Daniel Ellsworth & The Great Lakes is a great up and coming band that call Nashville their home. Watch the video for "Bleeding Tongue", the opening and stand out track from the band's debut release, Civilized Man which is a nice mixture of Jack White meets Cold War Kids. The video goes all conspiracy theory as the band boards themselves up in a house waiting for the jack boots to kick the door down. Apparently the G-men want to lyrics to the song. The chase is on.
July 4 saw the completion of Christopher Hoffee's forthcoming Atom Orr release Galaxies With Long Yellow Curtains . This time around the candles on the cake are actually sparklers. Stream it below: Hoffee's hymnal baritone simply shrugs with longing, and the only thing keeping us from tossing an embrace around him is the mid-tempo piano riff. For a track that gently upbraids the digital culture, it comes with an interesting declaration of independence : "a new death of a medium is on its way. Bye-bye CD...you kinda sucked anyway." Read that in its proper [...]
For those readers who think electronic music is a racket, you might stop reading now. To wit: Indian Wells , the Italian "tennistronic" outfit, whose roster lists Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe, and Andrè Agassi, among many others. Within ten seconds of album opener "Wimbledon 19803 you'll see what they're up to: tennis ball percussion, commentary samples, well-mannered applause, and a touch of synthesizer for flavor. The title track creates a glitchy net of loops, underspins and volleys. Our favorite service is "Deuce." Slower, murkier, best of three. Game point. Artist [...]
For those of us who think 2012 has been a bit too melodic: Seconds , by Alex Durlak, who curates Standard Form Limited , the record label and printing/binding service. Seconds is the last of a three-part series of improvised guitar, processed in real-time. This grinding, oscillating, twistingly rhythmic composition is simply not for sale. Don't misunderstand: it's available commercially . It's just not for sale. Try also parts one and two of the series: Catalyst on Standard Form's Rural Routes series , and Lowing [...]
You might not think you know who Jesse Harris is but I guarantee that you've heard his work before since he's the one the wrote Norah Jones' breakthrough song "Don't Know Why" . Luckily Harris has hung onto a few songs to take full credit of and release another solo album. You can listen to the first single below as well as watch a video for the retro and hazy "I Won't Wait", which features the vocaling styles of Conor Oberst and Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner. The track was recorded in Zinner studio and [...]
Watch as Big Apple import Tiger Darrow performs the ionized and delirious Sufjan Stevens cut "I Walked" at the Kessler Theater in Dallas, 6/21/12. For those who have already seen the steampunk cello corset , it's no surprise that Darrow opts for strings instead of keys. She manages a tribal-sounding percussion lick by thumping her bow against muted strings, and recreates Stevens' pastel synthesizer lick with a graceful cello loop. A striking cover, and a great introduction for TMIM readers. Artist links: home | twitter | facebook | imdb
A few months ago Desiree wrote about the amazing artist Keaton Henson , describing his music as "a work of deep feeling and not to be taken lightly". I second that sentiment, especially when a video is produced for his tracks. Desiree embedded the video for "Small Hands" and if you haven't seen the video for "You Don't Know How Lucky You Are" then it's a must as well since both are truly heart breaking and will the cause the viewer to be an emotional wreck. Just as I've started to recover from Henson's [...]
Yeasayer is one of those bands that you can always count on. While when most bands announce a new album release my I start getting all sweating wondering whether it's going to be a good one, with Yeasayer I automatically add it onto my top ten list without hearing a single note. Without fail, from what we here in "Henrietta" and now "Longevity" it appears that the Brooklynites have done it again. Listen to the new track below as well as the video vignette that they've created for the track. Yeasayer - [...]
It's not much of a surprise that a Muse song has been selected as the official track for the upcoming 2012 London Olympics Games. Matt Bellamy says that he wrote the song with the Olympics in mind and that it's about "total conviction and pure determination to win". The new inspiring track will be played throughout the Games including when athletes enter the stadium, in the lead up to the medal ceremony and also as the theme for all international TV coverage. The track's opening makes me think that it's about to bust into Eminem's "Lose Yourself" [...]
Yesterday NPR released their Summer Music Preview featuring some great new music from The Avett Brothers as well as some news about the band's follow up to the highly successful 2009 album I and Love and You . The lead off single for the upcoming album titled The Carpenter is a track called "Live and Die" which is a catchy as hell tune that will have you grabbing your closest significant other and swinging your hips. This track will be another radio hit for these guys. There is no official track list yet [...]
There is something unnerving about the idea of eternity, even for inanimate things. Regina Spektor captures this inverted notion of legacy quite deftly in her track "All the Rowboats." A tour through an art collection turns dark - literally and otherwise - as the audience watches the works try to escape: First there's lights out, then there's lock up Masterpieces serving maximum sentences It's their own fault for being timeless The titular craft keeps rowing and rowing, getting nowhere ("they'll keep hanging in their gold frames/ forever"), but: [...]
Zach Condon and company are still riding the high of their successful 2011 release and are making sure that you're not forgetting about them not that we're halfway through 2012. To help bring some attention back to The Rip Tide , the band has teamed up with director Houmam Abdalla for a video to the album's title track. The theme of the video is simple enough with a wondering yacht that finds it's way into what looks like the inside of a lava lamp.
The circle is so complete we can only nod our heads in agreement: while Greg Haines assists an English student ensemble, a composition named Digression forms. Digression, a new thread, a departure from the thesis. One leads to others, and in time the lecturer - using the student work as a first sketch - shapes his own collection of departures, called Digressions . There are passage here so devastatingly beautiful, we find it difficult to move until they pass. Mention of Arvo Pärt is no overstatement: the expansive arrangements, breath-holding stringwork, and metamorphic patience [...]
From Diffrance . Artist links: twitter | facebook | myspace
Much is made of Hiva Oa's fragility and restraint, but more than anything, the various attractions along this route fall under the general heading of "unexpected." The meta-tempo percussive rattle of "Urban" leaves the guitar ballad template out back, scratching at the door with the dog. The lyrical structure of "Ghosts" is brief and genuine. We've written about the EP's opening seconds before - this whitewashed chorus is the sound of inner dissonance, nothing really to do with the external world of instruments or processing - but you could spend days just stuck on the [...]
It's a common refrain at TMIM that interviewing would be a terrific business. Except for the fact that we rely on someone else to give all of the answers. But our dialogue with William Ryan Fritch couldn't have gone any better if we had written it ourselves: "I have a good idea of what the instrumentation for a song will be from the moment I start conceiving a motif. For And The World [Is Still Yawning] , the entire album began from me bowing a three note theme on this old Chinese cymbal I have. [...]
If we've learned anything in nearly four years of obsessive music consumption, it's that names mean things. It's only been two months, so we're still working on the title for Stash , but as for Cock and Swan, that is, cocky and soigne, the meaning is pretty clear. And not necessarily the opposites themselves, but the tension between them . It is too subtle by half, so give it one more full listen than you're accustomed to. Those listeners familiar with their other, more un-unplugged material might dread the hard right turn into brick and mortar. Don't. [...]
James Leyland Kirby, recording as The Caretaker , has recorded one of the strangest and most naggingly beautiful soundtracks in memory. Patience (After Sebald) is filmmaker Grant Gee's tribute to German writer W.G. Sebald, and Kirby's score samples old Franz Schubert records, extracts and exaggerates their natural static, and loops the brief sounds hauntingly, almost compulsively. Here the method is the comment: Kirby has remarked before on the social media age and our tireless efforts at converting everything we are into an electron stream, then uploading all of it to the web for posterity. So let's not [...]
I stumbled on this solo guitar arrangement of Gotye's "Somebody That I Used To Know" last night. No overdubs and Mike Dawes nailed it in just one take. Stunning. artist page | facebook | twitter | guitar tabs
Umm, come again? All is explained at The Huffington Post . Executive summary? Sure: MacCallum and colleagues adapted DarwinTunes to be accessed online by almost 7000 participants who rated each sound loop, played in a random order, on a 5-point scale from "can't stand it" to "love it." In a musical take on survival of the fittest, the highest-scored loops went on to pair up with others and replicate. Each resulting generation was rated again for its appeal. After about 2500 generations of sound loops, what started out as [...]
The Muse In Music
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A Little Something For Everyone At EDC New York
