Image: Nesta Half an Apple - Hospitality Despite a "you" address, this song is an internal monologue, a desperate reach for fleeting thoughts and places buzzing by -- wading boots, pennies, traffic on the bridge, half an apple to eat while you wait. With flesh not brown and grainy like that of every other cracked-open pomme in this world, but as white and crisp as the second [...]
Image: Christina Romeo The Snow Leopard - Shearwater Shearwater's new record, Rook , sounds comfortable, like the band pulled the shades, settled into vast, fluffy floor pillows, drank black tea (or 12 year old scotch) and picked up their instruments only as they felt moved to do so. Palo Santo (which I still prefer), came from the highwire. It was desperate, anxious, angry, spooky, spooked. And fierce, so fierce. Jonathan Meiberg's wondrous voice can still [...]
Image: aperrigue Brightness - Organic Stereo First off, Organic Stereo has the prettiest album cover this year, the linearity of its buildings buffeted by cotton-ball clouds, color-saturated by buckets of orange popsicle and Hello Kitty toaster cheer. Hiroyuki Morikawa builds folktronic layers with pastel tinted lucite panels, and when the clear, white light of morning lands its beam where violet meets yellow meets green, it's joy. [...]
Image: New York Times/Westminster Dog Show Leave That Scene Behind - The Wave Pictures It's not a matter of "getting past it." You either hate Dave Tattersall's voice, or you hate it less. It's whiny and nasal and so maddeningly atonal you want to reach through the speakers and grab Tattersall by the shoulders and shake him til his ears fall off (they're not doing him any good anyway). So why do I crush so [...]
Image: Karen Casey Smith San Solomon - Balmorhea Myspace Image: Jake Dobkin Outta Sight - Osborne Myspace [...]
Image: Irene Cecile Knock Knock - The Accidental Ali Smith wrote a novel called The Accidental about a stranger who insinuates herself into the lives of a fraught family. It came out a couple years ago and you might have heard of it; you might even have read [...]
Image: Martina Mullaney Pompeii - Indian Jewelry Indian Jewelry didn't used to be this nice or good. They used to be noisy, vaguely threatening, willfully iconoclastic, difficult and interesting but very ... did I say noisy? Ok, they still sound like they're singing from from the bottom of a well (or in the case of "Pompeii," choking on volcanic ash?) , still spouting static, knitting dense nets of mild-to-moderate cacophony. And they continue [...]
Image: Erin Tyner Oh, Heaven Isn't Real - David Karsten Daniels Why should Jesus get all the good music? It's not like this one's for the devil or anything -- it's just one great big secular humanist sigh of exasperation, as if Daniels has had it up to here with heaven this and hell that and will no longer hold his tongue. From the backyard of the Bible Belt, bluegrass swing, handclaps, holler [...]
Eleanor Jane Parsons We Carry On - Portishead Carry on as in muddle through , grimly persevere, make do, endure-- it's all so characteristically English, though not uniquely so. These days, we Americans are muddling through til the next election, many of us holding our breath and crossing our fingers that the Dems don't fuck it up again. We carry on, despite economic news more dire by the day and the contradictory message that it's [...]
Image: Nina Hartmann Skin Lieutenant - My Teenage Stride From Lesser Demons ( eMusic ), Myspace Image: Liu Zheng LCD - Mathematicians Myspace [...]
Image: Cathy Cullis I Don't Feel Young - Wye Oak A lot of indie pop bands, to their credit, recast the misery of being young and awkward and self-conscious as a magic of infinite possibility, constant discovery and profound connections. But what of that unaddressed misery--the lack of control, the sense that you speak too fast and laugh too loud and can't trust anyone enough to unburden the lead backpack of secrets from your shoulders? [...]
Image: wondercabinet I Feel Better - Frightened Rabbit I didn't really see it before, comparisons to fellow Scots, The Twilight Sad. But now that Frightened Rabbit has traded their small-scale art songs for broad mural-scope anthems with dramatic instrumental builds, the points of convergence are coming into focus. The band's lyrical pessimism and Scott Hutchison's mournful voice works both in scrappy [...]
Image: Peter Sutherland Everyday I Saw You in Egypt - Boo and Boo Too Boo and Boo Too is a thrift store of sound, for sure. I don't even need to get my hands dirty digging through historical bins because the Lawrence, KS band is kissing cousins to Chicago's still alive-and-wailing (usually good, sometimes quite excellent) The Narrator . But what The Narrator hasn't managed to pull off (i.e. The Big Time [...]
Image: John Murphy Bloodthirsty Angels & The Terrible Trumpets - John Ralston "Bloodthirsty Angels & the Terrible Trumpets" borrows the language of Revelations to delineate a fraught relationship. And with its lonely echoed spaciousness, the song sounds like it was recorded in a wooden church -- some 17th century New England meetinghouse in the dead [...]
Image: Mandy Lamb Aly, Walk with Me - The Raveonettes If it even crossed my mind in the past, I think I thought The Raveonettes were Dutch. I guess I visualized them flogging their seedy Spectorish wares on the edge of some dank low-country canal a few meters from a red-light zone window display. Close enough: They're Danes living in New York. But you can locate the cathexis of their music [...]
Image: Randy Bolton Time City - Laura Barrett If Peggy Lee had taken a right instead of a left from her wretched North Dakota girlhood to Manhattan instead of Hollywood and shared a two-room cold-water flat on a ragged street on the lower east side with another cigarette girl and tucked under her iron bed in an old blanket this African harp called a kalimba she won from a guitar player named Stan in a poker game. [...]
Image: Betty Turbo Come on Feet - Pete and the Pirates It rattles like teeth in a tin can, rings like a hard right to the head, packs more handclaps per square feet that your average gospel choir and breaks landspeed records in a Lamborghini. If you only eat a meal to get to dessert, this song is butter-sugar-flour lumped on your plate like mashed potatoes and fed fingerstyle. And fuck the Libertines, the Arctic Monkeys and the last [...]
Image: Keith Carter Jump In (For Gilkey Elementary School) - High Places They're small, with soft hands, sweet-scented hair and clay-porous minds, kaleidoscope eyes and hearts radiant as day lilies. Even so, they recognize condescension by several paces, the way forest beasts see poison plants, as pretty as they are, as poison. And they know immediately their own kind -- speakers of the secret hiccuped, jigsawed jargon of childhood, as leaped, [...]
Image: Heiko Rintelen Hands - Soft Fruit Myspace Image: Hyun-ah Cho Georgia May - The Harpeth Trace From On Disappearing ( CD Baby ) , [...]
Image: Megan Whitmarsh Hey peeps, I know I know. Every stolen moment I sit down to write a post, the words get sandtrapped somewhere between my brain and fingers. I hope to un-gum the machine with a new image & song mix in a couple days. So stay tuned for that. What exactly have I been doing since I haven't been blogging? Because you asked (or didn't): mostly disposing of inventory and supplies of a small business I used to have. Trust me, it's completely uninteresting, extremely time-intensive and absolutely [...]
Shake Your Fist
No Church In The Wild
Nas - Daughters
The Rains of Castamere by The National
CHROMATICS "THESE STREETS WILL NEVER LOOK THE SAME"
DIIV "How Long Have You Known?" (OFFICIAL VIDEO)
Avicii – Two Million
Beck – I Just Started Hating Some People Today
H&M Lookbook Mujer y Hombre Otoño 2012.
