omg this is so sexy. it’s like an 8 minute long orgasm.
link in the comments
Sep
30
Round 3: glo-fi. Dude from Texas named Alan Palomo, calls this Neon Indian. It’s pretty appropriate. I think glo-fi is fun to say. Glo-figlo-figlo-fi. With tracks like Deadbeat Summer, Should have taken acid with you, and Laughing Gas, I’m sure some of my friends will relate to this on a lot of levels. Interestingly enough, both the full album and the EP have the same title and same cover art. Palomo also has another project/myspace profile called VEGA, which is arguably cooler than this. Think 80s synth pop with Daft Punk house flair. fun*amillion. My only criticism is that sometimes the album feels too laid back for its own good.
Best tracks: Deadbeat Summer, Should have taken acid with you, Local Joke
Sep
30
OK round 2 of those ridiculously fun subgenres I listed below. Washed Out, a “chillwave” musician from Georgia, makes the chillest and waviest music I’ve heard in a while. It’s bedroop synthpop for sure, but with a…uh, leisurely mood about it. Maybe I should move to Georgia. I like how the album begins with the lyric “gotta get up” put to a dreamy, wobbly beat which is so intriguing that you stay seated for a while. Out on the fantastic new label Mexican Summer (former home of Kurt Vile). Link includes tracks Belong and Luck which have been released separately. Pretty much every song on the EP is a winner, but Get Up, New Theory, and Lately are best to start with.
Sep
30
I kinda still liked him as both Memory Cassette and Weird Tapes, but this is a really excellent album, and as he says “a ‘dreamwave’ unification” of the two. there’s been a lot of genretroversies this year about glofi, dreamwave, chillwave, etc, but I don’t care what you call it, the names are funny and it all sounds good. plus it’s all got roots in balearic and italo disco, which is pretty sweet. memory tapes is the dude from hail social, a band that was big in philly a few years ago then died. he now lives in new jersey, alone, very alone, as he doesn’t plan on touring the album apparently (grrr).
Best Tracks: Bicycle, Green Knight, Pink Stones, Plain Material, Graphics
Sep
30
Hopefully by now you all know that I only post really good music, music that I myself enjoy a lot and think that you will too. Ok, occasionally I post an album that’s bad but been waited on just to please whoever might want it, but my intentions are pure. So it’s hard to overstate the ecstasy that this band will bring to your ears. When this popped up in my blogfeedz this summer it was as if it had answered all my midsummer doldrums’ prayers. I had heard them prior to that with their beautiful remix of Too Young To Love by The Big Pink, so when Delorean sprang up in my reader I was inclined to give it a try. I’m glad I did. Too bad they got all p4k’d after that, but what can you do? It’s hard to describe this music because the end result is that you’ll be happy, so I’m almost asking myself why I should even describe it just fucking download it but I figure I should do a RIYL so here ya are: driving, dreamy, beach-pop, magic, dance, psychedelic, wonder, wander, whatever
Here’s to a proper full-length!
Sep
30
Delphic is one of my favorite last.fm finds so far this proverbial season (it’s always music season, people). I really like their description on their profile, which says they “aim to be the future sound of Manchester mixing euphoric electronica with anthemic songs for a post dance world,” mostly because it’s pretty accurate. The three tracks here, Counterpoint, Doubt, and This Momentary are all really addictive. They are on Kitsune Maison, along with a lot of other kickass artists. Check it out before it gets over-hyped!
Sep
30
My interpretation: New Order “took a walk down to the beach.” Enjoy. They’re apparently the latest and greatest in indie rock. I quite enjoy it, because it’s like The Smiths for people who are happy and not losers (jk meat is murder yall lolz).
They have an official EP called Summertime! out soon, but this is what’s been floating around and it’s at good quality so grab it. 8 tracks and all are incredibly sunny and catchy. My personal favorites are: I Felt Stupid, Let’s Go Surfing, Me and the Moon, Best Friend
link is in the comments
Sep
28
This is one of my favorite albums of all time. Shocking Pinks are from New Zealand, which is an beautiful and nice country. They’re on the most famous (only? jk) label in NZ, Flying Nun Records, home to The Chills, The Verlaines, and numerous other Dunedin Sound pop and post-punk bands in the 80s and 90s. This album is a compilation of their previous two albums released by Flying Nun, slapped together with some fancy/strange cover art and a beautiful DFA logo, their American label home. It’s fuzzy, melodic, and gives me nostalgia reminiscent of New Order and driving fast in the middle of the night. It’s probably all the cowbell.
This album will make you want to stay in high school forever. (Too soon?)
Best tracks: The Aching Deal, Emily, How Am I Not Myself?, Second Hand Girl, fuck it’s only 45 minutes, just loop it
Sep
28
Menacingly sincere love letters for a post-romantic age. A sweetly vicious debut way beyond the years of its youthful creators (they’re 19!), this album tears apart music and stitches it back together with minimal guitar lines, droopy, low-end beats and cautious dual boy-girl vocals. It is one of the best of 2009, and a debut at that! Can’t not.
They’re on Young Turks/XL, the former is also home to Tanlines, which has nothing to do with the xx but is equally as cool. Check out their Myspace, where they’re friends with another UK prodigy, Micachu!
Best tracks: VCR, Crystalised, Islands, Basic Space, Heart Skipped A Beat
Sep
24
Why haven’t I posted this before? Four or five of my absolute top artists over the past few months are not up here, so with this, I shall start to change that. This is Bibio, who was originally discovered by Boards of Canada members, intrigued by his inventively pastoral electronic music composed of intricate webs of guitar string samples. Well for this album, and his move to Warp (home to BoC), he shook things up a bit and threw a hip-hop style a la Prefuse 73, but it’s more downtempo with thick beats and so much better. The title for the album is pretty indicative of his sound, and maybe how he sees his position in his career, although this is certainly a strong statement, whether he had anticipated it or not. I’m sure it will make it onto some Best Of lists this year. You just have to listen and hear for yourself; it’s hard to resist.
Sep
24
OK so this summer was the summer of synthpop on all corners. A lot of pop songstresses too - La Roux, Ladyhawke, Marina and the Diamonds, Sally Shapiro, and this one, Little Boots. Now her singles and remixes got a lot of play, but then this synthpopsongstress thing started to become a THING, so in an effort not to be too hip/unhip, when the album came out it was generally shoved aside as a synthpopsongstress opportunity strikes album. This is a mistake. It is quite excellent - the synths are beautiful, and her voice matches perfectly, both lyrically and aesthetically. It is a fun album. I wish hype wasn’t a thing that killed legitimate artists, but alas. Great songs include: New In Town, Stuck on Repeat, Remedy, Meddle, Tune Into My Heart.
Sep
23
Sep
23
Arctic Monkeys made a third album. It’s more stoner-rocky. They’re not derivative or washed up. Yay! MORE ARCTIC MONKEYS!
Saw them at a few festivals this summer and they are always really fun live. This album won’t change music or your world, but it’s good confirmation that they weren’t just hype and they’re probably here to stay.
Sep
19
Another awesome release from Ghostly. Lusine, (previously Lusine ICL), or Jeff McIlwain is an ambient/IDM composer from Texas who has put out releases on Hymen and Isophlux in addition to Ghostly. His style typically ranges from anywhere from subtle and textural ambient to minimal, glitch, and softly serrated IDM. Here, he has refined his sound so it is crisper and snappier for a wider musical audience that has become much more accustomed to the addition of brightly popping electronic beats from IDM and hip-hop. I would venture to guess that if he, as Moby did with his first album, agreed to license out all of the songs on this album for commercial purposes, they would probably all be grabbed quickly and he would make a fortune. I don’t really know what that means, but I still really enjoy the album and think you will too. After the first listen to either Operation Costs, Two Dots, or Gravity, you will hear it’s clearly the result of careful, deliberate composition and polish.
Sep
19
This is awesomely danceable, cheesy French electrohouse by one of the original masters, David Guetta. It’s awesome this album has gotten so commercial and it probably sticks out like a sore thumb on this site, but I’ve been so into “When Love Takes Over” ever since I first heard it two months ago. Then, driving in the car with a friend, I found myself strangely loving a new Black Eyed Peas song (?!?!) called I Gotta Feeling. Turns out it’s produced by Guetta. If this is the direction pop music is going, I’m all for it; at least it’s something danceable, and boy are the lyrics fun. I don’t know whether I should like the song “Sexy Bitch” as much as I do, but the lyric “She is nothing like a girl you’ve ever seen before, nothing you can compare to your neighborhood hoe/I’m trying find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful [Damn, girl!]/Damn You’s a sexy bitch, a sexy bitch…” well, I wonder if it’s kind of brilliant.
This album is fun, in part because it reminds me of summer, as I saw him at Electric Zoo at the tail end of one of my craziest summers ever. You will probably enjoy When Love Takes Over, Gettin’ Over, Sexy Bitch, I Gotta Feeling, I Want To Go Crazy. just don’t think too hard :)
Sep
16
UPDATE: Link is now 320 kbps version.
Oh also this little gem came out. A lot of hardcore noise enthusiasts (who probably never really liked/appreciated Fuck Buttons in the first place) will disregard this record as Fuck Buttons’ descent into the maelstrom of dance electronic acts that exists in hipster music culture today. This is due in part to the presence of producer Andrew Weatherall, a noted electronic dance music producer with roots in 90s techno such as Orbital, and his own IDM band Two Lone Swordsmen. So, out is previous producer John Cumming (Mogwai) and with him the industrial, tribal beats of their gently harmonious noise. In is the earsplittingly intense anthemic dance manifestos. Their new producer is a prominent but welcome addition to what could otherwise have been vapid reduction of the best (and worst) of American noise over the past years. They were never supposed to be Yellow Swans.
This is an awesome album. With song titles such as Surf Solar, Space Mountain, and Flight of the Feathered Serpent, and electronic beats to match perfectly, they must have been on a lot of drugs between the Street Horrrsing tour and the recording of this and my guess is that those drugs were ecstasy pills. [Don't do ecstasy pills they are dangerous]
Sep
16
This dude has been making the bloggy rounds which is how I heard of him, and for good reason. A Londoner who’s been on people much cooler than me’s radar for a while after several remixes for prominent artists such as Little Boots, Simian Mobile Disco, and Telepathe, his solo project is a perfect reconciliation of his varied musical styles on remixes. He makes really great, danceable or chillable electronic music with awesome cut up beats and samples. It sounds like if Four Tet were cooler and less ecstatically weird. I really enjoy it, I think you will too if you like Flying Lotus or any kind of electronic music with a slight beat at times.
Sep
16
I think the FACT Magazine review of this should suffice as a description: Something Asa Breed-style Matthew Dear would make after a 10 year addiction to downers.
This is a hauntingly minimal, post-dance meditation on the aftermath by Canadian Jeremy Shaw. It’ll make you just sit and think, but when you get up you still won’t be able to get it out of your head.
This album is so grotesquely understated it’ll make you silently scream.
and also the cover’s in 3d, apparently.
Sep
13
Yes, it’s here. Yes, it’s awesome. New album from what I consider to be the best post rock band in the world. Some may disagree, if so whatever just put it in the comments.
Here’s the official press sheet on it. It’s pretty accurate and informative.
The sixth full-length from Do Make Say Think defiantly features four long-form tracks, three of which clock in at over 10 minutes, and all of which trace the inimitable musical arcs that have made this band justly celebrated for their unique sonic palette and vibrant distillation of compositional forms and influences into some of the past decade’s most consistently rich and rewarding instrumental rock.
Bucking the trend towards diminishing attention spans, immediate gratification, snappy digital singles and things that go ‘pop’ right out of the gate, DMST admirably stick to their roots and allow the vines that spring from their fertile musical garden to wind, curl and climb for as long as required. More than ever, the players keep their heads down, creating wonderful multi-movement instrumental works (with the occasional mantric or wordless vocal passage, courtesy guest singers The Akron Family and Lullabye Arkestra), overflowing with attention to tone and timbre, animated by unfussy yet ornate harmony, melody and polyrhythm, shot through with ineffable soul. The four songs on Other Truths are vintage Do Make Say Think, and the album represents the first time since the band’s debut (recorded over a dozen years ago) that they have found themselves with an entire collection of songs that unfold so organically over long duration. As testament to the unfettered evolution of these tunes, the band has titled them simply “Do”, “Make”, “Say” and “Think”.
Do Make Say Think has always managed to gather, balance and synthesise various poles simultaneously – ragged/precise, dirty/clean, atmospheric/ stratospheric – forging sonic narratives that combine broad strokes and clusters of detail. Perhaps more than their overtly ‘post-modern’ commingling of various musical genres (psych, jazz, dub, folk) this less conspicuous, indefinable ability to maintain such a consistently enthralling fusion of instincts is the true mark of the band, yielding a music that sounds and feels so unforced, natural and human. Certainly a key part of this unquantifiable equation is the band’s self-production, which has shaped their sound from the beginning, and grown along with it. Led by Ohad Benchetrit and his home studio Th’ Schvitz in Toronto, along with Charles Spearin and Justin Small, DMST has developed a canny and novel toolbox of recording and mixing techniques that contributes significantly to their sonic identity.
Ultimately it is tricky to distill what has made DMST so compelling to so many critics and fans over their 13-year history, but inarguably something beyond the sum of its parts has always sparkled through their music, an amalgam of many elements that seem present all at once, on every song and through every album: cerebral, emotional, atmospheric, visceral, cosmic, pastoral, synthetic, organic, meditative, ecstatic. Other Truths rallies them all once again, in new and dynamic ways, bearing the distinct imprint of the band’s sound – a brilliant addition to the band’s canon.
Yep, it’s beautiful. Be sure to check them out (in Europe and US) when they tour with Years, Ohad Benechetrit’s solo project, and The Happiness Project, Charles Spearin’s experimental voice/sound/orchestral collage project.
