The Homophones - "Everyone's Dead" I found this track in an email from a certain promo company whose emails I never read, and I only took a double-take because the innocuous words "gay zombie" were flashing in the subject line. Some great advertising there. I was curious. I'll admit it. "Everyone's Dead" is a simple, retro-minded, acoustic guitar pop song that I think is pretty catchy, in a quirky-on-purpose "I love death!" sorta way. FYI, there's some really embarrassingly bad sexual metaphors here-- ex. "I want to lick your [...]
I started a new job last week, and I'm way behind on my blog reading, so here's me trying to catch up like usual. Mr. Chop - "Zoid" "Zoid" is about as dark and sinister a mood piece as you can get, with droning synths sorta like Thomas Bangalter's "Paris by Night" , but with the beat moving double-time. ( via ) Speaking of things dark and sinister, Blaqstarr and M.I.A 's cover of "Way Down in the Hole" is an exciting bit of bleak and [...]
Tunde the Western Nightingale & His Band Volume 1: The Original 'Owa Nbe' Sound SIDE I Iwa Rere Miki Miki Bolaji Thomas Sholariwo Presidan Bayo Salami Eni Leti Ko Gbo SIDE II Jimmy Dabosa Ade Johnson Oba Ikorodu Ojo Toro To Paje Oju To Lojo My Juju The sound quality leaves something to be desired, but this Tunde Nightingale record is all I've been listening to for the past week. I [...]
La Roux - "Fascination" ( via ) " La Roux " sings like she has a frog in her throat, but this song still ends up being pretty great in my mind. She's clearly exhausting her voice to do things it was not designed to do, powering (sort of) through the song, breathlessly hanging on to notes outside of her range. The results are somewhere between cathartic and painful sounding, both glorious and tragic--it feels like a triumph of sorts that she manages to lay down the vocal without her voice shattering. [...]
Circlesquare - "Dancers (Radio Edit)" from upcoming album, Songs About Dancing And Drugs Tres Demented - "Brainfreeze (Edit)" from Carl Craig's Sessions (2008) !K7 are offering a free sampler with some great new and older tunes. Head over here to check it out. (You have to subscribe to their mailing list for the download.)
Friendly Fires feat. Au Revoir Simone - "Paris (Aeroplane Remix)" and "Paris (Aeroplane Remix) (Edit)" Aeroplane , the guys responsible for no-doubt-in-my-mind one of the best songs of 2008 , recently hit the internet with this pretty stellar remix. Honestly, I don't quite get their reasoning for tacking on 3.5 minutes of robot synth to the track, but the first half of the remix is pure gold. I've taken the liberty of making myself a quick edit [...]
Matthew Herbert Big Band - "The Story" >> www.matthewherbertbigband.com
Al Green - "Gotta Find a New World" via passion of the weiss "Gotta Find a New World" is from one of Al Green 's earliest albums, Green Is Blues (1969). The track's about 2 minutes long with a 30-second spoken word intro, making its real length just a short minute and a half. Yes, the guy mixing the album was clearly a fool. Fading out a great song like this after only 1.5 minutes is practically criminal . [...]
previously: Trouble in Dreams, pt 1 It Was a Very Good Year **** Destroyer - "Shooting Rockets (From the Desk of Night's Ape)" "Shooting Rockets" is the ominous centerpiece of Trouble in Dreams , and perhaps its most fascinating moment. This despite the fact that it's the second time Dan Bejar has recorded it. The song also appeared on Swan Lake's Beast Moans (2006) album in a severe, noise-blasted, [...]
Black Milk - "Give the Drummer Sum" ( via )
The Broken West - "Perfect Games" Jim Guthrie - "Difference a Day Makes" Darren Frank - "Teeming With Life" Eulogies - "Two Can Play" The Notwist - "Boneless" The Comas - "Oh God" Think of this as a short mixtape of "great and straight" indie pop--something that I've been listening to less and less these days, but I probably should change that considering how [...]
Iran - "Buddy" / Pitchfork posted this track earlier today at their website. It's pretty sweet. The band's members include TV on the Radio 's Kyp Malone and another dude who sang on Return to Cookie Mountain , and they've already got at least one song better than most of the ones on Dear Science . Check them out .
Destroyer - "My Favourite Year" It's not so much that Trouble in Dreams is a difficult album to understand--it's very easy to understand. (Just in terms of writing, it's probably Destroyer's least lyrically dense album. There are no lengthy, complicated narratives with confusing tangents to follow--the form that a lot of Destroyer material has taken.) It's that it seems that Dan Bejar wants Dreams to be understood purely on an emotional level, and it's pretty much impossible to describe, accurately, an [...]
Destroyer - "Rivers" "Hands tied behind your back. Steel chair giving you shivers. You've always had problems flowing down rivers." Trouble in Dreams strikes me as the perfect title for a Destroyer album--probably the best one Dan Bejar has come up with yet. It's particularly great for his latest album, because with this album, I think he's given over to his intuition more completely than ever before. Judging from the last five Destroyer albums (I've only heard Streethawk: A Seduction [...]
Curumin - "Sambito" ( via )
Ronnie Dyson - "I Don't Wanna Cry" Tonight I've been spinning Ronnie Dyson's 1970 album, (If You Let Me Make Love to You Then) Why Can't I Touch You . It's not an exceptional album, by any means, but it's got it's share of soulful gems. "I Don't Wanna Cry" is the track that I currently have on repeat--immaculate, late 60s soul. Dyson's vocal is pretty much perfect, and recalls the great Otis Redding more than a little bit.
Róisín Murphy - "Slave to Love" / While Google searching for Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music the other day, I came across Murphy's glorious, semi-new cover of "Slave to Love" . The song was featured earlier this year in a Gucci commercial . It's no Blondie and David Lynch tour de force , but still . . . I think anything featuring Róisín Murphy's sultry vocals is worth a peek.
Chuck D says the Canadian border is like the Berlin Wall for rappers--worse than the Berlin Wall, actually: "I experienced having to be searched by cops and dogs coming through western Germany to go back to Berlin, and I'm here to tell you that that seemed more humane." Public Enemy - "Fight the Power" ( via )
These elections are slowly numbing my soul. Bryan Ferry - "Which Way to Turn" Blank Dogs - "Setting Fire to Your House"
aliwood020687 (4 days ago) just so basic its epic DJ Mujava - "Township Funk" / This blog is starting to look like a YouTube channel lately, but I figure if you're going to listen to a track like this, you should probably be dancing or watching other people dancing. ( via ) **** On the subject of music from southern Africa, I would like to nominate "Stoned African Fuzz: The Sound of Zambia" for [...]
A.M. 180
Check Out: d’Eon – “Transparency pt. II”
the Weekender ::: New music from Catcall // the National // Summer Camp
KNIFE PARTY – RAGE VALLEY EP
