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Yesterday a singing crow, today a singing deer. The Kevin Phillips-directed video for múm’s “Sing Along” is a compelling clip with some truly beautiful moments (wait for the butterflies). It’s a bit like “Sugar, We’re Going Down” re-imagined by Icelanders with a darker and deeper visual aesthetic: A deer’s killed, kissed, and dragged dead up a hill and into a household where it becomes a rag doll pet forced to withstand all sorts of indignities (riding a seesaw, playing catch, acting as a centerpiece, getting framed, etc.), occasionally trying to do what the song title suggests. The lyrics includes lines like “we want to eat you with our spoon” and “you are so beautiful to us / we want to lock you in our house,” which may make you want to skip tonight’s bear stew and instead take your dog for a walk. Then again, maybe the clip’s finale will just have you in the mood for charred venison.
Continue reading New múm Video - “Sing Along” (Stereogum Premiere)…
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Publicists will neither confirm nor deny Yorke’s new supergroup performing LA’s Echoplex Friday (in advance of the Orpheum shows), but we have learned the 75 minute sets will have all of Eraser plus four new songs. Nice. (via twentyfourbit.com)
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On these new tracks, ex-Outsider Liz Harris sounds like she’s using smeary stars and the fall chill in a dark Northwestern forest as her backing band. Listen closely at MySpace (via GvsB).
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Fresh off of a tour with Florence & The Machine, and a tour-memorializing remix of one of her Lungs cuts, the xx stopped in to Jools Holland’s BBC2 studio to perform the subdued and lockstep cool of “Islands,” one of many standouts from their debut-album-of-the-year contender xx. If they look baby-faced it’s because they actually are babies (the quartet are all 20), babies that preternaturally distilled a sultry, drum-machined minimalistic pop blend bands twice their age can’t approach.
Continue reading The xx Bring Jools Holland Their “Islands”…
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The sunny psychedelic pop housed on LAKE’s Let’s Build A Roof deepens and interestingly darkens the Olympia group’s previous output. The dozen songs were produced by Karl Blau, someone who clearly has a knack for adding layers without losing a creaky, natural spaciousness (and someone they tour with in October/November). A ways back I mentioned “<a href=”http://stereogum.com/archives/mp3/new-lake-madagascar_081981.html”Madagascar“’s island feel. The group digs into shimmery horn-lined dream pop on the anthemic “Don’t Give Up” and gets increasingly frantic on the swooning “Gravel,” an exhilarating Let’s Build A Roof standout that debuts after my conversation with the band.
Right, they’re here because they work: Eli Moore’s a part time electrician’s apprentice and his fellow LAKE co-founder Ashley Eriksson works for for Whidbey Island Environmental Action Network, aka WEAN, “a non profit working to restore and preserve Native habitats on Whidbey Island,” an island about 30 miles north of Seattle. As far as the other LAKE-rs: Adam Oelsner’s a baker, Lindsay Schief’s a barista at Stumptown, and Markly Morrison multi-tasks at a bakery. (I didn’t speak to Andrew because he makes a living as a full-time musician. That said, he is also a student at Evergreen College.)
Continue reading Quit Your Day Job: LAKE…
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Until we have full audio, there’s this 80-second snippet of the band debuting their Twilight track with Victoria from Beach House at the Metro the other night up at YouTube. Sounds bloody nice. (H/T YANP)
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With the nature of tips we’ve received on Freelance Whales — both from the wide array of tipster-types (industry types, concert goers, streetwalkers catching them playing on a corner) and the neighborhood they all inhabit (Williamsburg) — we sorta figured this band would fall squarely into the prevailing washed out/hypnagogic fuzzbucket hazed-pop thing before having heard a note. After seeing ‘em at a loft party and spending some time with their self-released debut, it’s really nice to hear that they don’t fall there at all. Turns out FW are way out of step with the dominant trend of ‘09, and more in line with what the non-Gang Of Four appropriating wing of indie music was fixated on a few years ago: sounds that are acoustic and precious, boldly baring bespectacled sensitivity and couching touching melodies in delicate instrumentation: everything from guitars, banjos, tambourines, harmonium, and glockenspiels to yes the occasional keyboard and laptop assist.
It’s not to say Freelance Whales are a bygone-trend retread, or that they’re a cold fish in a chillwave: in fact there’s palpable warmth and tactful touch that crackles throughout their strongest tunes’s group chants, harmonies, occasional computer beats and baroque-pop arrangements that should prove irresistible to people with soft spots for the likes of Sufjan, Ra Ra Riot, Postal Service, and on. Freelance Whales don’t sound like any of those artists outright, but they’re linked in their strength at expressing fragility, and at working out a sentimental but memorable melody. See if this pair from their debut Weathervanes gets under your skin after a few spins. (That’s a photo from the loft party, one that got a little notice in other corners of the internet.)
Continue reading Band To Watch: Freelance Whales…
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After holing up in an L.A. mansion, dressing in all white and partying with lesbians, LCD Soundsystem inform us that their LP is due in March (and other tidbits) over at their suddenly active Facebook. (Thanks for the tip, Chris.)
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Talk Normal, the Brooklyn duo of vocalist/guitarist/bassist Sarah Register and yowling drummer Andrya Ambro, are following up various CD-R’s and 2008’s Secret Cog EP with an official full-length Sugarland, a heady 10-song/45-minute dose of their clamoring post-no wave deconstruction. If you’ve heard them, it’ll be unsurprising to learn Sightings bassist Richard Hoffman shows up on it. Or that they’re opening for Teenage Jesus & The Jerks in a couple of days. Or that one of the collection’s tracks is a cover of Roxy Music’s “In Every Dream Home a Heartache.” (If it seems surprising, listen to the original again.) I’m not sure what inspired the title Sugarland, but there’s that gay bar on N. 9th in Brooklyn that’s basically the only remaining structure on a street where construction seems stalled, the sidewalks are crumbling, and the rubble’s looking longterm. Regardless of whether or not I’m right, for a band who’s clearly inspired by an older, dirtier, more adventurous and empty downtown NYC, the reference is perfect on half a dozen levels. Listen to opener “Hot Song.”
Continue reading New Talk Normal - “Hot Song”…
