There is a running joke in my circle of friends that prominently involves caps lock and broadly superlative sentences. It should be noted that this has most recently found its raison d'etre in emails claiming Future Islands to be, "THE BEST BAND IN THE WORLD EVER." Unsophisticated, I realize, and only mildly sarcastic, but nonetheless reflective of the unknowable good thing that Future Islands
Frontman of synth purveyors Here We Go Magic, Luke Temple allows himself a different group of references on solo record, Don't Act Like You Don't Care. Apathy, addressed directly in the title, seems to run in the opposite direction of track two, "More Than Muscle" with its endearing chorus and wistful keys. The central implication regards how it will be more than a feat of historic strength to
Some people just have a flair for departure. Brad Oberhofer, the music intern and NYU student turned serious indie rock commodity, spent most of his first best song, "I Could Go" yelping the title lyric to the enjoyment of everyone who listened. It was a mantra for a generation of shrugging kids who were content to, pardon the reference, take it or leave it. Newly signed to Glassnote,
A glossy bit of racing fun, Keegan DeWitt's "Colour" is relentless in its pursuit of something; the question is what? Brief color metaphors (pedantic, we know) add the weight to the chorus, but it seems as if the focus is less on our relationship to imagery, and more one the caustic, distant relationship we have to one another. The most memorable line is the rapid fire, "I hate the way we're
With a name that evokes the grandest gestures of Faulkner and his title source material in the fifth act of Macbeth, that old line about "sound and fury, signifying nothing", the sweeping, synth folk of Sound and the Urgency steeps itself in two signifiers that deny being signifiers. On "White Kids", Sound and the Urgency find this sort of interstitial tension appealing, crafting a head-nodding
Lead single, "Pretty In Decadence" from French Films' debut record, Imaginary Future, opens with the warmest guitars of 2011. Of the same genus as the Cure's trademarked tumbling post-punk, more recently perverted by bands like the Drums, French Films, actually from Finland, are more unique in their ability to find something new in these old archetypes. The glittering synths and pounding drums
This has been our summer of returning to the idea of the mixtape. We couldn't bring ourselves to name it, "All The Colours We Have" a direct tribute to the GROUPLOVE lyric which launches this mix, but the rest are all songs with a color in the title (or with the British spelling of "color" in the title, which is more popular than we realized), and no shade is repeated. "Blue" is easy, so is "
If true human affection involves the dual act of killing and being killed, Lisa Hannigan is both a mass murder and a willing victim. Dating back to her mildly over-wrought and completely beautiful work with Damien Rice (footnote: 2006, "9 Crimes" single release), Hannigan has proved the master of shooting the middle between being so brittle you thought she could be snapped in half and seemingly
Friska Viljor, the Swedes by way of Berlin, have frequently channeled something that sounds like a brass band exploding in a telephone booth. This is a compliment, not musical terrorism. On "Passionseeker" the seventh track off their latest release, the band sounds far more like countrymen the Shout Out Louds, although a version that embraces the highest of highs instead of pluming the depths.
The first thought is, "Close To Me". It's not your fault either, the first ten seconds of Steel Phantoms' "Bedouin" are an absolute dead ringer for the Cure original. Of the next nearly five minutes the easiest comparison is last year's Hooded Fang record, an amalgam of string pizzicato building to a sprawling plateau of a chorus and the instantly memorable, "Everybody goes away." The path from
J. Nicholas Allard, the narrative voice behind Light For Fire, put his misery to paper. He made that paper into sheet music and that sheet music into a debut record about a girl who ripped his guts out over the course of a summer in New York City. How forthright. In essence, here, look what you did and I don't care who knows about it. On second promotional mp3, "The Huckster", also track one on
Yesterday afternoon, we received a promo of the very excellent debut album, Enemy/Lover from Dreamers Of The Ghetto. Out this fall, it is simply one of the best debut records you'll hear in 2011. Stunning in its sense of scale, the band proves masters of leaving enough space in their arrangements to fashion them into booming caverns, playgrounds for their trademarked gravel vocals. The album
A sea sick swirl of loops and buzzing sonics paces around the front of Icarus Himself's latest single, "On Your Side". It is fully more than a minute before Nick Whetro's vocals creep into the mix, a languid, shabbier version of Pete Yorn's desire to express the same sentiment 10 years ago. But this artful fog clears in the form of a crystalline acoustic guitar, a bit of clarity before the drums
As something wickedly poppy this way comes, We Humans might the next speeding pixel on the horizon with the kind of crossover potential that makes major label scouts think, "this could save my job" and advertising executives think, "What would it cost to use that song, 50k? Great, let's do it." Sounding a whole lot like Parklife-era Blur, We Humans only played their first proper live gig back in
As we inch closer and closer to Kyla La Grange's debut LP at the beginning of next year, she has yet another single ready for release in October, "Heavy Stone" with B-side, "Lambs". Available for streaming and free download below, La Grange is again in top form, though it almost risks redundancy to pay her these types of compliments. In her textbook style, "Heavy Stone" opens with a brittle
This review runs live and in color on the Bowery Presents House List blog. Without any urging, those in the crowd at the Rapture's sold-out Music Hall of Williamsburg show began frantically moving around. There was no sequence or coherence, but it wouldn't be long before the same people reached for the ceiling, fighting Newton's Law of Gravity. In the briefest summary, the set was an absolute
Finding a seat between Beach House and Warpaint on the team bench for far away feeling pop, The Moor make their entry into your hearts with their debut, self-titled record, out this Tuesday. Lead promotional track, "Warm Winter" that has all the sickly, unsettled feeling of one of those out of place February days where the temperature climbs into the low 60s and everyone wonders if the world
Oh, to be elevated, that curious anti-gravity, lifting and gaining momentum against every Newtonian law. But it is rare, to be sure, these upwardly mobile chord progressions, half because of innate difficulties and half because we live in an age where elevation feels dishonest. Our position already so edified, so ripe for tipping, we feel guilt, fear. We are watershed people, standing on a
The first time beat radio's Brian Sendrowitz sings, "I made you a mixtape/okay, it's not a tape at all", you believe him. It's a dead technology. Probably no one you know has made a real compliation tape in going on two decades, a memory that you, like me, might keep alive by calling CDs, even playlists or zip files sent to girls far away, "mixtapes", even if it means lying to the last three
With the continued support of the wonderful people over at 8tracks, we've re-examined our music library with a new eye and increasingly arbitrary filters. This time, on "All I Really Want Is Girls", we avoid the Beasties' track of the same name, but keep the impulse, searching for the songs that feature a single-word, female name. That means Ben Folds' "Jane" would be in (though we went with "
32ft/Second
No Church In The Wild
CHROMATICS "THESE STREETS WILL NEVER LOOK THE SAME"
Nas - Daughters
The Rains of Castamere by The National
DIIV "How Long Have You Known?" (OFFICIAL VIDEO)
Avicii – Two Million
Yellow Magic Orchestra edit from Chrome Canyon
Beck – I Just Started Hating Some People Today
H&M Lookbook Mujer y Hombre Otoño 2012.
