Posted on 28 July 2010
Nice to see swine flu hasn’t roughed up the smooth, lacquered baritone of Mr. Lekman. Just a bit after giving us some Summer In 3/4 Time, though still without full word on an album to kill the anticipation, Jens drops a new single titled, typically lyrically, “The End Of The World Is Bigger Than Love.” He has a way with words, both within and without the track, so — listen and download, then read his background explanation.
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Posted on 26 July 2010
The first video from Body Talk PT 2 is for “Hang With Me,” in electronic form. The clip looks like it was shot during the promotional tour for Body Talk PT 1, so it shows the typical life of a young Swedish pop star: long hours in the tour bus, hotel rooms, in-store appearances, concerts. It’s beautifully shot, with (of course) lots of natural light spilling into the bus and the hotel rooms. It makes life on the road look pretty/lonely.
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Posted on 23 July 2010
Funeral was about family, and Neon Bible was about institutions. The Suburbs on first listen, feels like adolescence, the time when you’re trapped between leaving one and joining the other. Will and Win Butler told NPR that the record would be about their childhood in the suburbs of Houston, Texas. So that makes sense. But what this very long –maybe too long–album seems to be about is losing and regaining innocence, reconciling your private world (developed in your room, in study hall, in the back car seat on family road trips) with the outside one.
In a sense that lost innocence has always played a part in their work, from “Neighborhood #1” to “No Cars Go.” That’s why they were such great inspiration for Spike Jonze as he adapted Where The Wild Things Are (it looks like he’s repaying the favor now). But adolescence and young adulthood feels like the center for the first time.
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Posted on 20 July 2010
In addition to showcasing a bit of The Suburbs we’ve yet to visit, this short clip of Win and Regine as puppety oddballs reveals that the band’s second MSG headline concert (8/5) will be streamed live on YouTube.
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Posted on 20 July 2010
In the two years since New York’s Ra Ra Riot put out their debut album, lead singer Wes Miles teamed up with old pal and multi-tasking Vampire Weekend/Boys Like Us/summer song slinger Rostam Batmanglij for Discovery, a pop project framed as a deceptively adept love letter to electro-R&B, by an initially unlikely pair of genre enthusiasts. A certain shift from both dudes’ previous outputs, something Miles touched on in his Progress Report with Jessica:
Discovery’s influence isn’t sonic: “Doing Discovery helped me feel like you don’t really have to do what you think is good, you just do what you want. There’s a subtle difference,” he says. “We just wanted to make something that was uniquely ours. Even if less people will ultimately get it, that’s the plan.”
Shades of MGMT in that quote, maybe. But whatever your thoughts on The Rhumb Line — and from your Gummy ballots in 2008, in aggregate you think quite a lot of it — in my mind there’s a deep wellspring of goodwill for Ra Ra Riot. Because this is the band that wrote “Ghost Under Rocks” — a track that catches a band at the height of its abilities, damn near perfect for what it is trying to be: elegant and bittersweet orchestral indie pop, perfectly paced, given an unexpectedly wistful poignance with the tragic events that surrounded the band during its public bloom. The drummer that stepped into John Pike’s shoes after his death is now full-time with the band; the songwriting duties handled by Pike now shared by the band. And here, two years later, comes the first full MP3 from the band’s followup LP The Orchard: produced by Ra Ra Riot and Andrew Maury, with mixing from Chris Walla (plus one song by Rostam), and, at least on “Boy,” sure to speak to RRR’s core base.
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Posted on 19 July 2010
The final day of 2010’s Pitchfork Festival was just as hot as Saturday, with stages that needed quick shots of energy to pull the audience out of its languor. Girls were pretty but wispy — though they sounded stronger as I walked over to Washed Out, who had the audience clapping along to his set. It also helped that Ernest Greene plays to the audience, not his instruments. Beach House played with several glittering, large diamonds behind them for their second Pitchfork Festival show (they played two years ago). Victoria Legrand stayed half hidden by layers of wavy hair, but Alex Scally paused to warn us: “If anyone has dry underwear by the end of this song, you have to leave the festival,” he said, before playing “Silver Soul.” Local Natives’ harmonies sounded impressively tight, despite some sound problems.
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Posted on 18 July 2010
A lot of times I compare live performances to how that band sounds on their album. At Pitchfork Festival, Saturday was really about how artists worked with the big crowd and the daytime heat (the latter was big factor yesterday as well). Delorean, for example, sounded great, but their early set could only get a few skinny fists in the air, while pastel pink balloons drifted over the crowds heads. It was too hot to even swat at them. Delorean even brought out the airhorn, the official sound of a party starting. Maybe it was too soon.
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Posted on 15 July 2010
Australian synth/dance-pop trio Cut Copy are at work on their self-produced (and self-pronounced) Tusk-influenced third album. The rhythmic, anthemic (“yeah, yeah, yeah, woo”), smeary, and psychedelic “Where I’m Going”’s likely appearing on said record. Much of it reminds me of the Beach Boys-via-E6 (on an electro kick).
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Posted on 13 July 2010
…bifurcated, probably. Yesterday the L.A. Times characterized the M.I.A./Die Antwoord/Sleigh Bells festival’s preemptive shutdown with a headline that principals had been “Citing Security Concerns.” Which would fit tidily in the context of last month’s Electric Daisy Carnival, where a teenager OD’d, the resulting death inciting the community’s enhanced scrutiny of such gatherings and leading to L.A. County’s instituting a task force to “examine and enhance rave security.”
The bigger reason, though, appears to be ticket sales. And how there weren’t that many.
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Posted on 12 July 2010
Bryan Ferry’s forthcoming “solo” album Olympia finds the Roxy Music frontman collaborating with Radiohead classicist Jonny Greenwood, Red Hot Chili Pepper/Atoms For Peace bassist Flea, Nile Rodgers, Scissor Sisters, Groove Armada, David Gilmour, and Primal Scream’s Mani. Pitchfork reports he’s also teaming with Roxy bandmates Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera and onetime squabbler Brian Eno. (It’s their first collaboration since 1973’s For Your Pleasure.) Outside the extra hands, the 10-song collection includes covers of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren” and Traffic’s “No Face, No Name, No Number.” There are other songs, too:
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