2003 was a busy year for Doctor Who , the long-running British sci-fi television landmark. With the show dormant for fifteen years and the show's 40th anniversary approaching, various arms of the BBC started up several projects to capitalize on the latent interest. Among the projects planned were a full animated feature to continue the series and a new remix soundtrack called Resistance is Futile . The BBC opened up its vast Doctor Who sound library to a number of artists for the purposes of remixing and reinterpretation, and the full album was to appear in [...]
I've been on a bit of an Eric Fensler kick for the past couple of days. Fensler's the guy who put together those GI Joe PSAs a while back, but he's been doing the twisted videos thing for almost a decade now. Lately he's been doing a couple of music videos for TRS-80, an electronic outfit from Chicago whose latest album, Mystery Crash , relies heavily on the sorts of retro-futuristic synth sounds that would sound perfectly at home played over late-night commercials from the early 80s. [...]
Between their 2001 debut album and 2004's Winds Take No Shape , San Francisco's Call and Response underwent a metamorphosis of sorts. In one end of the black box went Call and Response, Kindercore sweethearts and purveyors of sweet, unabashed twee-pop with a soft spot for cute keyboard noises; out the other end came Call and Response, a decidedly melancholy indie-pop band with a soft spot for minor chords. Exactly what happened in the three years, only the band could tell you. But to shed some light on how that metamorphosis took place, Call and Response put out an [...]
Tomorrow brings the end of an era: Bob Barker, after 35 years as the host of The Price is Right , is finally sailing triumphantly into the seas of retirement. When The Price is Right returns in the fall, it will be with a new, as-yet-unannounced host. Whether the new host will tell us to have our pets spayed or neutered, or whether he'll handle the wave of snot-nosed college students and forty-somethings with garish slogan t-shirts with the same bemused aplomb as Barker did, we don't know. But no one can ever really replace Bob Barker, [...]
Sweden's Club 8 was on a roll for a while. Over the course of five years around the end of the century, the duo of Karolina Komstedt and Johan Angergård put out four albums and three EPs of material, gaining them a cult audience in the States around the time record labels like Kindercore and March were leading the indie pop brigades to ever bigger audiences. And then, almost as suddenly as they appeared on the scene, Club 8 vanished. Their absence probably did little to speed up the decline of fey, unassuming indie pop; with the collapse of Kindercore [...]
Once upon a time, there was a band named Wire. They were an influential British punk band that started up in the late 70s and never seemed to stick together for more than a couple of years at a time. Various solo projects and other frustrations conspired to throw the band into the dustbin at regular intervals, and while their productive periods each show Wire in the process of aggressive evolution through guitar-fueled electronica to electronica-influenced clockwork guitar riffage, it's still the band's early post-punk works that seem to inspire other musicians the most. Take, for example, "Three [...]
While we're on the topic of shows, the Long Blondes have made the trip from the UK as well and are stopping by Lee's Palace next Monday for what I'm sure will be another bout of sweat-fueled dance party madness. Seriously, the few shows I've seen at Lee's have all turned into dance-offs, and considering the band's exuberant Britpop-meets-Blondie stylings I have no doubt that we'll see more of the same, even factoring in the lethargic nature of Toronto crowds. The June date coincides nicely with tomorrow's domestic release of Someone to Drive You Home , which [...]
Tonight is a night for second chances , as the Pipettes return to Toronto with Smoosh, the Portland-based sister trio with a median age of 13, and Monster Bobby, one of the Pipettes puppetmasters doing an impression of Casiotone for the Painfully Alone with fewer vintage keyboards. It'll be fantastic! Or not. It'll be something, anyways. Here's another taste of what I'll hopefully be grooving to when the clock hits the midnight hour, courtesy of the band's nighttime Beauty Bar set at SXSW.
In certain musical circles I've been lucky enough to stumble upon, Scandinavia has been hot shit for a couple of years now. No, I'm not talking about the umpteenth wave of indie pop to come from Sweden and Norway, though Peter, Bjorn and John and I'm From Barcelona have been getting their fair share of attention lately. I'm actually referring to the intersection where jazz and downtempo meet, an area that's been given many names including acid jazz, broken beat (though that doesn't really fit) and nu-jazz. That no one can agree on what to call the movement is somewhat [...]
I'm in Kingston for the weekend, so no song today. I, uh, kinda forgot to think of something and write it up this morning. Sorry kids—be back after the weekend.
A lot of things happened to the Go! Team between their two Toronto shows, mere months apart in 2005. They lost a member, gained another member, navigated through a major label bidding war and finally signed with Universal, and released their debut album in the States after a lengthy sample clearing process. All this corresponded with a massive boost in profile, such that the diminutive Lee's Palace could no longer hold the band, and so they were shifted across town to the Phoenix. Something else happened on the way across town: the Go! Team forgot how to impress. [...]
I went through a phase in high school where I decided I needed to learn how to sketch actual, honest-to-goodness people instead of the lifeless landscapes and odd still-lifes I'd been doing in art class up to then. When you're learning to sketch people, you obviously need some models. In lieu of live ones, I resorted to photos. So for a couple of months, I was trawling the internet for whatever photos I could find of Mary Timony and Corin Tucker, and drawing them rather badly during the free workshop classes in art. This led more than one girl to [...]
Working for a volunteer-run, small Canadian magazine is not exactly lucrative—the running joke at Shameless headquarters is that our offices are the living rooms and bedrooms of the people who create it. But there are plenty of perks besides the healthy glow you get from supporting something you believe in; there's also the launch parties, which are usually great chances to meet people you've only talked to via e-mail. They've also been great for seeing cool bands I'd never heard of. Last year it was Laura Barrett; a couple of weeks ago it was Forest City Lovers. [...]
It's a bit strange to think of Mary Timony as one of the veterans, but it's true—over a decade and a half later, she's still out there playing shows and putting out records. This Aversion interview plays up the not-so-oddity of her being an old-school indie artist at a time when "indie rock" has become shorthand for a fairly popular style of music. The contrast can be hard to see if you've been following Timony's career in isolation, as I often do with artists I really like; the progression she's made from Autoclave and the early Helium days [...]
Pat Tillman is Austin's premier "girl group". We support the bravery of one professional football player (Pat Tillman) who decided to make a stand for our rights as Americans to play retro-flavored pop rock. He basically put a gun in the face of every terrorist in the world who would deny us the freedom to sing our sweet American harmonies. So begins the latest bio for the Carrots, the Austin, Texas girl group that plays retro-flavoured pop-rock in honour of the football-player-turned-soldier . Or maybe they're actually playing retro-flavoured pop-rock to praise Jesus . Or maybe [...]
There are few things in life that can't be made better with the judicious application of vintage keyboards. Case in point: this charming little ditty from a trio of women and a guy called Slow Down Tallahassee. It's pretty much a revival of the grungier, garage side of the 60s girl groups—maybe a trashier, fuzzier version of everyone's favourite 60s girl-group revivalists, the Pipettes, but with a drum machine. So basically the aesthetic of the 60s, filtered through the sounds of the 80s, and played in the 2000s. (Memo to newspaper editors: have you kids finally come up with a [...]
So a couple of days ago I found a random flash video called "8-bit Reading Rainbow" and it is awesome. Unfortunately that link went down, and since then I've been unable to find any evidence of its existence on the Google, so sadly you will have to live without its crazy intarwebs-fueled goodness. But not all is lost, for the inspiration for that video is readily available, and if you close your eyes real tight and use your imagination, you can probably see that flash video in your head when you hear this song! But don't take my word for [...]
Look who's back. After a couple of years away and an interim solo album, Joel Plaskett has rounded up the Emergency once more and put together... a concept album? Well, let's be fair; this isn't the first time the Joel Plaskett Emergency have strayed into this territory. In Need of Medical Attention 's loose theme was about the death of Plaskett's grandfather, who was himself a doctor. Ashtray Rock is entirely different; there's a narrative, told in song and illustration thanks to Rebecca Kraatz, about two kids who start a band, meet a girl, fight [...]
As art school side projects go, Kitty Craft has to be one of my favourites. As the nom de plume of Pamela Valfer, Kitty Craft sounds like a very twee name, and in this case names don't lie—they just bend the truth a bit. Like a less quirky, more dreamy Solex, Kitty Craft trades in drum machine breaks and samples, but with a twee-pop sensibility. And if that wasn't enough, there's Valfer's girlish vocals on top of the whole thing. The whole enterprise is delightfully free of self-consciousness, and Kitty Craft's first album proudly proclaims on the package exactly what [...]
Maybe someone, somewhere in the mid-90s, had a feverish dream about the perfect musical concoction, and when they woke up all they could remember was the phrase, "you got your classic rock in my math rock!" And then maybe they carried that mantra with them through the years, like a glass slipper for all the bands in the world to try on, but nothing ever quite fit. The dream would have to wait a year, you said—and then another year passed, and another, until finally you'd just about given up. If you are that person with the undreamable dream, don't [...]
angels twenty
Monday Music – 28 May 2012
Bison - Quill
