Today’s song is a brand-spankin’ new version of a song The Idle Hands released on a rarely heard U.K. EP back in 2006 (I own it)…but the two Irishmen and three Americans are now based in Minneapolis and they’re recording their first American release and they just leaked this smokin’ re-do of ‘Loaded’ that has me got me on my feet and clawing my way back to reality this afternoon…I just had to pass it on. Still too soon for a name or release date on the new album, but you can stream more songs and follow the gang over on MySpace and for those of you SXSW-heads in Austin this week, they’re playing tomorrow night at 7:45pm at the Irongate Lounge…..
I kinda knew I was gonna like this right from the jump…..I didn’t even care if the lyrics ever turned up, I was so enthralled with the tap-tap-tap of the lone cymbal and the thump of the bass…..but when Faris Badwan’s vocal slides in it’s like a bastard-child cross between Peter Murphy and Ian Curtis…tres cool! ‘Sea Within a Sea’ is off their new album, Primary Colours, which is set to drop May 4th. You can head on over to MySpace or their website for more black eye-liner goth goodness.
With some of the songs I’ve dropped on The List lately (from Our Broken Garden…Pete Yorn…The XX…Young Galaxy, to name a few), ya might think I’m stuck in a deep hole of melancholy…I dunno…it’s not like turning on the news offers anything even remotely cheery these days…but I just find the music, I don’t make it! I think this current wave of aural depressants says a lot about the state of things overall…
Anyway, now that I’ve dropped us all into an even darker mood than we were in a few seconds ago…..the L.A.-based electro-acoustic popsters known as Lemonwilde just dropped their new EP, Red Room, and it’s damned nice, even if it does fall into that Glum Rock category. I really love how vocalist Joseph Murray has a little Ian McCulloch/Bunnymen thang goin’ on with the way his trembling voice goes up and down the scales. They’re giving away the whole EP on MySpace…CLICK HERE and check it out!
So when I first heard this cut from the new Our Broken Garden album, When Your Blackening Shows, I immediatley thought of Julee Cruise and and the Twin Peaks-y vibe the song gives off…then I saw the promo art with singer Anna Brønsted laying battered and broken in a bed of moss…and I really got Laura Palmer chills! Our Broken Garden, with the slow-core wall of production, lazy drums, church-like organs and dark, moody guitar work, kinda sounds like Radiohead on heroin, if they had a sexy Danish guest vocalist take over on the gloomier-than-usual songs. Probably not the kinda thing to listen to if you’re already in need of a Zoloft, but sometimes a dose of self-indulgent, ethereal melancholy is just what the doctor ordered. You can head on over to their MySpace page to get further depressed…..
If you had told me I would ever drop a Pete Doherty song on The List, I probably would have slapped you just on principal…I mean, the guy has turned himself into a tabloid joke and trashed what was not only a great music career but a lucrative and marketable music commodity by not knowing when to put down the damned crack pipe. That said, the junkie can still crank out a damned nice song when he puts his mind to it! He locked himself in the studio with legendary producer Stephen Street (The Smiths, Blur, Kaiser Chiefs, The Cranberries) and the result is Grace / Wastelands , due out March 24th. And damn…wouldn’t ya know it…Pete’s got a MySpace page where you can stream a few more cuts off of the album!
I gotta say, I’m pretty surprised with today’s song, ‘cuz when I first told you guys about Men Without Pants last July, they were weeks away from releasing their first album, but being the uber-perfectionists they are, Dan the Automator (Gorillaz, Mercury Rev) and Russell Simins (Jon Spencer Blues Explosion) trashed the early recordings and started over! And the song that leaked out today is so far on the musical spectrum from that earlier Song of the Day that I hafta wonder how all over the place the rest of the album will be! You need help remembering what I’m talkin’ about? OK…here’s ‘Double Life’, the song I leaked back in July…..
Now back then I said ‘Double Life’ was a gritty, dirty, ass-kickin’ bit of straight-up Rock & Roll that “hits you like a mash-up of White Zombie, QOTSA and Stone Temple Pilots”…but ‘My Balloon’, with the gals from Cibo Matto handling the vocals, is all sweet and frilly and full of sweeping strings & pianos and…pretty!!! How in God’s name are these two songs gonna live in harmony on the same album?!! I dunno either, but Naturally drops April 7th (they promise!) and you can stream a few more cuts (with other guest vocalists like Sean Lennon, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Pelle from The Hives) over on their MySpace page in the meantime.
I still get chills whenever I crank up his debut, musicforthemorningafter, so the news today that Pete Yorn is getting ready to drop his new album, Back And Fourth, has me all goose-bumpy. After that album hit, Yorn was hailed by the critics as the best thing to come out of South Jersey since Bruce Springsteen. To that, I say those critics obviously forgot about the pride of Red Bank, Kevin Smith….but that kinda comparison has gotta weigh on anybody and while his more recent releases have all been solid, getting heard in today’s music scene is tough enough without everybody thinking you’re the Boss’s replacement! His last album, Nightcrawler, basically went unnoticed, so he crawled back into the studio with mega-producer Rick Rubin. And if you think you’re hearing a a bit of early Rod Stewart in the mix, it wasn’t by accident…I’ve always thought his voice paid tribute to Rod, but he has he actually said he wondered what Stewart would sound like singing this song. The new disc is due on June 23rd, but you can head on over to MySpace to stream a few more cuts.
This is one of those indie band stories that kinda shows the length some bands will go to get heard ‘cuz they so believe in their music. East Hundred originally got together back in 2004 in the basement of brothers Brooke and Will Blair who thought they’d start a synth-heavy electro-dance band. After realizing that genre may not be their cup of tea, they invited Brooke’s girlfriend, Beril Guceri, to jump in on vocals. They played around as a trio for a while, releasing a few rough EPs, then in 2007 added childhood friends David Sunderland on bass and Susan Gager on keyboards and began in earnest writing original songs. But of course…you knew it had to happen…Brooke and Beril broke up, which added mucho tension to the mix, but also gave them a whole new path to go down with their songwriting. All that angst and heartache has finally produced their debut album (after five years!) Passenger, dripping with songs of failed love, friendships, anxiety and awkwardness. You should really head over to MySpace and give ’em a look!
A.) find the time…
and
2.) find the music, for the Song of the Day!
I’ve said it a million times, finding good music ain’t that hard…and honestly, it’s not like I spend major time doin’ it, either! I obviously scan MySpace Music, but I also keep my eyes and ears on a lotta indie record label sites and music blogs…they’re both great sources for incredible music that will probably never be performed by Rihanna, Kanye or Mariah Carey. Just this morning I fell over a post on the Young Turks Records blog announcing this band of four 19-year-olds from South London they just signed & recorded (in a studio the size of my bathroom!) called The XX. The wistful, dreamy, bedroom slo-jam has me swaying in my chair this morning…you can check ’em out further on their MySpace page and if you follow that link to Young Turks you can download another track!
I can’t put my finger on it…and even though I really, really like it…there’s something deeply disturbing about this song. Maybe it’s the way lead singer Catherine McCandless’ trance-like voice sort of begs and pleads the lyric…it’s like she’s transmitting a feeling of doom through the words. And the way the distorted, watery guitars and fuzzed-up keyboards fight to get heard past the thick production just adds to the sense of hurt and pain. I can’t quite imagine what these guys are like live…you can find out if you wanna hit Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg tomorrow, ‘cuz they’re opening for The XYZ Affair and Pete & J…but I figure a few anti-depressants and a beer might help to take the edge off! It’s depressing and dark and sad…and I love it! Their new album, Invisible Republic, doesn’t have a release date quite yet, but you can check ’em out over at MySpace
Provo, Utah is the home to three kids calling themselves Desert Noises and they just dropped their first EP…recorded in all of four days…and I gotta say, after listening to the first couple of cuts I’m pretty impressed! OK…maybe it’s a teeny bit derivative of Band of Horses, or maybe it’s just how lead singer Kyle Henderson’s voice hits the higher register the same way BofH’s Ben Bridwell does…I dunno, but the combination of his vocals and some pretty tight production (check out the open & clear guitar and bass!) makes for a quite appealing listening experience. You can check ’em out over on MySpace
It’s Punk Rock Tuesday here on The List and just in time too, ‘cuz I haven’t kicked out the Jams in a long, long time, but to remedy that, Art Brut just leaked a song that will not be on their next album! The Frank Black-produced album, Art Brut Vs. Satan, drops April 20th, but I guess they’ve got so much good stuff to choose from that ‘Just Desserts’ is getting used as a teaser to make you wanna buy the album. Snarly Cockney vocals, grinding guitars and lotsa dessert jokes…yup, that spells PUNK to me!!! I mean honestly…when was the last time you heard the word “patisserie” dropped into a punk song?!! Now that’s inspired songwriting! Check ’em out at MySpace
It’s been a while since I’ve found any shoegazey stuff that popped my cork, but when I heard Asobi Seksu had just released a new album, I was all over it. The Brooklyn-based duo (sometimes quartet), fronted by Yuki Chikudate, has followed up their previous album, Citrus, with another collection of electronic fuzz & shimmery vocals, reminiscent of The Cocteau Twins, with a bit of amped-up Blonde Redhead and My Bloody Valentine tossed in for good measure. The new songs have a familiar feel to them, but they’re bigger…more complex…than the bands previous work. I love this stuff! Check out Asobi Seksu on their MySpace page.
I’m heading out on a roadtrip for a few days, but before I go I figured I would give you guys a few of my favorite ‘go-to’ songs that I’ve dropped on The List in the distant past. No real rhyme or reason to how these got picked, they just kinda always end up near the top of my iTunes folder….
It’s been barely two weeks since I dropped a leak from the new Faunts album on The List, but now that Feel.Love.Thinking.Of. has come out, I really need to push my electro-homeboys from Edmonton a little harder by offering up the title track. I said then that these guys had me thinking of the first Depeche Mode album, Speak & Spell, with the frenetic synthesizers and Tim Batke’s spare, minimalistic vocal, and maybe it’s because they sound a lot like the 80’s electro-pop bands I grew up listening to, but I can’t stop playing this album. I’m sure some of you run in the opposite direction when anything resembling electronica crosses your path, but trust me…this is uncontrived, melodic and well crafted pop that deserves a look. Check out Faunts at MySpace
Just as they kick off their North American tour, Ladytron is releasing a 7-track EP of remixed versions of ‘Tomorrow’ off of last years album, Velocifero. It features some pretty diverse mixmasters doin’ the knob-twiddling…Jim Abbiss, Dirty Vegas, The Vector Lovers…and this one by Los Angelenos, Great Northern. They’ll be on the road April & May (including two nights here in NYC at Webster Hall) and for more info, head over to their MySpace page.
A perfectly crafted pop song doesn’t need any help convincing you it’s good…it just is…and I got that feeling late last night when I couldn’t sleep, turned on Kimmel and saw Anya Marina perform this song…I just felt it…tight production, catchy pop beats and a sexy vocal purred by a girl who, not for nuthin’, is also pretty damned cute. The Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter first popped up on my radar a couple of years back when she web-released a cobbled-together acoustic number titled ‘Lindsay Goes To Rehab’ (a cry for Ms. Lohan to maybe look into getting some help for her ‘addictive’ personality)…and then again when her song, ‘Miss Halfway’, scored a spot on one of the ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ compilation CD’s, a sure sign you’re going places in the Indie Music World…and I was struck by her delicate, jazzy vocals so when I heard her again last night I knew I had to search out ‘Move You’. It’s off of her second album, Slow & Steady Seduction, Phase II…and you can stream more from the album on her MySpace Page
I don’t drop nearly as much electronica on The List as I have in the past, but when I heard that Project Jenny, Project Jan are set to drop a new EP (that features a whole mess of other electro-artists, including Adam Matta, Mixel Pixel, One Watt Sun and the amazing knob-twiddlers from Brighton featured on this song, Fujiya & Miyagi), I had to search it out. With it’s fast-paced, jumpy percussion and scatter-shot lyric, this song should fit nicely onto your aerobic workout playlist. The Colors EP is out April 14th, but you can check out the Brooklyn boys right now over on MySpace
OK…I would have bet the ranch that when I sent out ‘Around The Bend’ as a SOTD back in October, that would have been the last we would hear from The Asteroids Galaxy Tour. I mean, come on…..as much fun as it was, wasn’t this one of those songs that got tagged to be some background muzak in an iPod commercial and would likely be forgotten five minutes later?!! I even half-joked that they were sure to be ‘the next best thing…”…..
I apologize!
On ‘The Sun Ain’t Shining No More’, the first leak off of their debut album, Mette Lindberg’s slinky, retro-60’s R&B vocal, the lo-fi instrumental arrangements, the decidedly scratchy recording technique and just the perfect amount of oversampling have made me a convert and as I sit here swaying back in forth at my desk, the cool vibe of the song and her cocksure delivery has me picturing an Uma Thurman-esque, Tarantino Superwoman, full-on ready to kick your ass if you don’t see things her way! I truly love all of the 60’s-inspired music comin’ outta Europe lately…and this girl’s got a lotta soul! Their album, Fruit, is set to drop in May, but until then you can head on over to their MySpace page and stream a few more songs.
Damn Ugly Photography 