I swear as God is my witness, it was just this morning as I was taking my shower, I was wondering, “When the Hell is Blonde Redhead gonna put out something new?!!”, and Voila!…a leak from their next album drops in my lap a few short hours later! The trio of Kazu Makino and the Pace twins (Simone and Amedeo) have been making music together since 1993 and have released seven full-length albums, but noting since 2007 and for dream-pop junkies like myself, that’s far too long. ‘Here Sometimes’ is apparently gonna be the first track on Penny Sparkle, due out September on 4AD, and if this is representative of the rest of the album, it’s far more synth-heavy than their previous effort, 23.
Sez Kazu…
“I am not sure what Penny Sparkle is but I hope I offered to them as much as they offered me. I know that we have never made a record this way and if I could go back in time, I would do it exactly the same way again…”
For more of Blonde Redhead, hit ’em on their website or over on MySpace or sit back and enjoy the video for ’23’…..
Eric Elbogen will always hold the dubious distinction of being the first person to ever grace the pages of Damn Ugly Photography when the blog went live and I made the Say Hi song, ‘November Was White, December Was Grey’, the very first web-based Song of the Day. If it’s possible to wear out a CD, I must have come close ‘cuz I had his album ‘Oohs & Aahs’ on repeat for weeks. Apparently he took a break from working on the next Say Hi album and dropped by Daytrotter and did a live session a few weeks back. If you guys aren’t already following Daytrotter, I can only ask, “Why?!!”…they’ve had amazing acts come by since 2006 to record mini-sessions of their songs…and you can download it all for nuthin’! Anyway, that’s where I found todays song, but you should all do yourselves a favor and bookmark the site, then head over to Eric’s facebook page and hit the “LIKE” button.
And as a bonus, here’s the video for “One, Two…One”……
It’s shapin’ up to be ‘Singer/Songwriters Named Sarah Week’ here on The List. Sarah Jaffe wishes she could be a little more delicate. This song…from her debut album, ‘Suburban Nature’, that she recorded in an old funeral parlor…is drenched in regret and heartache and she tugs at your heartstrings and cuts to the bone by pairing her soulful voice with the deep bass moan from a sadder-than-sad cello, yet the song actually swings towards the upbeat with the inclusion of a well placed scratchy guitar and shuffling snare drum. A native of Red Oak Texas, she’s only 24 so I’m chalking up her World weary attitude to what is likely an old soul.
“…50 boys, 50 lies, 50 I’m gonna change my minds…..”
That’s some powerful stuff. Go on….make friends with Sarah Jaffe on MySpace
*UPDATE*
I don’t know if Dallas photographer David Wilson just has too much time on his hands or what, but for whatever reason he decided to cover “Clementine” using a ukulele and a room full of synthesizers! Jaffe wrote on her Facebook page, “I’m not sure who you are, David Wilson, but you are awesome and so is this! Thanks!”
I’ve been sitting here listening to this cut off of As Day Follows Night, the third album from Aussie singer/songwriter Sarah Blasko, and while I’m struck by the sheer beauty of her voice, I’m having a hard time describing how it makes me feel. It’s kinda like if Karin Bergquist from Over The Rhine rode in on horseback in a Spaghetti Western! The howling intro and sparse guitar carry her pleading vocals though a haunting, bleak landscape painted by her stirring lyrics…
I can’t even understand me
So don’t think that you can help
When I say things and see things
That’s no way on earth to tell
That kind of honesty takes my breath away…and then makes me sad. I guess it’s working then, huh?!!
As Day Follows Night was was recorded in Stockholm, produced by Björn Yttling (of Peter, Bjorn and John fame) and was released a year ago everywhere but the States…that mistake is being corrected, ‘cuz it’s now scheduled for an August release, but until then, check out Sarah on her MySpace Page
We’re gonna do a musical about-face from last weeks ‘The Muscle & Charm’ with a leak off of the new album from School Of Seven Bells, due out next month. I love this Brooklyn-based trio and their psycho-hypnotic swirl of mesmerizing vocals, vibrant melodies and rhythmic noise. I was tossing out cuts from Alpinisms last year as fast as I could get them and I’m looking forward to hearing what the new record has to offer. On ‘Babelonia’, I’m instantly taken by the familiar Cocteau Twins-like chanting from twins Alejandra and Claudia Deheza and carried along by Ben Curtis’ shoegazey wall of of chugging percussion, layered guitars and electro-atmospheric noise. Disconnect From Desire is set to drop July 13th, but in the meantime you can check SVIIB out on their MySpace Page
If this little photography side-business I have going ever tanks and I had to find another gig, I don’t think I could ever be a real music reviewer because I have this nasty habit of always comparing any new music I hear to music I already know. I suppose it’s only human nature to think that way…I mean, when you tell somebody about a new band you’ve found they’ll invariably ask, “Who do they sound like?”…but real reviewers should have more arrows in their quiver than that. But then I’ve never professed to be a reviewer, but just an interested bystander. That hasn’t stopped millions of indie bands and tiny labels from sending me music from their latest Next Big Thing, which is exactly where today’s song came from. Henry Pope, the bass player for the Los Angeles based Atlantic Line, dropped me an e-mail offering their new album and would I mind get the word out to my cult-like followers? But it got me thinking, how did Henry know about my little corner of the musical interweb…and then I remembered that he also played with Lemonwilde and they were one of the first bands featured on the Song of the Day after I started the blog!
So now I’m gonna lean on my crutch of comparison and try to describe what I think of Atlantic Line…
I checked out their MySpace page and seeing the “Ambient/Live Electronics” tag these guys are describing themselves as, I was expecting a totally different listening experience from what I got hit with. Ambient?!! I spent yesterday with their album ‘Exit To Intro’ on ‘repeat’ and only one of the eight tracks (the Coldplay-like ballad, ‘Ghost In Daylight’) comes close to being described as ambient, so you rock fans needn’t be scared away by the thought of any frilly, loopy synthesizers and unintelligible lyrics! If you have to pigeonhole these guys in any category, Henry’s thumping basslines, William Oraha’s wall of fuzzy psychedelic guitar riffs and Noah Alexander’s power drumming is gonna be found in the arena rock section! And then there is lead singer Ray Silva’s voice…with his wailing and pleading and shouts, you come away feeling like you’ve just experienced a sort of weird mashup of Bono, Thom Yorke and Ian McCulloch. And since I mentioned Ian McCulloch (you can just feel another comparison coming on, right?!!), the first time I heard ‘The Muscle & Charm’ I couldn’t get the similarities to Echo & the Bunnymen’s ‘Bedbugs and Ballyhoo’ outta my head! Silva sings, “Who’s from the future, I’m from the future Honey…Do ya wanna see it, Do ya wanna see it Baby?”, but I’m hearing, “Buffalo and Bison…Bison and Buffalo…Ballyhoo and bedbugs…Bedbugs and ballyhoo”…! Go on…tell me I’m wrong!!!
Now here’s the best part….the boys are offering up the entire album on their website. It’s an honor system kinda thing and you can download it for nuthin’, but don’t be a cheap ass…if it gets you going, toss ’em a few bucks to show ’em how much you appreciate real music! (And yes…I kicked in!)
And then head on over and make friends on their MySpace Page
I’m gonna jump on my soapbox and make an appeal to all photographers who live or shoot in New York City. Today is the last day to register with the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting to speak out at the hearing on June 3rd against charging fees for all still photography permits. Every editorial and advertising photographer uses the type of equipment that under current rules requires a film permit from the city and up until now those seeking a permit simply were required to carry $1,000,000 in liability insurance, but the new proposal is adding a non-refundable $300.00 ‘application’ fee for every time a permit is pulled to shoot! Given the razor-thin profit margins photographers are working with these days and the budget tightening our clients are faced with, a $300.00 permit fee will seriously hamper location shooting in the city.
I will be speaking on behalf of EP, ASMP, APA and NPPA, but the more photographers who get up and let their voices be heard, the better! If you’re available to to go the hearing being held June 3, 2010 at the 125 Worth Street Auditorium, you must register by TODAY…contact Dean McCann of the Mayor’s Office at 212-489-6710 or by e-mail at applicationfee@film.nyc.gov and if you can’t make the hearing, please vote “NO” on this online petition.
OK…let’s step back from yesterday’s exercise in shameless self-promotion and get back to why we’re all really here…to get some new music for your iTunes folder!!!
After the new website went live yesterday, I sent Ryan Karazija the link telling him that his band, Audrye Sessions, was chewing up some serious bandwidth in the ‘Famous People’ gallery. Ryan got back to me late last night with a gift…a leak from their new album. ‘Bad Day’ is a revelation…unlike the guitar-driven Audyre Sessions I know…it’s simply beautiful…like a pastoral journey that floats in on a warm breeze but steadily builds to a frenzied & joyous drum-banging, anthemic crescendo. Few songs get me hooked as quickly as this one did and honestly, I can’t wait to hear more. No word on when Ryan and the Gang plan the next release, but stay close…I’ll let ya know…and in the meantime, check ’em out on MySpace
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And it even comes with
a trippy YouTube Video…
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Damn Ugly hasn’t had this many hits in one day since he went to DC and photographed The President…and even then I don’t think the graph went that high! This morning, David Hobby, also known in photo circles as The Strobist, interviewed me last week and posted it on his blog at 8:00AM this morning….
His post today…and the launching of my new website…have resulted in a major traffic jam clogging up the interwebs! I could only hope and pray to get this kinda action on a daily basis, but since I’m trying to get people signed up for the Santa Fe Workshop Ronnie Weil and I are teaching, I’ll take whatever action I can get!
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!!! EDIT !!!
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Damn Ugly made it to the Top 100 Blogs of the Day on WordPress!!! #27…and climbing like a rocket!!!
The Redesigned Website Is Up !!!!!
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You’ve probably noticed my participation here at Damn Ugly has been sketchy recently, but after a couple of months of all-night design sessions, resizing images and portfolio editing, my new website is up & running!!!
This is the third website design I’ve put up and by far the best. Quite honestly, the format of this site is exactly what I would have wanted years ago, but the technology just wasn’t there. Until now I’ve been using a Livebooks design, but this time I worked with Rob Haggart’s web design company, ‘A Photo Folio’ to implement the changes and we went live over the weekend. While everything about the architecture of the site is new, I incorporated a lot of the basic design elements from my previous site in this new project.
The first major change you will see is that I’m no longer hamstrung with a single, small image window…the images are much higher resolution ands now dynamically resize as you change the size of your browser window, or…even better.…you can click the ‘Full-Screen’ button at the lower left of your monitor and view the biggest, sharpest possible images I can offer! Navigating with the Thumbnail view is also much faster since you can see larger thumbnail images and they pop up ten times faster than the Livebooks version ever did. And I really like being able to navigate forwards and back by simply clicking on the left or right of the image…as you roll your mouse over the image, a ‘+’ or ‘-‘ icon appears and you can click and go! You can also access the thumbnails by placing your mouse in the middle of the screen and clicking when the grid icon appears. I don’t even know why I’m explaining this because the site design is so intuitive it just seems natural! But if you have any problems getting around the site, just ask a five year-old…it’s been years since I’ve met a kid who couldn’t figure out the internet!
Finally, having these hi-rez images allowed me to add a couple of galleries that I plan to have a lotta fun with in the future. My ‘Artificial Portraits’ and ‘Light Tests’ will allow me to show more of those behind the scenes moments that normally get archived to a hard drive, but offer insightful looks at the nuts & bolts of my shoots.
As some of you already know, the past couple of months have had me furiously redesigning my current website with the folks at APhotoFolio.com and yesterday Rob Haggart, Mr. APhotoFolio himself, informed me that they have become the first photography website company to deliver custom designed iPad sites, built using HTML5, for all of their customers. Check it out…
As I sit here resizing TIFFS down to JPEGs for my new site, I hafta wonder if the next thing I’m gonna be doing is purchasing a carload of iPads to act as my portfolios?!! Given how labor intensive, not to mention expensive, printed portfolios can be, having everything on an iPad just might make sense! I dunno…it’s all very early in the game, but if I can get over not having a printed book of BIG prints to show an art director, who knows?!!
And now, here’s a quick look at a sample page from my new website, which will be up as soon as I finish resizing those damned JPEGs…
Click on image for Full-Size
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Hey Kids…It’s a Two-Fer Tuesday today on The List!
Paul Banks, Carlos Dengler, Sam Fogarino and Daniel Kessler…those Joy Division-lovin’, dark-minded boys in the dark-colored suits otherwise known as Interpol…are back in the studio and they just leaked ‘Lights’, a song that takes more than two minutes before it really gets going, but then majestically builds up a theatrical momentum and ultimately sounds like it could be the opener off of their as yet unnamed new album. Now don’t get me wrong, I really like this, but I think the boys might hafta sit down with The Killers and work out some royalty payments, ‘cuz from where I’m standin’ they straight-up lifted the opening riff from The Killers song, “All the Pretty Faces”, and used it and the plodding hook that carries this song!!!
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club just dropped Beat The Devil’s Tattoo, the sixth album in nine years from the L.A.-based neo-psychedelia-garage rockers and along with the new album comes a new drummer, one-time Raveonette Leah Shapiro. Now don’t get me wrong, there’s no bigger Raveonettes fan out there than Mr. Damn Ugly, but when I heard the hard-rocking BRMC was gonna be backed up by their drummer, even I took a deep breath. But if what I’ve heard from Beat The Devil’s Tattoo is any indication, she’s fitting in very well the band’s established sound. On ‘Conscience Killer’, the tribal driving backbeat and fuzzy, reverb-heavy guitars help give Peter Hayes’ vocals a hot & sexy T-Rex feel. And just what is it about Marc Bolan (and The Raveonettes, for that matter?!!) these days? It was only a few weeks ago when I offered up a Raveonettes cover of ‘Heart Of Stone’ by Brooklyn Psych-rockers Amazing Baby that was a dead ringer for T-Rex and now we have BRMC jumping on 70’s Glam Train!
BRMC is currently in the middle of a bone-crushing European Tour, and you can check ’em out on MySpace
OK…so we’re out in Hoboken freezing our asses off this morning and I decide to do a quick portrait of the guy I was shooting on the sidewalk outside of his building…and yes, I knew that maybe I would need a permit, but we were only gonna be out there for fifteen stinking minutes and besides, it wasn’t like we had a twenty-person crew and motor homes and generators….but of course, just as we were ready to get going a cop pulls up and barks out, “You gotta permit for this?!!”…”No”, says I, pleading blissful ignorance of the complex photography laws of the fine State of New Jersey (insert all the sarcasm you can muster), “…but do you think you could let us slide?”. You already know the answer to that one, and he tells me I have to go Police Headquarters and fill out an application…
Off I go, meandering through the pothole-ravaged roads of the square-mile hamlet only known because Sinatra was born here, but when I get to the Cop Shop they say I’m in the wrong place…I hafta go to City Hall! OK…I walk the two blocks to City Hall, but once there and after waiting fifteen minutes in line, the Town Clerk (a snottier jerkoff you will never meet!) tells me it’s the Police who approve all film permits and besides, it takes three days and there is a $700 fee!!! I explain my situation and that I’m not shooting a ‘Film’ and that I’m working for a magazine, not Dreamworks, but he could give a rat’s ass…he ain’t budging. So one more trip back to Cops where, you guessed it, they shoot me down in flames!
So the photo of Bo that sits at the top of this post is all I have to show of the dump beautiful town that is Hoboken!!! I suppose that if that asshole Town Clerk sees this, I just might get a bill for $700 since, technically, I did shoot there, but I’ll take my chances and simply avoid Hoboken for the rest of my time on Earth!
Mark your calendars kids, ‘cuz in July Mr. Damn Ugly is gonna be jetting off to teach a workshop at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops!Reid Callanan, the High Priest of Santa Fe, has invited Ronnie Weil and I to teach a week-long program called ‘The Editorial Portrait’…..an intensive class that will let us show a group of young photographers what it takes to shoot for an editorial client. We’re still figuring out the curriculum, but I’m getting tired already! I figure by the end of the week, if the students don’t have a very good idea of what it takes to be an editorial portrait shooter, they never will! The week will be a non-stop cycle of shooting and critiquing work…every day new assignments are given out and the students have to adapt immediately and come back with great imagery. I’m looking forward to kicking some young photographer ass!!!
The fun begins July 4th and you can read all about our workshop HERE!
Demander calls themselves a three-piece irregular rock band.
Sivan Harlap and Dave Kurutz met behind the snack bar at Villa Park High School in 1994. Karen Kanan Corrêa met Sivan and the two played in The Hissyfits back in 2001. Sivan actually spent the first few months of their acquaintance trying to get Karen kicked out of the group because I guess not everyone likes viola in a rock band, but Karen eventually switched to bass and the two became fast friends. Over the next two years they performed with The Killers, Gary Go, Holly Golightly and many others, but since 2004 they’ve been playing together under the name Demander. Dave and Karen met completely by chance in New York many years after the previous events, somewhere near 2008. Through some cosmic melding of the minds, the three of them now make bright sexy-time adventure pop for jogging, dancing, drinking or making out. And next Tuesday they’re set to drop their second album. It’s called Future Brite. Recorded in NYC, the album was produced by Jim Keller (Co-founder of 80’s band Tommy Tutone and writer of 867-5309) and was mixed by John Agnello (Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth, Hold Steady). Guest musicians include Franz Nicolay of The Hold Steady, Native American Music Award winner Martha Redbone, and members of World/Inferno Friendship Society and Anti-Social Music. During the recording process, there was apparently some singing done in a vocal booth that smelled like sheep perfume and a whole lot of clapping. You can enjoy more of Demander on their MySpace Page and further fun can be had by watching the fun-fun-fun video for ‘Math’…
Hailing from a tiny town in Northern Wales, The Joy Formidable is getting loads of hot press after having just dropped A Balloon Called Moaning, an album of frantic, grungy, Lo-Fi rock that stands out because of the stark contrast between all the crashing guitars and feedback and noise, and Ritzy Bryan’s pleading, fragile little girl vocals that rise above the noisy cacophony lamenting, “All these things about me you never can tell”…
Check out more of The Joy Formidable on their MySpace Page and then you can watch the video for ‘Whirring’ where they once again propagate the myth that all of Wales is nothing but a cold, grey wasteland of moors and mountains and fog!
Just last week, Kate Tucker put out a call on Kickstarter to help her fund the release of ‘White Horses’, her next album, and now The New York Times has a story about websites like Kickstarter, SellaBand and PledgeMusic and how indie acts are using them to get their projects off the ground.
So if you haven’t checked out Kate’s video yet, follow THIS LINK and toss her a few bucks. In less than a week she’s already pulled in $2150.00 of her $5000.00 target, but we gotta keep this going. I know some of you have already kicked in a few bucks, and I’m gonna try my best to not get all Public-Access-Pledge-Drive on you and hold any feet to the fire, but I know how many people are reading this and I also know a lot of you could dip into your mocha latte budget and help out and it ain’t exactly gonna hurt your bottom line…
So Band of Skulls did a live session over at Daytrotter a few weeks back and layed down some pretty gritty versions of songs from last years ‘Baby Darling Doll Face Honey’ and show once again just how damned good they are. No overdubs or fancy production, just straight to tape and out the door…what more can you ask?!! If you haven’t bought this album yet, I hafta ask, why not? Follow that link above to Amazon and spend six bucks…you’ll thank me later. And then register at Daytrotter where you can download even more of their killer live sessions with bands like Au Revoir Simone, Beach House, Bon Iver and Spoon…all for nothing! Now am I offering value here, or what?!! Check out Band of Skulls on MySpace
Damn Ugly Photography 