Tag Archives: new music

Why? Does Alex Love Alopecia

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Hard to say, but I’ll try anyway.
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Why? – Alopecia

Way back in ’03 I came accross Why? (aka Yoni Wolf) after coming accross him via Fog. Over time he and Fog collaborated on Hymie’s Basement then both gradually reinvented themselves from oddball solo artists into band leaders. Now everything has come full circle and Andy Broder (Fog) and Mark Erickson (of Fog’s current band) have collaborated with Why?’s band to produce an utter masterpiece. Much like the excellent album Ditherer Fog put out last year it sees Yoni take his sound and peculiar style and push it to eleven by using the might of a full band and the confidence of a few successful releases behind himself.

I’m very much a lyrics man myself, and Why? does definitely play towards that kind of listener, but also he’s found a way of taking his near monotone delivery and like many of the best rappers taking it as a way of focusing on delivery as well. This is not, in the main, a cheery album, which at least makes it fit with most of his previous work. A good example comes from my favourite track These Few Presidents…

Even though I haven’t seen you in years, yours is a funeral I’d fly to from anywhere

…which gets sung in a laid back breezy style. Looked at in text form the lyrics seem unworkable, but somehow the whole adds much more than you’d imagine. And even if you don’t like the sound of that – check out their cover of Close To Me on their Myspace.

Pagan Wanderer Lu

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Pagan Wanderer Lu’s Live at last.fm is a nicely recorded free introduction to the peculiar musical stylings of Andy Regan. A label mate of Napoleon IIIrd whose In Debt To is not only the CD I nearly snapped in half by stepping on it on my floor this week but also my favourite new British act of last year.

Basically you get a mix of organ sounds, urgent vocals and some odd noises whacked on top. What both he and Napoleon IIIrd do is interesting and doubtlessly they will be compared to Badly Drawn Boy if they make it big in any way. But actually I’d rather they just stick to their lo-fi stylings for now and produce obscure pop of this nature. It’s dead good stuff. If you don’t fancy a whole EP, then grab Our New Hospital Sucks in early radio form from his website.

Pagan Wanderer Lu – The Tree Of Knowledge – Live At Last.fm/Presents

Or get Tree Of Knowledge which has a very repetitive beginning with chants in very schoolyard like style and which has for me the lyric that is a gold standard and hard to beat.

Christians like you are why god invented lions

And there’s the bit that sounds like him taking out the tape and playing it backwards. I dearly hope that’s what he did. Shame, his technology minorly fails him near the end, but I disagree with him, the lad deserves applause.

Can’t wait for the album…

Kelpe, Kelpe please!

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[myspace]

Rather glad to come home earlier this week to find the new Kelpe album Ex-Aquarium had popped through the letterbox. I’ve been listenning to Kelpe rather a lot since coming accross him on the rather lovely DC Recordings compilation Death Before Distemper, where his Quick Broken Harp is two minutes of evil glitchy electronic genius. There aren’t many modern electronica tracks which are both excellent and make for a disconcerting and brilliant ring tone.

This led me on to his first album Sea Inside Body which proved to be my favourite bath time listenning of 2007. Age Sculpture and Age Concerns are easily the highlights of the album with some glitchy genius underscoring the disorienting nature of growing up as remarked upon by a number of samples from documentaries on young ladies. And it sounds a lot better than I just made it sound, honest. What Kelpe seems very hooked on in these tracks and most of his work is playing about with sounds that are noticeably imperfect, be they slightly off-key melodies that feel very Boards Of Canada like, samples which have been down sampled enough that you can hear the gaps and also an appreciation of “warm” organ sounds. All things I like, basically.

On the new album there is more stuff to harp on about in the shape of Half Broken Harp which is kind of a 12″ extended remix of Quick Broken Harp made to feel much more organic and also to reveal, candidly almost, just how much he’s played about with his harp samples as it builds slowly from a clean sample to the original track after 80 seconds when the beat finally kicks in. In this it’s reminiscent of Venetian Snares, and as a fellow Amigan I’ll note here that both Kelpe and Venetian Snares started their musical heritage on such an instrument/home computer without becoming as shit as Calvin Harris. I won’t attempt to coin a term for a musical genre to ghetto-ise such artists into though.

Kelpe – Shipwreck glue has ping-pong samples in it as well. Another thing I like, well, ever since Susumu Yokota anyway.

So, listen to the new album at the least – it’s rather nice.

Say Yay! to Yeasayer

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Not sure how it’s taken me until now to notice them but I’ve used the last three tracks of my emusic month on Yeasayer’s debut album All Hour Cymbals. It’s really rather good, certainly I now have my first new favourite band of 2008.

All very dreamy and clearly something of a post Beirut band in production at least, this is wordly stuff especially Wait For The Summer, which you may find by hunting around a bit. I wonder what the remainder of the album is like…

Fortunately you too can hear two of those tracks by just going to the band’s website, much as I hate hot-linking (die Torchwood fans!) – I must point you straight at 2080 as the best of the lot to try.

Music of 2007 – My emusic Top 10

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emusic is doing it’s annual poll of users favourite albums of 2007.
I figured it might be nice to share my picks with y’all so here we are.

1 Of Montreal – Hissing Fauna Are You The Destroyer
Full of energy and earnest confessional lyrics, Kevin Barnes takes some outstandingly bleak and poor times and creates possibly the greatest manic album of all time. So many tracks to love, but I think it’s the balls behind having the full twelve minutes of The Past Is A Grotesque Animal sat in the middle of the album as the both it and the band emerge from a chrysalis as the greatest funk band ever. And it has duelling guitars.
2 Spoon – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Spoon + Horns = Supreme. That’s the formula for The Underdog and You Got Yr Cherry Bomb anyway. As ever with Spoon the album is a mix of styles with some really amazing experiments included such as The Ghost Of You Lingers which combines an apparent musical minimalism with their usual lyrical economy.
3 Napoleon IIIrd – In Debt To
Easily both the debut and British album of the year. Caught him first live supporting Fog and I simply can’t fault a lyric like Average is not the best you can do or We’ve got bored of the democratic scene and handed control to celebrities. And all with somewhat oddball instrumentation as well. And yes those lyrics do sound far better sung, naturally.
4 Jens Lekman -Night Falls Over Kortedala
Cor, apparently Jens is now cool with the likes of The Guardian finally lauding him as a minor genius. It’s a brave man who opens his album with a sample popularised by The Avalanches, and it is the continuing enchanting use of samples that makes the album and lets him segue between so many different styles. Also, Sipping On The Sweet Nectar makes me think he should just do an all disco album.
5 Misty s Big Adventure – Funny Times
Someone somewhere reviewed this and said you can’t make songs about requited love using a tuba. Aside from being quite definitively wrong, they need to go and listen to Devotchka and maybe some Mahler. Misty’s have produced a third album of amazing pop, which won’t be popular though they could play up their ska angle and become hip, maybe.
6 A Hawk And A Hacksaw And The Hun Hangár Ensemble – A Hawk And A Hacksaw And The Hun Hangár Ensemble
We all make mistakes every now and then, mine was to fail to and see A Hawk And A Hacksaw And The Hun Hangár Ensemble when they played five minutes walk from my house. Still, I saw them later in the year with Ungar at the helm of his cimbalom. I think Jeremy Barnes takes the folk gypsy music angle and runs with it far better than Beirut, perhaps due to less singing.
7 Super Furry Animals – Hey Venus
To be honest it felt almost like piracy to download SFA from emusic and I’m tempted to pick up the CD in due course. A complete return to form for the Welshmen here, and something that could almost be my favourite album of theirs.
8 They Might Be Giants – The Else
From the moment the Dust Brothers were announced as producing tracks on this album I was looking forward to it, because their remix of Snail Shell – Snail Dust is one of my favourite songs ever. The bass heavy mix was therefore no surprise and I think it’s a great album. And there’s some awesome songs like The Cap’m on here.
9 Peter Bjorn And John – Writer’s Block
Every so often I have a weak moment where I’m in a record store and just end up buying something cos I’ve heard it there, like this. I think Objects Of My Affection is much better than Young Folks though.
10 Beirut – The Flying Club Cup
More lovely Beirut stuff, it’s not as much of bolt from the blue as the first album, naturally. However I can’t get enough of some of his more croony songs like Nantes especially with the thin 70s organ sounds on it.

C30 C60 C90 Go!

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That loveable rogue Soundhog is back again, fresh after dredging up the remainders of the works of The Freelance Hairdresser with a roughly fortnightly series of quicker, less intricate mixes, called The Broadcast Sessions, the latest of which is really a compilation and is also really rather good.

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And as if that wasn’t enough you can seemingly grab most of his Curdler EP on his last.fm page as well. Or if you’ve never heard any of the earlier Radio Soundhog stuff, start with the BBC Wales Session and then try volume 4 (the offshore tapes) and then volume 6 and marvel at the craftsmanship and get ready to mutter “Ben don’t make them like this anymore…” and sigh wistfully in times to come.

Channel M For Misty's Big Adventure

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I’m sure I’ve described Misty’s Big Adventure live a number of times, including the wonders of their dancer Erotic Volvo (who has apparently been named Worst Mascot 2007 by The NME[1]). But anyway thanks to Channel M (for Manchester) bringing us Birmingham’s finest band led by a man named Gareth here’s Misty’s playing Crumpled Up Guy, I Can’t Take The Time Back, The Kids Are Radio Active and The Wising Up Song. If you don’t get Crumpled Up Guy skip to 1:05 and enjoy I Can’t Take The Time Back, possibly the best song to combine talk of time and love since the original version of They Might Be Giants First Kiss.


And if the embed don’t show, click here to see it.

[1] fools, I think I feel old to remember when the NME was worth reading for me.

"Let's go to bed at 9 o'clock in the evening so we will be fresh to serve"

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You may recall me mentioning Napoleon IIIrd in my Fog gig post, well the album is due out next week and there’s a video now! (though I’ve had the album and been listenning to it on and off for months because it was released on emusic months ago[1])


I am full of love for both the song and the video for Napoleon IIIrd – Hit Schmooze For Me and nudge you all henceforth to consider downloading it or buying it or at the very least listening to more of his stuff on myspace.

[1] and yet I’m still buying the CD, not least because I still feel obliged to buy physical copies of any music I like particularly.

"Tired of using technology", you say?

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Then why does the bulk of the song (other than the amusingly terrible lyrics) consist of a C64 loop being pitch shifted up and down (and badly at that!)?


50 Cent AYO Technology feat Justin Timberlake

On the plus side, the instrumental version is a great example of how to integrate chip music into a modern sound. Though for me I’ll still look to the likes of Kelpe and 8bitpeoples for my fix.