Blog: silence is a rhythm two

Remastered Antmusic Part 3 Last year Columbia Records began reissuing the Adam & The Ants back catalogue, starting with the first 3 LPs. The entire process has been guided by Marco Pirroni, guitarist and co-writer for so much of Adam's career. They are beautifully packaged, and all contain a wealth of bonus material. I posted a couple of tunes from Dirk Wears White Sox [...]

I Started A Dance Craze Based On My Anxieties Mark Oliver Everett, AKA Eels is an emotional alchemist - he is an ace at taking human misery and turning it into audio gold. His latest LP is a double disc sackful of woes called Blinking Lights And Other Revelations. It's a fascinating listen, full of scruffy pop gems that are all based on the uunhappy things that have happened in E's life over

Funky Friday With Lyrics Born Today brings a couple of cool hip hop tunes from Lyrics Born . He recently released Same !@#$ Different Day , a set of 8 remixes and five new songs. I'm loving the groove of I Changed My Mind (Stereo MC's Rattlesnake Mix) . The backing track is typically Stereo MC's - repetitive, uptempo, smooth and [...]

A '90s Obscurity Eggstone - a Swedish trio, formed in the late '80s. Their 94` LP Somersualt contains a quirky blend of twee pop (which has been kind of a recurrent theme around here this week), American indie pop (think Pixies), British indie pop (think XTC or Blur) and the kind of softer stuff Kings Of Convenience excel at. The Dog is built on a great set of angular riffs, the chorus is

Loopy Psychedelic Electro Pop Of Montreal - Oslo In The Summertime A crusty, lo-fi hippy hoppy beat coupled with springy, lush electronics. Wonderfully multi-tracked vocals. Funny lyrics about summertime life in Oslo. A chorus that sounds like it's being sung by muppet chickens. A dash of twee pop. It's all of that, and a really fun listen to boot. The rest of the album The Sunlandic Twins is equally entertaining [...]

Chicks On Speed Ditch Electroclash Wax My Anus "Wax My Anus, inspired by Courtney Love, sounds like Macbeth's three witches trying to make a record by the Fall." (The Guardian UK)

You've Got To Hold Your Head Up High New Order have a new LP called Waiting For The Sirens' Call. Reviews have been mixed, though they've tended towards mostly positive. There have been a lot of comparisons to Technique, which is accurate in it's balance between clubby tracks and rock, though Technique remains the better record. I've spent a couple of weeks with Waiting For The Sirens' Call

Funky Friday - Uncle Louie and Snoop I've got a couple of groovy disco tunes for you today. First up is a T.K.Records gem from 1979, Uncle Louie's Full Tilt Boogie. This arrived in my email box this week courtesy of Jockohomo (he has a classic John Foxx era Ultravox tune up for you to grab - go now!), who had just gotten it off a disco news group and thought I might enjoy it. He was

Spooky's Schmoo And Little Bullet (Two) Fancy a bit of prog house, circa '93? Then you're in luck with today's post from Brit duo Spooky's classic album Gargantuan. When you read about this record it's often in comaparison to another prog house classic, Leftfield's Leftism. One thing for sure is that Gargantuan isn't as consistently good as Leftism, which is one of my most favorite electronic

Teapot Tempest Polara are a Minneapolis rock band that is now in it's 11th year of existence. Formed in 1994 by local scenester Ed Ackerson they are a group unafraid to experiment with electronics, straddling the fine line between raging wall-of-sound noise and poptastic melody. Drawing inspiration from Britpop and the shoegazers (and having a singer who reminds me a lot of Roger McGuinn from

Marbles Robert Schneider is best known as the lead singer & song writer in fuzzy, scuzzy, psychedelic twee-pop rockers the Apples In Stereo . Marbles is his solo side project, and he's just released a new LP called Expo . There has been one previous album released - 1997's Pyramid Landing and Other Favorites , which is a compilation of the material he had recorded up to that point. Although I haven't heard that one, a friend [...]

Funky Friday Fink One man band Fink released his LP Fresh Produce on NinjaTune's now defunct ambient imprint Ntone back in 2000. It's a record that actually fits better/belongs among NinjaTune's best known releases - you know, the Coldcuts, the DJ Foods, the Herbalisers. It's a heady brew of beat experimentation, with luscious downtempo and abstract hip hop grooves, jazzy licks and hefty

A Big, Stinky Serving Of (Digitally Remastered) '80s Cheese I was at the record store this week when I saw it on the list of new releases floating around the counter - The Power Station's one and only self titled album, given the remastered reissue treatment, with 7 bonus tracks and a DVD with a few vids and a live performance from SNL. They were a mid '80s "supergroup" that put together two

Do The Whirlwind A few weeks ago I posted an Out Hud song and drew comparisons to the Tom Tom Club. This prompted a reader to inform me that she agreed. She then took the comparison one step further and said she thought that the new Architecture In Helsinki single sounded a lot like them too. Who?! said I (having never heard of them before). Turns out they are an 8 person band from Melbourne,

Control Your Area Nice Nice are guitarist Jason Buehler and percussionist Mark Shirazi. Their speciality is beat-based rock music - free form, abstract and often improvised. They have a new EP called Yesss! coming out June 21st on Audraglint Records (Portland, OR based indie-tronica label, home to releases by Tarwater, Fontanelle, Kid 606 and Charles Atlas). The new EP, in the words of it's

All Things Fixable Indie hip hopper Alias recently released a record called All Things Fixable on his own imprint, Goodwithmoney Recordings. It's a collection of tracks recorded between 2002 and 2004, all of them on CD for the first time. A stop-gap release until his next Anticon release later this year, it's a set of mostly instrumental tunes that combine finely chopped beats, washes of synth

Funky Friday - Time For Change Change were an early '80s r'n'b group based in Italy. The brainchild of Italo-Guadalupean business man Jacques Petrus, they put out four albums of American styled r'n'b. Jacques was not a musician, so he relied heavily on hired studio help to create the music, and relatively unknown American singers provided the vocals. The earliest recordings were helmed by his

An Animated Description Of Mr. Maps The Books are a duo out of NYC, Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong. They have released their third album Lost And Safe on German electronic label Tomlab. I hadn't heard of them until recently when I encountered some of their songs out in the music blogosphere, and, intrigued by the "blipworld, speedblues, country & eastern and post-anything" music (their label's

An '80s Obscurity West India Company were a side project of Blancmange (see my last post for more on them). A collaboration between the duo and Indian songstress Asha Bohsle and percussionist Pandit Dinesh, their sound was synth pop + classic Indian music. I don't think they recorded more than a couple of singles together - I've never seen an album and Google doesn't have much to offer. The 12"

God Ain't In My Kitchen Blancmange - a duo comprised of vocalist Neil Arthur and intrumentalist Stephen Luscombe, part of the early '80s UK synth pop scene. They started out as experimentalists, then embraced a more pop-tastic direction. This led to a handful of clever, catchy, humorous pop songs that mixed synth pop's electronics with organic percussion and guitars. They had instant success