Tagged: new2me

Hard to believe that Kim and Thurston from Sonic Youth have a daughter old enough to start her own punk band. When I first read the news clip over at Pitchfork, I was trying to do the math to figure out how old she must be by now, and it just made me feel old. Big Nils is her band, hailing from Northampton, Mass. And judging by my own teenage output, Coco Gordon is on track for greatness by comparison. Her band's debut is on sale for $5 over at Bandcamp . [...]

I heard a track from San Francisco's The Art Museums on WUSC a few weeks ago and I've been smitten with their new(ish) record, Rough Frame, ever since. As Pitchfork says "the duo enthusiastically professes the lo-fi indie pop religion of heroes Television Personalities and legendary labels like Sarah, Slumberland, K, and Flying Nun." Not a bad recipe, at all.

I usually star the Guardian's "Band of the Day" picks in my Google Reader and go back and listen when I have time. The best one I've run across lately is Paul Lester's pick of I Blame Coco , who just happens to be the daughter of Sting. Now, regardless of what you may think of Master Gordon Sumner or his myriad musical incarnations, his youngest daughter Coco, née Eliot Pauline Styler-Sumner, has an outstanding set of pipes. Like her father in his early days with the Police, she's obsessed with reggae-inflected pop, but she sells it [...]

Hearing that a band is from Brooklyn may predetermine your attitude towards it, but good music rises above petty biases, good or bad. Soren Well is a quintet from the aforementioned trendy borough that plays a frighteningly accurate amalgamation of Loveless -era shoegaze with showers of guitars and dreamscape vocals. The tonal similarities to My Bloody Valentine's career-defining album are almost overwhelming. Upon first listening to "After", I just harped on all the noises and bended tremolos I could pick out that sounded like they were sampled straight from Loveless . But the more I listened, the less [...]

Via Swedesplease comes word of the swedish garage/postpunk sounding band, Makthaverskan . Swedesplease has the mp3. Check it out.

So, I was just browsing for records recently at Lunchbox Records in Charlotte, NC (an awesome record store, by the way) when I happened across a 73 by a band called Cotton Candy. The clerk had written "Mark Robinson" on a sticker above the price tag, which is why I picked it up. Well, because of that and the cool artwork. Mark Robinson, as you may well know, owns Teenbeat records, home of one of my favorite defunct bands, Unrest , which Robinson also fronted. As an avid collector of all things Unrest, I must [...]

Raves from the English press still manage to thrust artists into the limelight, despite having cried wolf too many times to remember. But I think The Guardian is onto something with Dave I.D. This guy evidently makes Buriel look like a fame-whore by comparison, even though he does have a MySpace page, inscrutable as it may be. It's doomy, paranoid music with indecipherable lyrics, glitchy beats, and echo dub guitars. In between proclamations of "he's bloody brilliant", Paul Lester describes "Why Weren't The Message Sent" thusly: "sounds like the Beatles playing Cabaret Voltaire's 'Nag Nag Nag'." [...]

The garage rock schtick has been done to death, but there's always room for when it's done well. Harlem is your band. Mixing in a bit of frantic, Pixies-style unpredictability with its retro-kitsch harmonies, Austin's Harlem knows how to make a glorious lo-fi racket. I recommend listening to "The South of France" on the band's MySpace page, which has been getting crazy play on Sirius XMU lately, or watching the video for "Witch Greens." As GvsB pointed out back in August, Harlem's description of itself is hard to top: "When kids are [...]

It's always a pleasant evening when you can attend a free show by a band you've liked but never seen ( Stricken City ) and get introduced to an interesting new band ( Screaming Lights ) in the process. Stricken City's single Tak o Tak was one of my faves of '08, so I was quite chuffed to finally get to see them live. Stricken City come across as a bit of a ramshackle but more rock'n version of Metric, sans electronic beats, combined with the indie ethos of the late '80s and early [...]

Found out about Kat Bjelland's new band by way of one of Courtney Love's illiterate and indecipherable blogs . Evidently, Bjelleand's home is in danger of being "reposeesed", which one can only assume by context should read "repossessed." Sad news. But on the plus side, Bjelland's new band is awesome. Her vocal stylings don't stray far from the manic yelping and crazily possessed howling and grunting she parlayed into a brief major label stint with Babes in Toyland in the early 1990's. Her philosophy doesn't sound like it's changed much either. Quoth Bjelland on FasterLouder.com : [...]

A few weeks back, I caught Stephin Merritt and his merry quartet for a lovely acoustic show at GW's Lisner Auditorium, and while that show was amazing, it was like the bazillionth time I'd seen Magnetic Fields in the last 15 years. It was, however, the first time I'd ever seen Shugo Tokumaru and he was quite an interesting and completely unexpected opener. Definitely worth checking out. He's been called a japanese version of Of Montreal, but I think that might be pushing things quite a bit. More like The Shins meet a Japanese Sufjan or [...]

I've been enjoying the new album from Brooklyn's School of Seven Bells lately and figured I should mention it here on the Drawer, seeing as they're on tour and playing with Drawer B faves, M83. Speaking of M83, that's a good starting off point for comparison. Lush, gauzed ethereal vocals, electronic walls of noise, lap-pop bleets and bloops. A dash of Stereolab, a smidge of Broadcast, a dollop of Cocteau Twins and beat you can almost dance to. It's quite an appealing cocktail when it works. I'm looking forward to catching them [...]

Caught this on 3hive . Fun stuff from Germany.

Via the always interesting Pop N Cherries comes word of Reading's Happy Robots Records and their new compilation BotPop . Preview the album @ LastFM .

Listening to Incredible Weapons courtesy of Pop'n Cherries .

Roses Kings Castles , a side-project from the drummer of Babyshambles. I rather like this, but I'm not yet sure why. (swiped from Winnie Cooper )

With its phonetically malapropistic name, Columbia, South Carolina's Cassangles defies any qualifying genre distinction. There are scraps and strains of familiar sounds to be sure, but they're fused together loosely in chaotic bursts of energy and underscored by the youthful disdain of form and structure. The brashness of this band's ethos and execution is infectious. With flowery basslines reminiscent of Minutemen-era Mike Watt and experimental deconstructive guitar work, Cassangles attacks its lengthy instrumentals with a penchant for the unorthodox and the unexpected, particularly in the animalistic percussion that veers in and out of jazz phrasing and punk calamity. Highly recommended. [...]

"Two men in love with German minimalist techno, disco trash, early '80s synthpop and lush, moody soundtracks" That's enough for me on a sunny, chilly afternoon Friday. MySpace , Official Site , free mp3 .

I mentioned the Boy+Girl remix of the Young Lovers ' track Talking in French the other day but I neglected to mention the band themselves, who have a non-unique sound, but they manage to pull it off, at least on the track Talking in French. Check it out on MySpace .

First The Presets , then Cut Copy , now via Big Stereo comes word of the '80s inspired dance pop of Boy + Girl . I don't know what they're feeding our antipodean friends down in Australia, but I hope they keep it up. Additionally, it seems Melbourne, home of Cut Copy and Boy+Girl (among others), is moving up in the world of hip enclaves, having made it into the Top 10 most livable cities in the world, according to arbiter of hipness, Tyler Brûlé (he of Monocle and Wallpaper [...]