It bears remembering that the Dirty Projectors made the finest album of last year. Mount Wittenberg Orca, a song cycle initially written for performance at New York’s Housing Works in a benefit concert organized by Stereogum’s Brandon Stosuy, isn’t a proper follow-up — but it is a worthy sequel. The mini-album finds the band diving head-first into the harmonic mazes they explored on 2009′s Bitte Orca, determined to reach the limits of indie rock lung capacity. The music stays spartan, leaving the voices room to shine (or shatter glass) and Bjork bjorks around harmlessly, sounding particularly nice playing call-and-response with the DP’s vowel sound montage on “On and Ever Onward.” Don’t play this one for your cat.
At this point, The Clientele has proven itself the most reliable band in chamber-pop: nearly ever year, like clockwork, the band issues another set of lingering guitar arpeggios, hushed but yearning vocals and daydream philosophizing that you’ll want to clutch to your ears until the London-band issues its next installment. The group’s next outing is the mini-album Minotaur, the follow-up to 2009′s psych-tinged Bonfires On The Heath; it is, as we’ve come to expect, thoroughly excellent — I’ll let the single speak, softly, for itself.
2010: The Year We Make Contact With Really Dreamy Records. The diversity of excellently synth-soaked, romantically sung releases hasn’t been so strong and broad since the peaks of shoegaze and New Wave, chillwave or no. Consider: The Radio Dept., Beach House, Wild Nothing, Puro Instinct, all wondrous, languorous artists who burrow deep in distorted warmth and gentle drum machines. Memoryhouse’s The Years EP joins them proudly. The music’s what you’d expect, but it’s the vocals that make the group step beyond their genre: singer Denise Nouvion doesn’t sink as deep into the sonic bed as many of her contemporaries, singing with an edge of Pam Berry (or Janeane Garofalo)-esque sarcasm and self-awareness that makes one wonder, as she herself might, what she’s doing swimming in slumberland. The answer’s easy, though: playing great songs.
(Astute listeners: you may notice bits of Jon Brion’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack beauty “Phone Call” in “Lately.” I’d say the band does JB proud.)
Hayden’s Skyscraper National Park is probably my favorite produced/engineered album of all time — the closest I’ve ever heard an album come to bringing its performers directly into your bedroom. You can imagine how unbelievably great it sounds on 180-gram vinyl. Do yourself a favor and trade in your Bon Iver LP and order this right now. It’s $17 including shipping — a small price to pay for a warm heart.
It’s not quite time for sweater weather yet, but psych-folk trio Pepper Rabbit is nevertheless touring America. It might get a li’l heated under all that wool, especially depending how long you gaze on indie rock babe/drummer Luc Laurent. (There’s a related Tumblr post to link to about this but I couldn’t find it. Use your imaginations. Update: It’s here!) So, uh, wear cut-offs? Dates — and the band’s incredible cover of fellow Rawkblog favorite ARMS’ “Heat and Hot Water” — after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
In the day-to-day grind of blogosphere hype, and indie fandom at large, it’s easy to lose sight of the genre’s true lightning rods. (As opposed to Lightning Bolt.) The great tragedy of the Best Coast album is that it’s inspired mountains of love and hate and discussions (from this blog included) that could’ve been better served on an artist, well, worth having opinions on. Crazy For You is sometimes a good record, sometimes a bad one, but it’s never as Best New Music great or 0.0 terrible as the current state of music discourse demands it to be. So I hope you watched St. Vincent’s performance at the Pitchfork Music Festival last night, either online or in the sweaty crowd. Annie Clark is, almost inarguably, the most interesting girl — and maybe the coolest person, period — in indie rock. Her music is vocally charismatic; lyrically evocative without the myopic seriousness of, say, Joanna Newsom; sonically visceral; melodically adventurous and pretty much just the best. She merges influences from Radiohead to Arrested Development with the satisfying ease of a Derek Fisher three-pointer. (The fact that she’s Milan Fashion Week beautiful doesn’t hurt.)
Stereogum reported today that Clark and Talking Heads mind-bender David Byrne are collaborating, for what could potentially be her next album. I don’t think I need to tell you, but as we struggle to keep enjoying our briefly beloved summer jams, this is something we should actually get hyperbolic about.
Naming your band “The Smiles” is pretty much asking for punchlines, but the Los Angeles group”s “Cala Cola” delivers on the nom de plume‘s promise. Jangly, sweet and high-energy in a way that recalls a beach-ready, less Africa/boat shoe-obsessed Vampire Weekend (and Rawkblog recent favorites International Waters), the track offers chill waves the old-fashioned way.
Tomorrow starts the first day of two weeks of recording part one of a new solo album. This is the one I have been working on that is so far written on my old acoustic and I plan to keep these recordings simple…I am dubbing this the “west coast”sessions…THEN in two weeks I am off to NYC to record part two of the crazy NYC sessions which started as a “Cold Roses evil twin” minus the noodling vibe but now sound like some weird extension of Love is Hell. Where there was excessive jamming ( which I was shit at ) there are now cool chord passages and feedback and neat rhodes organ fills. Exciting times! Fingers crossed it all works.
Not to mention the two albums in the can that we should be hearing any day now. Are these exciting times or what?
It bears remembering that the Dirty Projectors made the finest album of last year. Mount Wittenberg Orca, a song cycle initially written for performance at New York’s Housing Works in a benefit concert organized by Stereogum’s Brandon Stosuy, isn’t a proper follow-up — but it is a worthy sequel. The mini-album finds the band diving head-first into the harmonic mazes they explored on 2009′s Bitte Orca, determined to reach the limits of indie rock lung capacity. The music stays spartan, leaving the voices room to shine (or shatter glass) and Bjork bjorks around harmlessly, sounding particularly nice playing call-and-response with the DP’s vowel sound montage on “On and Ever Onward.” Don’t play this one for your cat.
At this point, The Clientele has proven itself the most reliable band in chamber-pop: nearly ever year, like clockwork, the band issues another set of lingering guitar arpeggios, hushed but yearning vocals and daydream philosophizing that you’ll want to clutch to your ears until the London-band issues its next installment. The group’s next outing is the mini-album Minotaur, the follow-up to 2009′s psych-tinged Bonfires On The Heath; it is, as we’ve come to expect, thoroughly excellent — I’ll let the single speak, softly, for itself.
2010: The Year We Make Contact With Really Dreamy Records. The diversity of excellently synth-soaked, romantically sung releases hasn’t been so strong and broad since the peaks of shoegaze and New Wave, chillwave or no. Consider: The Radio Dept., Beach House, Wild Nothing, Puro Instinct, all wondrous, languorous artists who burrow deep in distorted warmth and gentle drum machines. Memoryhouse’s The Years EP joins them proudly. The music’s what you’d expect, but it’s the vocals that make the group step beyond their genre: singer Denise Nouvion doesn’t sink as deep into the sonic bed as many of her contemporaries, singing with an edge of Pam Berry (or Janeane Garofalo)-esque sarcasm and self-awareness that makes one wonder, as she herself might, what she’s doing swimming in slumberland. The answer’s easy, though: playing great songs. 
Naming your band “The Smiles” is pretty much asking for punchlines, but the Los Angeles group”s “Cala Cola” delivers on the nom de plume‘s promise. Jangly, sweet and high-energy in a way that recalls a beach-ready, less Africa/boat shoe-obsessed Vampire Weekend (and Rawkblog recent favorites International Waters), the track offers chill waves the old-fashioned way.
Because that’s what 
