NYC garage quartet Shark? seem to inhabit a world where primarily everyone dons a poor quality Ronalde Reagan (I assume this is Reagan. Just a janky, janky Reagan) mask in their normal lives. They wear a Reagan mask when they're at band practice, making out, and stealing people's purses. It's the right display of Shark?'s sense of humor, whose anti-ode to the women of the west coast "California Grrls" may be vitriol-laden but seems to have a tongue-in-cheek sensibility to it. The band has just released the song with Old Flame Records, who will also drop their full-length Savior [...]
Last year, we made the terse Baltimore postpunk duo Ed Schrader's Music Beat a Band To Watch . This year, they contributed a song to Sub Pop's Sub Pop 1000 compilation. And now they've got a video for that song, "Radio Eyes." In the clip, the band's two members occupy some sort of hellish academic realm, one full of sentient apples and grabby disembodied hands. Philip Leaman directs, and you can watch the video and download the song below. Read More...
Under his Har Mar Superstar alias, Sean Tillman has been singing sexed-up, vaguely satiric lounge-lizard anthems in indie rock clubs for nearly a decade and a half. On his new album Bye Bye 17 , Har Mar turns toward old-school soul music, testifying hard and winking less than he's ever done before. And in the video for his new single "Lady, You Shot Me," Har Mar cops onstage moves from James Brown and the Temptations, as he and his two lovely backup singers show the world what stagecraft used to look like. It's oddly inspirational, and you can watch [...]
Boston-based Captured Tracks outfit MINKS are set to follow-up 20112s By The Hedge with Tides End , so named after an estate the band encountered on the East End of Long Island - where the band decamped to combat a case of writers' block - inhabited by eccentric, isolated residents in a state of financial decline. (This according to their album autiobio .) So basically, MINKS lived their own version of the Maysles' classic film Grey Gardens , and now have an album to show for it. Great art has been born from less! The [...]
Matt LeMay is a New York singer-songwriter and occasional rock critic, and he used to lead the underrated indie-pop band Get Him Eat Him. Lately, though, LeMay has been releasing charged-up power-pop nuggets as solo singles, and we've posted a couple of them already. Today, he releases his latest double-A-side, "Right Jacket Pocket" b/w "If And Or When," and both of them are toothy, nervy bursts of melody. LeMay played all the instruments on both, and you can download both below. Read More...
Today marks the release of Way Yes' digital LP Tog Pebbles and they're giving away "Macando" to celebrate. One of the things that the Ohio band excels at is writing songs with some of the warmest tones and this Afro-pop-informed track is just as soft and fun as we're used to. Check it out below. Read More...
Cory Thomas Hanson, aka W-H-I-T-E, makes aerial electronic pop, as evidenced but the simmering shimmer of his "I Wasn't Afraid." Its accompanying clip is beautiful and bizarre - a continuous frame of leather gloved-hands going through a range of vaguely S&M tasks but in a completely safe for work way. Check out the video and download the track below. Read More...
Eric Elbogen is a busy guy. His current gig is playing bass for Telekinesis, but he's also resumed his on-again, off-again solo project Say Hi to craft the soundtrack for indie flick Free Samples . The movie stars Jess Weixler (of the bananas horror movie Teeth fame) and Jesse Eisenberg, as well as one of Hitchcock's muses Tippi Hendren and features. Among the new tunes from Elbogen is "Love, Love, Love," a very sweet and sober number. Check out the track and the film's trailer below. Read More...
Earlier this year, we posted the video for " The Beauty Surrounds ," a melancholic synthpop song from the Chicago duo Houses. Now, the Brooklyn-based producer Silent Rider has remixed the track, turning it into a spare six-minute throb but leaving its sense of ache intact. Download the remix below. Read More...
Italian electronics-and-guitars dream-pop machine Mauro Remiddi is in the swing of making a proper followup to last year's Strange Weekend LP, and he's taken a practical tack to ensuring it sounds different: He sold off all his shit. All his instruments, anyway, and instead he invested in a modular synth. The LP itself is still some ways off, but as a stopgap he's offering the finest moments from his "obsessively" self-recorded sessions learning his way around his new mod in the form of a new EP called Silent Speech . It's instrumental (i.e. [...]
Montreal sorta-duo Majical Cloudz's forthcoming LP Impersonator is an album best experienced as an album; it invites and rewards immersion. Still, the individual Impersonator tracks that have thus far been released make that invitation pretty damn hard to turn down. If you slept on "Childhood's End" when it debuted in March, turn right back around and download it now . And today, the band have made available another track, "Bugs Don't Buzz," a brooding, lush number that captures in miniature the lucid, somber majesty of the collection. Point blank, it's one of the best albums [...]
The first time I listened to Charli XCX's terrific True Romance , I found myself almost distracted by her vocal similarities to another British pop singer, Marina Diamandis, aka Marina And The Diamonds. Now, fittingly, the two singers are headed out on a North American tour together, and to kick it off, they've dropped a new collabo, "Just Desserts." It's an apt title considering the buttery richness of the voices in question. Download, listen. Tour dates below. Read More...
Brooklyn dance-rockers Lemonade, fresh off of their 2012 album Diver , have a new single up online called "Perfect Blue," and it sounds like a particularly sensitive relic of the late-'90s boy-band era that's been fed through whatever filters they use to make scuzzed-up DIY Flabush-warehouse dance music. The group also has a few shows coming up. Below, download "Perfect Blue" and check out the band's touring itinerary. Read More...
Portland psych-pop duo Wampire are a Band To Watch as of March 2013, and their debut album Curiosity drops in a couple of weeks. We've already posted its songs " The Hearse " and " Spirit Forest ," and now we've got another one, a carefree guitar-twinkling lope called "Trains." Download it below. Read More...
Mild-mannered French superstars Phoenix have already lined up a serious cast of heavy hitters to remix or rework their new single " Entertainment ": Grizzly Bear , Dinosaur Jr. , Blood Orange . And now the band have commissioned a remix from the Dirty Projectors, who aren't exactly deep in the remixing game. The Dirty Pro remix does, however, sound a lot like a Dirty Projectors song: Echoing vocal yelps, tricky rhythms, hooks that sneak up on you (even if, in this case, they're hooks that were already in the song). Download the remix below. [...]
Last month, Sinkane shocked the world, and himself a bit also, in being pulled onstage by Usher to sing a Sinkane song (" Runnin' ") in front of a confused (but excited!) SXSW audience. Your 'Gum crew was 100% present, and the wow factor on it having happened is still high all these weeks later. So it is a particularly good time for Ahmed Gallab to step up with his most beautifully rendered video to date; there are probably more eyes on him now than ever. "Warm Spell," a standout from his DFA debut LP [...]
The influential dance producer Joy Orbison doesn't release tracks too often, so it's a pretty big deal when he lets one drop. This morning, he just threw a new one up online like it was nothing. The song is called "Donell," and it functions, more or less, as a twitchy UK garage remix of " U Know What's Up ," a 1999 hit for the R&B singer Donell Jones. Download it below. Read More...
The great '90s postpunkers Girls Against Boys never officially broke up, but they've been inactive since 2003. They're back now, and that is very good news. Back in the day, they combined punishing and skronked-out post-hardcore dynamics with consciously sexy disco-funk push-pull, keeping the focus squarely on the rhythm section by employing two bassists. They'll tour again this summer, and their live show is the sort of thing you absolutely want to see. And they've got a new song called "It's A Diamond Life," on which they sound like time has left their attack completely undiminshed. This thing could appear [...]
It's a Baltimore family affair when Peals' " Blue Elvis " gets remixed by Dan Deacon. The duo, comprised of William Cashion of Future Islands and Bruce Willen of Double Dagger (if anyone has intel regarding where they're hiding the unsold Double Dagger RDS release, let a girl know), went soft and wistful for the original but Deacon steps in and makes it even brighter. While he maintains its prettiness, he flips it into a chugger that's just an extra bit more glittery. Take a listen below. Read More...
The insanely prolific Guided By Voices will release a brand new LP English Little League , a follow-up to January's Down By The Racetrack EP. Here's "Funky Minnows," quick and quirky, like most of the best GBV tracks, a little bit about love, a little bit about the thrill of a microscope - Robert Pollard does love science , after all. Check out the track below. Read More...
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Kanye West Performs “New Slaves” And “Black Skinhead” On Saturday Night Live
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And We'll Run
