queen + 50 cents

good for a chuckle....

minus story

well, might as well throw up a couple of songs form minus story. here is one. one above. very nice stuff.

cat power

i'm lazy/busy as usual... but here is the title song from cat power's upcoming album "The Greatest".

Other things spinning.... tortoise vs. bonnie "prince" billy's album of covers, ester drang, tenement halls, detachment kit, minus story...

ladytron

i was a bit disappointed with ladytron's latest but now i'm over it and i've learned to just relax and enjoy.

chad vangaalen's album isn't too bad either - i like this song: clinically dead.

deerhoof makes me smile: wrong time capsule

airwaves

ah, yet another airwaves is over and what a relief - four days of waiting in lines to get into overcrowded venues. i may have spent more time waiting in the cold than actually listening to music. but then again there wasn't really much to miss - this was probably the least exciting line-up in a while. i was pretty excited about seeing ratatat but that didn't happen - mostly thanks to gus gus who for some inexplicable reason always draw huge crowds of people despite being the fourth most boring band in the world. maybe that says something about icelanders. at any rate since gus gus played right after ratatat there was no hope of getting in. i did, however, manage to catch annie (non-offensive pop but wastly overhyped - it clearly pays to be a blonde), new radio (who proved that playing bad rock music with cellos doesn't make it any better), the zutons (who exceeded my expectations), architecture in helsinki (who managed to live up to my expectations), ampop (slightly better than coldplay but equally unexciting), eberg (who i have been trying to hype but now i think that their album may just have been an happy accident) and some other bands that were neither good nor bad enough to mention. except for ulpa. once again this band saves the day - they are just freakishly good. sort of pre-orchestral flaming lips with the foot firmly planted on the effect pedals. and their new song sounds like a (good) remix of jon spencer but with a touch of greg dulli's swagger. right now they blow every other icelandic band out of the water. (an old song linked above)

hadn't it been for ulpa airwaves gets two thumbs down this time around. & it is the last time i will attend until i'm provided with a good reason - better bands and some certainty that i will won't have to freeze my ass off to catch the bands. besides, once you factor in the price of the alcohol consumed, one might as well just buy a ticket to nyc to see your favorite band instead.

bastard

man, i'm lazy... i must snap out of it soon. i haven't managed to get excited about any new music lately. swervedriver and les savy fav monopolize the ipod at the moment. i'm hoping neon blonde will grow on me - a blood brother's side project - but it hasn't happened yet. hmmm... must be the weather. can't even get excited about the airwaves festival. except maybe about ratatat - and for the fools that skipped calla last year and tv on the radio the year before, this is going to be the show you miss this year and then regret it later.

well, this is a band i would like to see live: part chimp - iron pond
the song is taken from the brilliantly titled album chart pimp. it probably won't sound good on your computer speakers but finally, finally a loud and unruly band that ... i don't know makes me smile and think that at least some people still know how to make a ruckus with their guitars...

... oh, and a song from the detachment kit above - old news but sometimes old news is good news...

albums of the year... i had hoped

i'm willing to bet that i'm not the only one that has been waiting impatiently to hear the new broken social scene album. i guess the album has been officially leaked now that bss feel the need to announce it on their website. so what is the verdict? it's not you forgot it in people. it sounds more chaotic and less poopy. windsurfing nation, (zip file) which any bss fan has heard by now, is a stellar song. in short, it is not the album i dreamed of but neither the album that i feared after seeing them on olympic island this summer. it somehow feels a little loose knit, like the band just had a big party - kinda like the band is having more fun playing than you listening. of course, repeated listening may chance this - great albums are rarely great at first listen. anyhow, the good news is that bss is also releasing a limited edition ep (7 more songs) on the same day as the album... oh joy.

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another album i have been dying to hear is calla's collisions. televise and scavengers are two of the best albums released in the last few years and it is a shame that calla hasn't caught everyone's ear yet. calla apparently thinks so too because collisions strikes a little poppier note than previous releases as hinted at by their (excellent) shows over the last year. unfortunately this comes at a cost - the nice "calla-sound" is almost missing here. previous releases sounded a little dark, a little miserable, and a little mysterious. now the lyrics seem a little to straightforward and the choruses too big. but despite all my complaints the album really is pretty good - it just didn't live up to my, perhaps unreasonable, expectations. if you haven't heard calla before, start with televise though.

it dawned on me
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ah, mf doom... not that one ever needs to wait impatiently for an mf doom release since he releases about 43 albums a year. nevertheless, many have been excited about the pairing of mf doom and dangermouse - the grey album guy. i wasn't too crazy about the grey album - though i did think it was an improvement on the white album, which, honestly, was rubbish. dangermouse's work here sounded a little flat here at first, and perhaps a little derivative of mf doom's production style and you wonder what is the point of a collaboration if you aren't bringing anything new to the mix. but to be fair, the beats grow on you and despite a slight initial disappointment (a theme here?) I now manage to thoroughly like the album - much like it took me a while to get into mm food. it is no madvillainy, of course, but yet another solid mf doom album (the 28th this year, i think).

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just because i have the links handy: Rogue Wave: 10:1
& Of Montreal: requiem for omm2
& the new pornographers: use it
& wolf parade: you are...

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i caught the red sparrowes opening up for zombi and breather resist last night and, well, this band is the shit. they were so good that i just left after they played because there was no way the other bands could compete (and, ok, i was feeling a little sick and tired). their album is strong contender for the album of the year in my book and live they are even better. catch them if you can....

sounds like violence

i can't say i had high expectations of band with a name like sounds like violence. nor the fact that it is on deep elm records. this band just has emo/punk written all over it but thankfully it didn't stop me from checking out the pistol ep. it sure is punky, but with a pop flair, and it might pass for the blood brothers' scandinavian cousins. basically, it is great album for those of us that like their pop with spikes. the band is definately competent though it is not breaking any new ground. the band's singer is, however, the band's biggest selling point. the above song, grow/blow, bears more than a passing resemblance to afghan wigs' early output and is the stand-out track here. if sounds like violence can expand their sound and range in this directions we may be in for a treat. right now, sounds like violence sounds like an interesting proposition - but one wonders where they are headed. they migh settle for a competent pop-punk band but they might also, and hopefully, start living up to their name. now if only they wrote lyrics like dulli.

arpeggios madness

well, there are few things i like more than to bitch about pitchforkmedia. and yes, obviously i wouldn't if i weren't a devote reader. it has become something of a ritual - 9am, coffee, cigarette, pitchforkmedia, and then i can go work. and this, of course, just means that i get annoyed with the smallest things. lately, arpeggios have been bugging me. ever damn review has to mention arpeggios. low arpeggios, floating arpeggios, lithe arpeggios, pretty, jangling arpeggios, dark Rhodes arpeggios, blistering arpeggios, genle folksy arpeggios, jazzy guitar arpeggios, tripping arpeggios, tender ebony-and-ivory arpeggios, and so on and on. the thing is that having read music reviews obsessively for nearly two decades i hardly ever recall coming across the word arpeggios. but apparently arpeggios are the shit now. but i don't know if it is because musicians everywhere all of a sudden realized that they didn't have to strum their chords or the music reviewers just learned a word that sounds polished and cool - and signals that they know more about music then you do. which ultimately is what most music reviewer want to get across. i'm leaning towards the latter. pitchforkmedia is undoubtedly one of the most elitist, snobbish music sites out there. a search on google reveals 122 mentions of arpeggios on pitchforkmedia.com. On rollingstone.com we have 17. need i say more? well, yes. this would seem to support the notion that the music hasn't changed but, well, rolling stone doesn't review exactly the same albums. so i checked out a few other music review sites and here is the ranking.

pitchforkmedia.com 122
adequacy.net 73
stylusmagazine.com 57
popmatters.com 50
rollingstone.com 17
fakejazz.com 8
nme.com 8
junkmedia.org 7
tinymixtapes.com 5
themilkfactory.co.uk 2
spin.com 1

obviously there are differences among the sites in terms of number of reviews, etc. but the picture seems pretty clear and i think the editors of pitchforkmedia should cut down on the arpeggios abuse.

silence kit

after hearing the silence kit's latest album pieonear i sat down to figure out how many russian bands i had heard. and to be honest, tatu was the only one i could recall. so in short i was a little shocked by how good silence kit is. pionear consists of three songs - with an average duration of about 22 minutes - so, yes, it has got post-rock written all over it. it is mostly instrumental, starting out with a sort of cabaresque piano that shortly gives way to an exploding guitar riff that reminds me of radiohead peppered with a dose of kyuss. then we get some more quiet parts on par with mono's prettiest moments and some more loud parts of shredding guitars and strings that sound equally frightening and beautiful. if this does not end up on my list of the very best albums of the year this year will indeed have been amazing.

the song above is in .ogg format (plays, e.g., in winamp). more song, including all of silence kit's self-titled debut, can be found here.

code pie & people for audio

well, i guess there is really no end to the good music coming out of canada! no sooner had i posted my last post than i bump into a couple of more bands that sound great ... and happen to be from montreal. code pie falls somewhere in between do say make think (or is it do make say think... i can never remember) and the arcade fire without sounding too much like either. and i'm not sure that these comparisons are all that appropriate. but if you like either of those bands chances are you will like this. this habit is, well, a very elegant album. there is something very classic about it - the songs remind me of some british indie band from the late eighties (whose name i can't remember) - sort of timeless in that way. definately worth our attention. more songs here.

people for audio, on the other hand, have little to do with pop. again, another montreal band, godspeed...., is the easiest point of reference. but whereas godspeed sort of like their instruments to melt together, people for audio like you to be able to tell the instruments apart although i suspect they want their music to have a similar effect. this is a risky strategy because it is a more 'traditional' approach but most of the time they pull it of. it is also a little jazzy in places, not dissimilar from karate (who apparently have called it quits). check out the title track from and this will be our homecoming. (15MB)

troubled hubble & the most serene republic & wolf parade

it doesn't seem that long ago that i was making fun of my canadian friends (behind their backs of course) for how bad canadian music was. but now the stream of fresh new bands from canada just doesn't seem to stop. at any rate, my suspicion is that canada always had a bunch of good bands around but that noone was listening. and that is probably true about every other country - i've mentioned norway as another example of this before. but at any rate, i'm ready for the backlash to begin - it can't be a long wait for that to happen. especially since some of the stuff is a little like arcade fire - which is not necessarily a bad thing. the most serene republic might fall into this category. but still damn good if you ask me. try content was always my favorite colour. from their debut underwater photographer. troubled hubble has been around for awhile and making beds in a burning house is their 4th album. it is hard to avoid comparisons with modest mouse - but again not thing to be compared to. the song above, ear nose & throat, also sounds a bit like rem but relax, like rem while they were still worth listening to [correction. troubled hubble is from chicago which is not in canada]. finally, wolf parade is probably the most promising of the bunch. they just released an ep on sub pop. they are perhaps a little bit more difficult to pin down. certain songs lend themselves to obvious comparisons with other bands, including some of the above, but what makes them interesting is that their range seems greater. that, of course, may just mean that we'll have to subtract points for lack of consistency. you are a runner.

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other going ons. caught trs-80 last night. great show. on one level the music is hopelessly geeky but then somehow it works and you can't help groove to it. which i guess makes me a geek. also playing were odiorne, which is jimy chamber's new band. chambers was mercury rev's drummer/sometimes singer(?) - on what probably were the best mercury rev albums. sadly, live they were a disaster - partly thanks to a busted speaker which made the vocals sound like slipknot (or how i imagine they sound) and i guess the bassist and keyboardist must suffer from a minority complex because i could hear them all too well - at the cost of only hearing the guitar when i was in the bathroom. odiorne's heavy wish.

other stuff on the stereo. julien neto - pretty, quiet, pretty. pelican - loud, pretty, loud. swervedriver - good, better, best. oxes (new ep) - loud, fast, dangerous. buck 65 - twang, beats,........

abstrakt keal agram

abstrakt keal agram share a label with m83 and you may have heard their remix on one m83's releases. i started out thinking that abstrakt keal agram was sort of an ambient hip hop after listening to clusterville, which was the second album. their last album, bad thriller, released last year makes things more difficult and now i just can't figure out where to file abstrakt keal agram. m83 might be one reference point but you could also imagine these guys enjoying themselves, the postal service and blonde redhead. bad thriller lacks the menacing tone of clusterville but it makes up for it in terms of diversity. never anything less than interesting to listen to and i doubt there are any more successful efforts mix seemingly incompatible genres together.

abstrakt keal agram's hell mix can be found here

icelandic music

by request - an old one - some icelandic stuff. some good, some bad.

jan mayen - the new kids on the indie block. old fashioned indie rock a la, maybe, pavement. nothing too original but, god damnit, some hot tunes. shut up shut down.

mugison - everyone's darling these days. really a cuddly bear that everyone from, well, me to my grandma loves and adore. even if they have never heard his music. he is the perfect anti-anti-star. so down to earth, hailing from a remote village, occasionally brings his father on stage that he should never be a star. but it is exactly that which makes him the biggest star. undeniably talented. i would love to hate him but i can't. i want you.

trabant - along with gus gus (which were actually not that horrible a long long time ago) this band represents almost everything that is wrong with iceland. pretentious pretty much sums it up. and pretty horrid songs. although their shows can be mildly entertaining (which can not be said for gus gus - god, i hate them). nasty boy

eberg - noone seems to know eberg. he released a little popgem a year and half ago that went almost completly unnoticed. one can almost forgive having been a member of spoon (uh, the icelandic spoon - not the really good one). he is a little difficult to listen to at first because he sounds like he has inhaled helium but after a couple of listens it becomes clear it is surely the most innovative pop album released by an icelander (with the possible exception of mugison). single drop from sea

the funerals - i resisted the funerals for a long time. can you blame me? an icelandic (alt-)country band? their album lordy is, however, a pleasant surprise being more reminiscent of bonnie prince billy - of course, a comparison that noone can live upto - than say, uh, more countrish country. stockholm city

mínus - i'll have to give mínus a credit for being pretty tight live. but that is all they get from me. terrible singer, unoriginal songs but yet, for some reason, are billed as the saviors of icelandic rock'n'roll. here comes the night

úlpa - i was completly blown away by these guys the first time i saw them play. they reside somewhere in between flaming lips and radiohead but throw a healthy dose of rock in the mix. i have high hopes for these lads. dinzl

slowblow - slowblow are just a nice band. they sound nice and use all sorts of instruments. which i sometimes wished they didn't b/c the songs themselves get a little buried under the instrumentation. at any rate i do have to admit that i liked their older stuff better - it was both more melodic and edgier somewho. i still suspect that those elements are still there i just find them damn hard to find but in the meantime i'm quite content with the saws and the sewing machines. very slow bossanova

ampop - electronic pop influenced by radiohead. quiet and quite nice. their new material relies less on electronics which in some ways is an improvement because they sound less like radiohead but unfortunately that means they sound more like coldplay. but on the whole quite pleasant and to be fair sometimes they are more post-shoegaze pastoral pop than the aforementioned. worth a listen. a fresh one.

hjalmar - there is something fundamentally wrong about an icelandic reagge band. which is why i avoided them for the longest time and was very surprised when i found out i actually like them. now, this may just be that may taste in music is bad i can't tell. it just seems impossible that something this wrong can be this good. here is a live one.

kimono - is the best band in iceland because they know who polvo are. japanese policeman is from their last album which was good but didn't quite capture their live shows.

some others:
tenderfoot - country
graveslime - 362 days until christmas
skakkamanage - flames of fire
skatar - halldor asgrimsson

the very hush hush

song from the forthcoming album by the very hush hush. fuzzy pop of the best kind. reminds me a little of the much touted clap your hands say yeah but also a little of the russian futurists. the also operate a very hush hush website.

the shortwave set

some more summer music here. some sort of psych pop. what apples in stereo would sound like if they had grown up in london? or st. etienne if they had grown up in north carolina. who cares? great summer pop is all i want at the moment and this does the job. another song can be streamed here.

not so fast

apparently my last post was very well received & i got many congratulations and even more thanks for having given up on the blog. this was, of course, just a ploy to get rid of some of my innumerable readers. and to let the more persistent ones know that i was planning to be even more lazy over the next couple of months than before. anyway here is a song of from art brut's recent release. which i'm having trouble to decide whether i like or not. and here is a bootleg of the same song. maybe some time soon i will try to attempt to explain why i have doubts about art brut. until then you will have to decide for yourself.

urusei yatsura --> project a-ko

i stumbled upon old friends the other day. urusei yatsura are scottish and, well, they sort of sound scottish. their early albums are pavementesque hyper active pop. later on they were less hyper but guitars still sounded nice and some of the slower songs were actually pretty good. at any rate if you liked the delgados' domestique you should study upon yatsura. at any rate, the album i stumbled upon was everybody loves yatsura, which is far from their best effort but this song silver dragon is closest in spirit to their earlier stuff (which i am too lazy to dig up). just take my word for it and do the digging. so, at any rate, yatsura disbanded and three-quarters went on to form project a-ko, which well sounds a lot like yatsura. i believe they have an album in the works and a couple of songs can be found here.

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in other news: i'm bored of blogging. it such a pain now that i have to rely on ftp. + what happened to all the good music. i did catch autolux and the ravonettes the other day. autolux was louder and rougher than on the album which was exactly what i had hoped for. the ravonettes were also louder and rougher than on album but i would never have dreamed of it. i might be forced to give their albums another listen. damn impressive. oh, forgot to go see architecture in helsinki. oopss. the dears played a free show in front of bunch of people of which only about 5,84% were actually listening but the dears did a good job nevertheless.

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and for a goodbye: the best summer song royal trux ever recorded. ridiculously brilliant.

say hi to your mom

say hi to your mom's new album ferocious mops sounds fun. parts postal service and equal parts something weirder makes for a nice combination. the only complaint is perhaps that it isn't always terribly original. but still a fairly solid effort. get another mp3 over here and buy the album while you are at it.

heavy trash

jon spencer joins hands with matt verta-ray (madder rose then speedball baby). sort of the rockabilly explosion. slightly fun. a couple of tunes over here.

russian futurists

i was a pretty big fan of let's get ready to crumble and method of modern love. russian futurists have a pretty unique sound that i can't possibly describe with any sort of... words. well, it is pop. and there are loads of keyboards it sounds like. old ones probably. sounds like someone lost in toy store. i wouldn't be surprised that the russian futurists have listened to the likes of magnetic fields and maybe belle and sebastian. however, our thickness falls short when compared to the futurist's previous affairs. the place to start is undoubtedly but that is not to say that our thickness is not worth a listen or two. & probably a few more than that b/c it will grow on you.

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for the icelanders... nina nastasia is making an instore appearance at smekkleysa this saturday. thanks to helmet for the tip...

minotaur shock

minotaur shock crept in through the backdoor somehow - i had tried to listen to their earlier output but without much success. but there is something very likeable about their forthcoming album. the music fits somewhere along the path that manitoba (now caribou) from electronics to, erm, pop. some sort of electronic pastoral pop. other bands that come to mind are daedelus and boards of canada. the first single, vigo bay, also reminds me of the ratatat's retroizing of hip hop. and daft punk - while i used to like them. another great summer tune. the album is a bit uneven but at the very least it is inventive and considering i wasn't willing to cut this band a lot of slack it is a pleasant pleasant surprise.

supersystem

supersystem used to be el guapo and pitchforkmedia doesn't like them very much. now, i haven't heard their album but if it sounds anything like this it should at least be fun. actually, reading the review for their album nothing comes as much to my mind as another system, that is, the lcd soundsystem. i reckon supersystem's mistake was not to call themselves tft supersystem. at any rate, i prefer super to sound.

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nifty new feature today as well - just look above. it's an mp3 player! press start and here some tunes.... all stuff freely available on the web. listen and then buy lots and lots of albums.

madvillain vs. four tet

i don't know what genius thought of this but that genius deserves a prize. four tet remixing madvillain. no, it doesn't sound that exciting but some of the tracks here are absolutely fab!

fiery furnaces and the summer

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my summer really started when i heard this song - never mind that it has yet to reach 10 degrees. there is just something about this songs that makes me feel like it is summer. & it is not just that it has the word summer in its title. it is the sound of summer. & hopefully it will be this good.

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what else.... remember to check out ghostdogjr on www.webjay.org. i throw new stuff in there once in a while but, well, you may have to dig to find it.... perfect substitute for your radio...

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spinning (& liking): the evens (ian from fugazi and friend), jaga jazzist, alias, colleen, architecture in helsinki, russian futurists, and boy least likely to, brazilian girls, electrelane

gypsy punk ii - venetian snares

altoghether sort of gypsy punk going on here. venetian snares is best (un)known for his frantic drum'n'bass or drill'n'bass or whatyoucallit. well, in short venetian snares have been trying hard to make music that you can barely listen to - not because it is bad but because it is a bit mindnumbing. the music has always been more interesting than enjoyable. his latest album, Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett, changes all that. though it has it shares of frantic beats it combines it with more traditional instruments - all sort of gypsy sounding. in places the album recalls portishead, in others aphex twin's flirtations with classical music. it also reminds me a bit of amon tobin's live set (last summer) which incorporated some fantastic violin samples. venetian snares weaves the electronic and accoustic sounds together with the same skill that amon tobin does. normally i turn away from a venetian snare's cd waiting for my headache to subside, this time i am waiting to hear what he does next.

gypsy punk i - gogol bordello

i don't really know anything about these guys except that they were generating some buzz with their live shows last summer and that they have a new album out east infection. and well, they sound like a lot of fun. mala vida is a cover of manu chao and, well, it doesn't sound worse than the original. the album is available over at itunes and and some more songs are available at: http://www.gogolbordello.com/

single frame ii

i completely sold myself on single frame and had to go back and listen to their old album wetheads come running. it is about 10 times better than i remembered. and not as much keyboards as i remembered. brilliant.

single frame

single frame released a quite brilliant little album a few years back that sounded a little like pavement with loads and loads of fun keyboards (and some guitars). only much better. (and by the way, i must admit that i was wrong about malkmus - his new one is quite good actually - especially when compare to his post-pavement output). anyhow single frame's new one body/end\basement basically say goodbye to the melodies and produce an electro-creepy album. can't help but think of brainiac's last and, as always, brilliant ep but sometimes the music is more funky a la the faint. the link to the video above is a good example of that side of the band - which may even outfaint the faint. but somehow i still keep expecting single frame to do even greater things - this is not the great album i was hoping for but it certainly surprised me, which can only be a good thing. but this is a killer song.

manta ray

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just got back from spain, hence my inactivity here, where i managed to discover some new spanish music. I guess manta ray hails from madrid. the music is a bit difficult to classify. there are definately some post-punky math-rocky leanings here but it is also a little bit emo (not yucky dashboard but more in the vain of that band that released birch - my memory fails me). and then there is a touch of jamc-type rock (pre-shoegaze rock?!?) to it. yeah, i make no sense but the album is quite nice. so there you have it.

wasting time i don't have

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forgot to get you friend a birthday present? no problem, go here and print out the calendar.

seona dancing

it appears that ricky gervaise from the office was in a band in the early eighties, made it onto the pages of the NME, and finally had a hit in the phillipines after they the broke up. although under the name fade - supposedly because the radio station that 'discovered' the song didn't want its rival stations picking it up. no mention of the freelove freeway though... more details all over the internet...

i also happened to catch the first episode of the american version of the office. clearly they opted for copying the original almost right down the facial expressions (with a little americanized dialogue) but the result is just a disaster. and my expectations weren't high to begin with.

red sparowes

i recommend that you give this album a couple listens before you head over to the red sparowes' website. i certainly hope some silly PR person put that together and not the band because it reeks of pretentiousness. sure, the website correctly notes that the album is stunningly beautiful - only it takes about hundred words to say so. it puts you a little off. but i can't help it but forgive them that. the music. well, post-shoegazing, post-rock. the obvious comparisons are probably mono (which i apparently have to mention in every post) and mogwai but in some ways a little bit more muscular overall, which is countered with some great use of slide guitar. something about the music also calls to mind stoner rock a la kyuss or perhaps the god machine (which may not really belong in that category). stunning.

a couple of songs are also available on the band's website (but don't tell me i didn't warn you).

british sea power

i was a little disappointed when i first heard bsp's new album open season. gone were the noisy, almost irritating guitars and instead it all appears rather polished and, honestly, rather boring. even so, just like its predecessor the decline of the british sea power, open season improves with each listen as the melodies sink in. but the faint traces of echo and the bunnymen that were buried under the "chaos" (ok, far from black dice but relatively speaking) appear very clearly here. at other times i am reminded (again) of the kitchens of distinction and the suede. distinguishly less original sounding than their debut but pretty solid, intellectual pop (as we used to call it back in the day).

mono vs. eluvium

dreams somtimes come true i guess. finally got to see mono this past weekend - in short: every bit as good as the records. and if you haven't given them a chance this is your final warning. give them a few spins and you may even decide that they out-mogwai mogwai and rub shoulders with godspeed. eluvium opened up and, well, caught me by surprise b/c i hadn't really thought that much of his album, which admittedly isn't the kind of music that you like the instant you hear it. but with a backdrop of a very nice and bit edward gorey-like animation it was well, just very enjoyable.

however, the show made me rethink my position that free shows are bad. now i also think cheap shows are bad too. shows should really be ridiculously expensive. how f**king annoying can people be? why do people go to show if they are too busy talking? and for some reason they always seem to be standing behind me. if not them, it is the guy who insists on singing along with the band - often in some sort of a falsetto. remember the shooting at the dimebag show in december? bet that guy just went nuts just because the people behind him were talking. anyhow, expensive shows might keep the people that aren't really interested in the music away.

thunderbirds are now!

i once spent a year in east lansing, michigan. not really a place that has a lot going for itself (unless you like american football or basketball). the whole year the theaters only showed one foreign movie (amores peros). one of the few things keeping me sane were these guys that had shows in the basement. anyhow, if i'm not mistaken i caught the thunderbirds are now! there once. and i was fairly impressed. and i'm probably more impressed by their new cd justamustache. basically new wavy power pop with some nice twists. locate them somewhere in between hot hot heat (just to avoid confusion - i did like hhh. not sure about the new one though) and les savy fav. i've also heard people mention brainiac but noone can really touch brainiac. anyway, hell of a lot of fun.

bellafea

bellafea is a duo that hails from north carolina. they just released an ep "family tree" that is, well, quite excellent. listening to thorn bird one can't help but think "hey, they've listened to blonde redhead" (which, really, can only be a compliment) but then they take the song in different directions and, well, pretty quiet directions at that. i look forward to hearing more.

jeff hanson

awfully busy these days. anyhow, jeff hanson's first album son sort of kept under the radar, which was very unfortunate for those who missed it. simply excellent stuff that sounds a bit like elliot smith if elliot had sung like a girl. no, jeff is not a girl. his new self-titled album treads much the same water as his previous effort but is perhaps slightly less poppy. perfect music for sunday mornings and thursday afternoons. highly recommended.

other stuff sticking to my cd player. the norwegian shining. on the label rune grammofon that is single handedly saving norway from the bottom seat on the list of interesting countries. the shining really can't be described without making them sound awful - words like prog, fusion, etc. pop up in my head so it was with great trepidation that i pressed that play button. but hot damn, did this stuff blow my mind! definately not the stuff i listen to normally but this one won me over. rune grammofon also deserve for their covers, see some here: http://www.boomkat.com/promotion.cfm?id=2. then there is red sparowes. another surprise. contains members of neurosis, isis and, uh, some other band. if you like mono, or mogwai, then this is something you must check out. stunningly beautiful and loud.

oxes

i hadn't listened to the oxes in a while. so i did. i still love them. and then i also have a soft spot for red martian. though they sound nothing like the oxes.

pony up!

yet another montreal band. this one actually counts as its member my former hair stylist - i guess that is my brush with fame! [pun not intended at first but i'm leaving it like this]. anyhow, quite nice. jangly guitar pop probably goes a far way to describe the bands. at any rate, their s-t ep is promising - except for an apparently unhealthy obsession with matthew modine, which is really the only blemish on the 7 song ep. above, great pop fun. check out their website: http://www.ponyup.ca/

les georges leningrad

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i never liked the name of this band - i was expecting some sort of russian folk punk or something (which actually sounds kinda fun) - so i never checked them out. that was probably a mistake. but not my only one so i'm not going to feel too bad about it. oh, well. this is of their sur les traces de black eskimo. they call it post-punk electro but in the end is sounds a little industrial - but with a sense of humour.

the talk

i quite like this. from the album like magic in reverse that is out in about a month or so on the north carolina's moRisen label. something to look forward to if the rest of the album sounds like this.

j & lou

who would have thought? dinosaur jr. is reuniting for a few shows. i'm not sure how i feel about that. but then again dinosaur jr. always just sounded like one long guitar solo live and you would never have guessed how great their albums were from seeing them live. at any rate, this should keep lou from releasing more crap for a little while. here is one of their best.

mary timony

well, well, mary timony (and her ex-outfit helium) seemed always a little underrated to me. and any polvo fan that hasn't checked helium out should be ashamed of themselves b/c of ash bowie's role. anyhow, mary has a new album coming out soon and although bowie is absent we should be in for a treat nevertheless.

kitchens of distinction

the first time i heard interpol on the radio i thought "cool, they are playing the kitchens of distinction." digging out my kitchens' albums and listening again to them after years of gathering dust of course makes plain that i must have been drunk. yet, there are certainly strong similarities in place. i guess the kitchens were lodged somewhere between shoegazing and the wedding present and, yes, their music hasn't aged terribly well - mostly thanks to the sound on the albums, which seems a bit thin. however, it is somehow easy to imagine how the albums would sound if they were recorded today - they would sound a bit like interpol! above, a sample from their love is hell album and here one from strange free world.

is this funny?

remember veruca salt? sort of weezer for the boys. decent fun, anyhow. then nina gordon left the band (she was the cuter one!) and started a solo career. the results were so horrible that you have probably never heard any of her stuff. i mean really horrible. anyhow, when i saw that she had done a cover of N.W.A. I thought maybe she had snapped out of it, stopped making whiny crap and would perhaps deliver something interesting. instead, it sounds like this. this is so incredibly bad. i can not believe how bad it is. it makes me laugh. but it also makes me a bit nauseous. therefore i had to post it. for nina's sake i hope that ice cube never hears this. but then again, i don't really care.

calla et al

what else is new. well, calla is preparing a new album - first taste over at www.callamusic.com. not disagreeable at all. caribou has been spinning but not scoring the points that manitoba managed to get. 13+god, the collaboration of themselves and notwist, is a little disappointing - each band is, well, absolutely fabuous (esp. notwist) but thinks don't really click here. the queens of the stone age, which i secretly love, aren't doing it for me either. the best track already appear on the desert sessions 124-125. still fun though. thee silver mount zion.... have been singing too much. british sea power is overpolished. hell, everything just seems crap these days.

lucky pierre

how did i miss this? arab strap's moffat has a side project! and touchpool is his second album. my, my! arab strap never really sounded like the very up to speed with technology with their simple drum programming but apparently moffat has a few tricks up his sleeve. lucky pierre is electronic, slightly cinematic perhaps. pretty pleasant.

enon

one of my big regrets in life is never to have seen brainiac live. sigh. it was a brilliant band and if you haven't checked them out you should. john schmersal formed enon after brainiac disappear from our sight after releasing an album under the name john stuart mill in between. jsm was in some ways a big departure from brainiac being almost acoustic but enon at first represented a return to a territority not dissimilar from brainiac. then enon took a different turn. and then several more. anyhow, lost marbles and exploded evidence is a collection of b-sides and other stuff that enon has released over the years. some of it is brilliant some of it not so much so. but then it is fun and inventive. the sample sort of represents pieces of both with the schmersal "part" of the song sounding very much like the direction brainiac was heading in towards the end.

webjay

improved services by ghostdogjr -- on the right hand side you should be able to find a new link to webjay followed by a few tracks. click the link and you will be transported to ghostdogjr's webjay page where you can listen to the playlist that has been set up there -- sort of like radio ghostdogjr.... the songs are a mix of the old and the new for now but do not include the samples I throw on this page. and if you get bored with me you can always find other good music on webjay.org. also, i would appreciate a comment if you try it out and like it - or dislike it.

kristen

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i caught kristen opening up for deerhof in berlin over a year ago and, well, i was truely impressed by them - and not only because it was the first polish indie band i've heard. live their sound was a bit polvoesque - i couldn't honestly say that i liked all their songs but the good ones were really damn good. on record they sound quite different - somewhere between the jazzy leanings of karate and, well, sort of the tortoise/chicago sound. really damn nice actually.

intransitive preferences, iia, or extreme preference change?

again pitchforkmedia is the subject - they just published there best albums 2000-2004. and you may recall that not to long ago they published their top 50 for 2004. interestingly enough arcade fire - funeral was choosen the best of the rest in 2004. Yet it only makes it to no. 45 in the period 2000-2004. so was 2004 such a bad year in music compared to the previous four? well, not really according to the results: no. 9 animal collective - sung tongs, no. 13 madvillain - madvillainy, no. 18 devandra banhart - rejoicing in the Hands, no. 25 brian wilson - smile (sic!), no. 36 the streets - a grand don't come for free, no. 37 ghostface - the pretty toney album, and no. 40 the fiery furnaces - blueberry boat. obviously there is some inconsistency here. or did pitchforkmedia happen to change its preferences so radically over the course of a month or so? a more likely explanation are the rules used to come up with the ranking - i.e. the may not guarantee transitivity (if A is better than B, B is better than C, then A must be better than C) or perhaps it just fails on the independence of irrelevant alternatives (like when the presence of Ralph Nader determines the outcome of what is really a contest between Gore and Bush in 2000 - maybe?). at any rate, although i don't disagree a whole lot with the list, this just goes to show that lists like these are rather meaningless and we can all just relax....

bossa nova part II

Nouvelle Vague - st

somewhere I read that nouvelle vague is french for bossa nova (portugese) and new wave (english). so, if camping's flirt with bossa nova seemed like destined for failure then nouvelle vagues' album seemed doubly so. basically, this is an album of bossa nova covers of joy division, pil, the clash, dead kennedys, the sisters of mercy, the cure, and others. basically songs that don't really lend themselves to the treatment they receive here in an obvious way. naturally, the results are a little mixed but overall it is an inspired effort and the successes (or not) are not where you expect to find them. e.g, the depeche mode doesn't quite work as well as it should while the cover of love will tear us apart works pretty well, perhaps because the band avoids giving too straight of a reading of the song. perhaps the biggest surprise is too drunk to fuck, which has never sounded as intoxicatingly fun. the greatest asset of this album is that it doesn't succumb to thinking of itself as a "fun bossa nova project" but attempts instead to focus on what it was that made many of these songs so great to begin with while offering a different interpretation.

bossa nova time part I

Camping - Suburban Shore

well, not your grandma's bossa nova really. for one thing the singer sings in german, which admittedly doesn't seem right ... although it ends up sounding quite right. the rest of the trio has also released cds under the name chessie sounding more like m83's kind of shoegazing and occasionally that sounds creeps through the bossa nova. a combination somehow unlikely to succeed (on so many levels) but nevertheless the trio pulls it off effortlessly and beautifully.

silkworm - cotton girl (acoustic)

i just rediscovered this song. an acoustic cover of their own - insanely brilliant and much better than the original electric version.

sage frances

oh, and check a couple of sage's tunes out at syrdurrjomi.blogspot.com. His new one is not bad at all - not that one would have expected that from his previous albums with or with-out the non-prophets.

what's spinnin'

well that damn list has prevented to post anything else for a while. so it looks like the year starts with a whimper and not a band. disappointing releases all over the place. bright eyes' albums were subpar - although there are some good songs inbetween. trail of dead was likewise a huge disappointment as i have mentioned earlier. and now, lou barlow emerges with a album so boring that it hurts. i think somewhere along the road i just completely lost my patience for lou. yeps, sebadoh was great but the more i think about it, lou's whining was the least attractive bit of the equation. and, of course, i don't like the way he holds his bass. but all is not lost, amon tobin's soundtrack (game not movie) is pretty "nice" - "nice" because it is kinda nightmarish and scary. not his most brilliant but damn it actually makes me want to get the game it was written for. prefuse 73's new album is also promising and includes contributions from almost anyone who is worth anything - including my what's-her-name in blonde redhead. busdriver also has a new album that sounds quite interesting as well. and finally, cloud cult released an album last year that was, well, interesting. earthy types these guys i'll tell you. i don't like the earthy types but the songs don't appear to be too recycled. check 'em out here. and here

at last at last

that took a while. and i certainly regret it. and now i have decided lists are stupid and serve no purpose except to upset people. i came to this realization reading pitchforkmedia's top 100 singles 2000-2004 (as well after spending lots of time tracking down their top 50 singles of 2004). this must be some sort of an in-joke, right? justin and britney in the top 20? lcd soundsystem with two entries in the top 20? are there different standards for singles? or do none of the "regular" people release single anymore? or is pitchfork the new rolling stones? counter-revolution please!

one

Blood Brothers - Crimes

i guess this album represented a little change of pace for the blood brothers. there is a little new wave feel there i guess - at least that's what i thought when i first listened to the album but i can't really hear it anymore. now it just sounds like frantic screaming and wailing. well, not exactly, the music is actually quite "nice" and the two vocalists really make my day. but most importantly it all comes together in a solid whole. although this album is just mountains of fun i can't somtimes help notice it because i get too impressed with how the vocals and the instruments fit together. at any rate, certainly not the prettiest of this bunch but it is worth testing your patience with.

two

Madvillain - Madvillainy

well yeah, it should be apparent that i'm a sucker for mf doom. this album is just so brilliantly inventive that i have no words to describe it. and i'm not going to try. hip hop's biggest leap forward since public enemy.

three

Detachment Kit - Of this blood

the album starts of like the decemberists then kicks into gear with a song better than anything trail of the dead aspired to (ok, i'm pissed at the trail for their lame new album) before visiting the world brainiac left vacant a few years back. and then we get the prettiest song released last year. this band is just fucking amazing - most bands are content with sticking with one genre and doing it decently. not here. this band is also responsible for the best show i caught last year. devastating. how can i choose just one song? another one