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.