Florence + The Machine, "Shake it Out" get it on Ceremonials Every now and then, a band comes along that makes you use the phrase "every now and then, a band comes along". Florence + the Machine (does anyone know the sum of that equation? I'm bad at math) is one of those bands, but not in the way that they're some bright signal of a new, brave music, but instead, are a band like Coldplay: one that succeeds in spite of it's negatives. [...]
Megafaun, "You Are The Light" get it on Megafaun (2011) Things I'm a sucker for that are present in this song: Horn swells. In fact, if I was to start up a band, I'd probably call it Horn Swells. You can use it on your own band, but only if you're really awesome. A hymn feel. This is likely the name of the debut album by Horn Swells. [...]
The Go! Team, "Buy Nothing Day (feat. Bethany Cosentino)" find it on Rolling Blackouts I slept really hard on this new Go! Team record. It was put out in January, but I just never bothered picking it up for some reason. Okay, so Proof of Youth didn't really do much for me, but Thunder, Lightning, Strike was a fantastic album, with tracks like "Huddle Formation" and "The Power Is On" pumping me up like I was a little kid on a school [...]
Almost exactly 20 years ago, I cut a morning class with my college roommate Scott and my friend Molly, went across the street and bought a copy of Achtung Baby , came back to the dorm, ordered a pizza and took in the album from beginning to end. I was deeply disappointed. The Joshua Tree was the focal point of my high school rock star dreams, with the live version of "Where The Streets Have No Name" from Rattle and Hum being the live version of said dreams, and [...]
Friend, are you one of those people that hates Facebook like you hate your own brother? You're ready to give it up entirely for something that is Facebook but is not Facebook ? Want to get updates from your favorite music blog (whichever music blog that might be), but all 50 billion (approximate) of the current social sharing tools leave you feeling cold and alone? If so, then you're on the purportedly revolutionary new service from the scrappy startup company with the crazy, it'll-never-be-successful name "Google" that they've revolutionarily named Google+. And you know what? So are [...]
DJ Shadow, "Scale It Back (feat. Little Dragon)" (2011) find it on The Less You Know, The Better Remember back in the 90s when the ubiquitous guest vocalist was Michael Stipe? Then, around 1999, Stipe passed on his mantle to Thom Yorke, who seems to have passed it on to Little Dragon. Seriously, this band is EVERYwhere. Not that I mind. Yukimi Nagano's voice is as reliably great on all of her guest spots as Yorke was on his. I just wonder how they even [...]
I've never been much of a fan of Halloween. Or at least not beyond my days of extreme candy greed. I have a hard time thinking of a costume, it's usually really terrible when I finally decide on one, and then I spend the rest of the night having everyone tell me how lame my costume is. So I gave up and just leave the holiday to the people that are into that sort of thing. But I do really like the strive for spookiness in Halloween. I'm not a big fan of the goofiness of the costumes [...]
Slow Club, "Two Cousins" (2011) get it on Paradise "Two Cousins" has been floating around me for a couple of months now, coming up on shuffle and lumped in with the rest of the album, but it's only been recently that it's seriously stuck in my head, and I find myself constantly wanting to hear the glorious celebration of the chorus and the kind of melancholy of the verses. But one of the things that frustrates me a little about Slow Club [...]
Greg Brown, "On Records the Sound Just Fades Away" (1982) get it on One Night Who in god's name is Greg Brown? Hell if I know. His wikipedia page states that he is signed to little Red House Records, a label I respect, and that 25 years ago he recorded a song cycle to complement William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, a project so pretentious-sounding that it might be fabulous. The truth is, [...]
Veronica Falls, "Wedding Day" (2011) get in on Veronica Falls Gossip! So. There's this guy named Stephen , apparently, who one or more of the members of Veronica Falls have kind of a flirty, it-might-happen thing. The catch? Stephen is married . I know! Yeah! Married! Now, there may be some romantics in you that would actually kind of like to see Stephen give in to this love that's swelling outside his blessed union (which sounds a euphemism here but so [...]
We've had recorded music long enough so that a chart of the history of a certain sound is starting to look kind of Escher-esque. In this case, it's a sound that was popular in the late 80s and early 90s that was based on British bands that were indebted to their New Wave forebearers, which inspires Anglophile Americans to ape that same sound that then gets re-loved 20 years later by another group of Americans. And there's a staircase that connects with itself somewhere in there. The early 902s retro sound first popped into my ears last year [...]
Blitzen Trapper, "I Love The Way You Walk Away" (2011) find it on American Goldwing One of the casualties in these days of The Music Avalanche™ is straightforward singer-songwriter type stuff. I mean, music geeks have always tended to look for more adventurous music, but when you can find something new every hour, it's easy to gloss over the tunes that have a familiar sound and structure. This kind of irks me, though. I can find plenty of mixtapes of remixes remixed by [...]
A lot of my "that's where I heard it first stories" revolve around record stores because, frankly, I used to spend a lot a lot of time in them. This story is no different. The same night I found (with an extraordinary sense of glee that has stuck with me for, what, nearly 20 years now) Hunters & Collectors' 2-disc live set Living In Large Rooms and Lounges (utterly essential, in my opinion) and realized that one of my favorite bands from college was not only still recording, but still viable a half a world away, [...]
St Vincent, "Year of the Tiger" (2011) find it on Strange Mercy I don't know how September's been where you live, but here in DC, the sun hasn't come out once in the entire month. Not once! Don't fact-check that, because I'm telling you that it's a fact, and isn't my word good enough for you by now? The gloom and drizzly, half-assed rain is taking its toll, but the silver lining is that it's making the new St. Vincent album make sense. [...]
Let's be honest. When bands you love breaks up, the emotions it brings often have as much to do with their place in your life, in the era ending and the passing of time, as it does in the meaning of them not creating any music any more. And so, even though R.E.M. has finally broken up a good 15 years since I last loved anything new that they put out, it's hitting me heavily: the official death of a band that changed the way I listened to music, forged friendships over and in whose sound I can [...]
M83, "Midnight City" (2011) find it on Hurry Up, We're Dreaming I didn't go as crazy for the previous couple M83 records like some other people I could mention (but won't because it would be completely pointless), but this song has been digitally filed into the HOT DAMN section of my iTunes library. The irresistible synth loop, the barely-there vocals and, to use a phrase I feel like I've been using a lot lately, an awesome sax solo outro. I should probably also file this [...]
There's no shortage of terrible covers out there, and the vast majority of them usually fall into one of two categories: Overly faithful and vastly inferior to the original and totally pointless, making you just want to hear the original Overly experimental, wrecking the original, and just as pointless as the first kind of bad cover A good cover finds makes the original great and casts it in a new light. It makes you notice that that disco song had a really great melody, that the original was a little [...]
The Rapture, "Never Die Again" (2011) find it on In The Grace Of Your Love Lately, the first word that pop into my head when I'm looking for descriptions is "restrained". I don't know what's going on in the recording studios of the world, but it sounds like there's a whole lot of people in 2011 who are really afraid to totally let go. It can be frustrating (why do drums so often sound choked and a little slower than you want them?) but not as bad of [...]
Class Actress, "Keep You" (2011) get it on Rapproacher You know, it's not like I do Fine Tune Friday for my health. Kind of the opposite, in fact. My computer is coal-powered, and it puts out this pretty nasty black exhaust that I'm breathing in the whole time I'm writing it up. I don't think it's good for me. ANYway...I put out Fine Tune Friday, because I care . I want to make sure you don't miss anything. So even if every [...]
For the last half century or so, the British music press has generally loved two things: music that sounds unmistakably British, and music that sounds unmistakably American. And when I was in London in the fall of 1993, just after Suede's rise, but before Parklife and Britpop dominance, the English music press loved Grant Lee Buffalo, who were as as interested in steeping in being American as the new crop of British bands were in being quintessentially British. GLB's debut album Fuzzy got rave reviews, but didn't gush nearly as much as the reviews of Grant [...]
Naive Harmonies
Princesse - Tell Me | MP3
Beck - 'I Just Started Hating Some People Today' [Listen]
[LISTEN] Gotye (Passion Pit Remix)
New Remix: Jonquil - Run (RxGibbs Remix)
