Aside from showing up at The Day Job for 8 hours, 5 days a week (*sigh* it pays the bills), I make stuff for my Etsy shop (warning boys: tis girly). Unless you too have an artsy-crafty bent and flog your own wares, you have no idea how time-consuming it is.

[Trying not to hyperventilate now that I've outed my various online personas. Breathe, breathe.]

ANYWAY, I've thought a lot about it and don't want to quit Shake Your Fist right now. Maybe it's naive in these mp3-blogging End of Days, but I remain committed, in theory at least, to amateur music criticism/evangelism. At the very least, I'd like to make it to SYF's four-year anniversary. So let's continue to limp along, shall we?

Oh and yes, I'm planning to do some sort of year-end list. But it won't be as elaborate as last years' and probably won't appear until we're deep into December, encroaching on January (yup, right about when the word "list" raises the sour specter of vomit in your mouth).

Ok, music! And not just music, but Christmas music! (that'll distract 'em!)

Come on Santa - The Raveonettes

I could've chosen any one of the four tracks on The Raveonettes' lil Christmas gift to the fans, they're that interchangable. Some synth-swamp with greater conviction, others bust out flashier tambourine moves, all of them sound like Phil Spector's Christmas album on Quaaludes. Which doesn't seem festive, I know, but at least it's honest. We pay for any "joys of the season" with sleep and sanity, so an exhausted, almost catatonic, Christmas EP is so right-on you wonder why anyone bothers to record aggressively cheery or comic or sad or bitter Christmas projects when what they're probably trying to emote is, you know, tired. "Come On Santa" distinguishes itself by not being the lead track or the one about ghosts or the one about Cleveland. It has a fragile, winking music box intro (calculated and effective), a phoned-in drum part (not a figure of speech, the beats sound like they were literally mediated via telecommunications equipment) and detached boy-girl harmonies line-reading a romantic script with about as much conviction as John McCain arguing that Sarah Palin was presidentially prepared. A plangent guitar cuts through The Eurocool Raveonettes' sophisticated malaise, though, and lends the song surprising humanity, even pathos. You won't turn this one on when you need a little Christmas right this very minute, but on certain days and particular hours in December ... when you need to put the forced hilarity on ice.

From Wishing You a Rave Christmas (eMusic, Amazon)

Country & western

2008-10-24T12:30:00.004-05:00

Image: National Photo Company Collection

The Treehouse Song - Ane Brun

These are days of miracles. In less than two weeks -- bar catastrophe -- Barack Obama will become this country's next president. And Tuesday night, I, with a couple hundred other exhausted E6 followers, sang a capella, "we will live forever and you know it's true" as we circled Jeff Mangum on the inauspicious floor of the Bottom Lounge. And he played a song. So I shouldn't be surprised, not at all, to hear a young Scandinavian woman sing with Dolly Parton's self-deprecating coo and hiccup, and perform regret looser, more ambivalent and thus convincing than anything I've heard all year. Ane Brun offers "Wouldn't It Be Nice--10 Years On" as a small, sad smile that nevertheless lights you up inside.

From the lovely Changing of the Seasons (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

Cowboy - The Rumble Strips

Remember that Depeche Mode video where they dressed up like cowboys and kicked around some dusty desert town (or dusty desert town set)? And how it was totally whack but also kind of sexy? Hmm hmm, that kind of cowboy. Except imagine kids raised on ska and frequent affirmation instead of dance pop and depression. They grew up and started a band.

From Girls and Weather (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

A Drink - Micah Blue Smaldone

If it were only for Sam Amidon's album, this would be a excellent year for plain-cloth roots performed with wonder and awe and rue. But here is Micah Blue Smaldone -- that former punk reborn as a troubadour in a musty Union Army-issued greatcoat -- with a new record. Songs about drinking -- drinking too much -- can be blunt and facile. But the expository "A Drink" offers no lessons or summaries in its verse upon verse. And when Smaldone sings "Tonight I will drink to coming home/ I've loved your babies as though they were my own," these impulses and actions aren't incompatible.

From The Red River (Amazon), Myspace

Midnight, sapphire, cerulean, teal

2008-10-12T14:45:00.005-05:00

Image: Franziska von Stenglin

Midnight Blues (live at Planet Claire) - Liz Green
Midnight Blues - Liz Green

Thanks to Blogotheque for reminding me (a month ago, things are on a 30-day delay round here) about Liz Green, a Northern English lass with the haunted timbre and cadence of a lost, nameless American Southern blues singer (who scrubbed floors and rubbed her fingers raw by day, lost herself on a tiny stage by night and died at 33 of TB, as those stories go). A British girl with a well-deep, well-dark voice that ripples and ripples and ripples. The first track is live-recorded in Paris; the second is a studio recording. Often -- mostly -- musicians efficiently reproduce their recordings on the road. Not the sonics, the emotional tenor, the meaning to the singer, the sung-about, the sung-to. But these are two utterly different songs. I'm sure you can guess which I prefer.

From Bad Medicine/French Singer (Amazon), Myspace

See My Love - Headless Heroes
See My Love (Song for Greg) - Gentle Soul

Alela Diane and a crew of Nevada City, CA (Newsom country) musicians have made the covers record I wish Vetiver had earlier this year: eccentric, eclectic, electric, ringing with reverb, good cheer and imagination. The original "See My Love" was performed by Gentle Soul -- an obscurish hippie folk duo -- soft, whispery, sideways. But Diane sings it strong and melodramatic against surging and cresting orchestral waves (I never realized she had such powerhouse pipes) like it's a certain girl-group declaration of destiny, romance, true love and affirmation of faith in the power of songs to communicate those things unambiguously.

From The Silence of Love (Amazon), Myspace

Natural's not in it

2008-09-21T10:45:00.001-05:00

Image: Alexis Rockman

Eternal Day - Henegar-Union Sacred Harp Convention

Kedron - Sam Amidon

From Awake, My Soul: Original Soundtrack (Amazon)

Image: Rachel Denny

The Fallen Aristocracy - Northern Portrait

From The Fallen Aristocracy (Amazon), Myspace

Image: Yeondoo Jung

Oh Sky! - Coal Beautiere

From Fight Your Broken Heart and Fly (Amazon), Myspace

Image: Aliki Braine

Avenue of Trees - Parenthetical Girls

From Entanglements (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

Image: Will Cotton

Neverchanger - A Shoreline Dream (feat. Ulrich Schnauss)

From NeverChanger single (eMusic), Myspace

Image: Joel Ross

Settle On - The Shaky Hands

From Lunglight (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

Zip file of Sept mix

Glorious fuzz

2008-09-03T18:30:00.002-05:00

Image: Mokona73

Private Amber - Rosemary Krust

Nico's smoky slur & drawl dances an uneasy lap with an opiated guitar strum. Instead of sun-baked, this field of poppies is traced with frost. Brittle petals crumble in a pinch. The cold wants to see you shake, she sings. And you do.

Myspace

Tell the World - Vivian Girls
I never got the whole Pipettes thing. They are (were? are they gone yet?) charmless singers and I confess their post-post feminist irony performance thing cleared the top of my head by a good couple feet. Vivian Girls not only charmingly reconstitute Spector-girl-group, they make a passionate plea for the relevance of C86 breeze and shoe-gaze dense. Oh, and for new wave and garage rock and poor--really, really poor--production values. "Tell the World" is thick as clotted cream with close harmonies, gingersnap beats and a glorious fuzz.

Buy Vivian Girls (Amazon), Myspace

The real

2008-08-21T19:50:00.003-05:00

Image: Shelby Nycole

Let's Talk About It - White Denim

White Denim's (first? new?) album is a package bus tour of 70s rock, breezing through psychedelia, glam, hard rock, prog, soul, post-punk -- even waving at disco. Ya know, if it's Tuesday it must be Bowie. At several points their enthusiasm seems kinda feigned and mocking, and at other stops they're palpably enthused. "Let's Talk About It" is White Denim's spiked, angular Buzzcocks/Wire/Minutemen nod. But instead of attempting some inevitably flawed forgery, they expose the influence/creation process for its fakery. The singer seems to forget when to come in and then sorta slips out, the guitars break down, the drums pursue their own alien muse, the lyrics dryly meta comment: "Let's talk about it/ let's react to it." Then there's the puppet-string pulling post-production slicey/dicey that's as common these days as bands with "white" in their name. Somehow that doesn't screw up the song.

From Workout Holiday (Amazon), Myspace

Disaster - Nerve City

Dogs - Nerve City

I guess it's my unhealthy attachment to the thoroughly delegitimized concept of artistic authenticity and related false consciousnesses, but I never seem to tire of this type of crusty, lower-than lo-fi, "hey, you'll never believe what I found buried in a box in the basement!" material. Allow me to amend: I never tire of it when the songs are actually good, i.e. melodic, hooky, concise, wrapped in mystery, wonder, secret and surprise. These are that, but "Living Wage" an undownloadable on the one-man (the multi-monikered, multi-residenced Brendan Sullivan) garage band's Myspace is even neater. Pretend The Animals secretly recorded an epilogue to "House of the Rising Sun" and tucked it away for a more forgiving age.

Myspace

Oh My God - Ida Maria

Just rocks.

From Fortress Around My Heart (Amazon), Myspace

Saturn rising

2008-08-03T11:05:00.006-05:00

Image: Jayme McGowan

Perception Stick - Talbot Tagora

Hyacinth Grrls - Abe Vigoda

"Perception Stick" is what screenplay pitchers refer to as high concept. Just sort of beats you into entertained submission with a, um, stick: point blank metaphor, rigor mortis beats (think Meg White), massive low end and narcotized coed vocals sticky with swamp (think a less-sophisticated Black Mountain). It's pretty great. Talbot Tagora's part of Los Angeles' Smell scene, which I'm loving against my better judgment. I ignored the initial buzz on neighbors Abe Vigoda, but looked the band up after their messy, convoluted (and loud so loud) strawberry jam with No Age at Pitchfest on a Sonic Youth cover. Yeah, they do sound a bit like No Age crossed with Animal Collective informed by Sonic Youth. And I suppose "Hyacinth Grrls" is a ref to The Wasteland, which I guess makes them a little literary too. God bless L.A. and may its music ever prosper!

Talbot Tagora: Buy some of their stuff, Myspace
Abe Vigoda: Skeleton (Amazon, eMusic) Myspace

Shape of My Heart - Noah and the Whale

So no, this isn't the car commercial song. But the first dozen times I saw that ad I thought good for the Magnetic Fields! The similarities were pretty superficial anyway. NatW, for example, isn't soaked in bleak irony; Noah (presumably) just has a funny-miserable voice. Also: British. Also: seems to have picked up the ever-popular eastern European brass thread. In fact, the band is of a piece with a dozen folk-pop outfits and has simply made the looser, less-calculated (better) LP Bishop Allen should have.

From Peaceful the World Lays Me Down (Amazon), MySpace

Red eye

2008-07-19T12:00:00.004-05:00

Image: aptrick

Lotus Flower - One Little Plane
Myspace

Image: Lauren Greenfield

Your Red Dress - Alaska in Winter
Myspace

Image: Michele Valdez

Who Loves the Sun - Velvet Underground
From Loaded (Amazon)

Image: Bea Fremderman

Last November - Lackthereof
Myspace

Image: Benjamin Donaldson

Blind Lead the Blind - John Matthias
Myspace

Image: Elspeth Diederix

The Swimming Song - Vetiver
Myspace

Zip file of July mix

Belladonna

2008-07-13T00:45:00.004-05:00

Image: Nesta

Half an Apple - Hospitality
Despite a "you" address, this song is an internal monologue, a desperate reach for fleeting thoughts and places buzzing by -- wading boots, pennies, traffic on the bridge, half an apple to eat while you wait. With flesh not brown and grainy like that of every other cracked-open pomme in this world, but as white and crisp as the second you sliced it on a scarred wooden board at half past eight this morning. In all the blur and flux, this half apple is a still point, a portal. And the song...it could be a Woolf novel. It could be from anytime in the last 60, oh 70 years.

You can download a few more Hospitality songs at their Myspace.

The Gift of Song in the Lion's Den - The Lord Dog Bird
Within every noisy psych-art-rock guitarist is trapped a 4-track bedroom taper. Meet Colin McCann, also of Wilderness. Here, his playing, the production, is appropriately humble, but his subject and melody strain at the leash, yearning for the volley of reverb, the fury of drums, a big booming mania of vocals. Within every 4-track bedroom taper is trapped a noisy psych-art-rock guitarist.

The self-titled album will be released in August (pre-order from Amazon). And if you don't already own it, pick up a copy of Wilderness' first record (Amazon, eMusic). It's phenomenal.

Throw that beat in the garbage can

2008-06-26T14:00:00.002-05:00

Image: Christina Romeo

The Snow Leopard - Shearwater
Shearwater's new record, Rook, sounds comfortable, like the band pulled the shades, settled into vast, fluffy floor pillows, drank black tea (or 12 year old scotch) and picked up their instruments only as they felt moved to do so. Palo Santo (which I still prefer), came from the highwire. It was desperate, anxious, angry, spooky, spooked. And fierce, so fierce. Jonathan Meiberg's wondrous voice can still generate some snarl when necessary, but I don't know that it -- or the songs on Rook--extend any actual claw. That said, "Snow Leopard" is a grand thing and Shearwater is still intense, even electric, in person. (And wow, Meiberg's boy next door in need of a hot bowl of chicken soup sure pulls the indie chicks, huh?)

Buy Rook (eMusic), Myspace

Fort - Pumice
I'm not going to lecture you again on neglected New Zealand bands of yore or argue that The Clean is probably the most awesome musical act ever to put sound to twisty tape. Pumice shares a homeland and really, really poor recording equipment and that's pretty much it. This is messy, abrasive shit (Pumice, indeed) that buries any insinuation of melody under miles of grime. Nine out of 10 of you are going to hate this. I guess that's a challenge.

Buy Quo (eMusic), Myspace

Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks - The Rapture
Working on something else, I was reminded of how this is pretty much the awesomest track ever for kicking off a mix. The pacing is brilliant and when the guitar and Luke Jenner's voice come in, it's like being pierced by a long, sharp needle at the same time your bones are shook broken. I mean, if multiple forms of torture felt extremely good.

Buy Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks (Amazon), Myspace

Catching up:
Speaking of mixes, Locust Street has a Ting Tings, Girl Talk, Cut Copy-free summer mix (instead, Vivaldi, Michael Jackson, Al Green, The Pogues and the Meatballs theme, among others). One of these days I'm gonna get mine up here. Hopefully before the end of summer.

The ever-pragmatic Catbirdseat/Catbird Records offers multiple options to pay or not pay (as your budget, ethics, medication dictates) for the new Forest Fire LP.

Dusted's mid-year list talks up albums I've never heard of. Yay Dusted!

Looking through lucite panels

2008-06-15T16:45:00.004-05:00

Image: aperrigue

Brightness - Organic Stereo

First off, Organic Stereo has the prettiest album cover this year, the linearity of its buildings buffeted by cotton-ball clouds, color-saturated by buckets of orange popsicle and Hello Kitty toaster cheer. Hiroyuki Morikawa builds folktronic layers with pastel tinted lucite panels, and when the clear, white light of morning lands its beam where violet meets yellow meets green, it's joy.

The Stories Linger in My Mind is only available in Japan right now, Myspace.

Trading Things In - The Voluntary Butler Scheme

Based on the band's EP, I'd say that in the future, The Voluntary Butler Scheme might want to follow their Jackson Five obsession rather than their Archies (tho it sounds more like The Archies via The Apples in Stereo). This song is the exception--relentlessly clapped, intensely shakered, silly lyrics sincerely sung ("If you were broccoli, I'd turn vegetarian for you"). But what bumps it from unremarkable 60s-worshipping pop song to summer playlist essential is an amateurish drum shuffle/cymbal crash that's so overused and so badly recorded that you've gotta love it. It's like someone keeps tripping over a cable and falling into the drum set. And it's the most wonderful musical move I've heard in months. I mean, these kids are having fun.

Trading Things In single (iTunes, July 21), Myspace.

June jangle

2008-06-06T00:10:00.003-05:00

Image: New York Times/Westminster Dog Show

Leave That Scene Behind - The Wave Pictures

It's not a matter of "getting past it." You either hate Dave Tattersall's voice, or you hate it less. It's whiny and nasal and so maddeningly atonal you want to reach through the speakers and grab Tattersall by the shoulders and shake him til his ears fall off (they're not doing him any good anyway). So why do I crush so hard on this nerd and this song and his rickety band and inconsequential--but oh so lovingly detailed--lyrics?

From Instant Coffee Baby (Amazon), Myspace

Whole Wide World - Wreckless Eric

I'm embarrassed to say how few of the tracks on the new John Peel favorites collection I already knew (very few). But even if I couldn't say how, I recognized this song from somewhere. I didn't think it was ever a radio hit in the US, but didn't want to google it (Google just makes everything too easy). Then it came to me: the underrated Will Farrell & Emma Thompson & Maggie Gyllenhaal vehicle, Stranger Than Fiction, which has one of the best soundtracks of recent memory. That could have something to do with the fact that Britt Daniel helped out (so lots of Spoon songs and smart picks like post-punk classics "That's Entertainment" and "Mind Your Own Business"). And it's not difficult to hear "Whole Wide World" as a Spoon antecedent--as something that could even inspire a musical career--with its elegant and discrete pieces, its chug of bass, dash of tambourine, guitar squiggle, drum thumps. Nothing extraneous, everything perfectly in its place.

From Perfect Unpop: Peel Show Hits and Long Lost Lo-Fi Favourites: 1976-1980 (eMusic)

glowglimmershimmersparkleshine

2008-05-24T21:00:00.006-05:00

Image: Karen Casey Smith

San Solomon - Balmorhea

From Rivers Arms (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Image: Jake Dobkin

Outta Sight - Osborne

From Osborne (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Image: Lisa Kereszi

Now Til '69 - The Shortwave Set

From Replica Sun Machine (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Image: Travis Ruse

Wondrous Place - The Last Puppet Show

From The Age of the Understatement (Amazon), Myspace

Image: Estelle Hanania

Ruususuu - Lau Nau

From Nukkuu (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Image: Jan van Holleben

My Dunks - The Clik Clik

From My Dunks, Myspace

Image: Melanie Schiff

Working Bees - The Pinker Tones

From Wild Animals (eMusic), Myspace

Image: Corey Arnold

Close the Lid- Port O'Brien

From All We Could Do Was Sing (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Zip file of May mix