Archive for March, 2010

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The Numerators // Human Blanket EP

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

Got to say, West Texas lo-fi heroes The Numerators have really outdone themselves lately. Between performing at some stellar SXSW gigs, taping a brand spankin’ new video, and planning an assault on the West Coast, the group has somehow found the time to record and release a crazy good six-track cassette-ready EP entitled Human Blanket which you can download FOR FREE from their website.

The disc is a fast and furious eleven minutes, blazing through each song as quickly as possible without coming up for air once. Before you know it, you’ll find yourselves hitting the end and pressing repeat to figure out what just happened. Fuzzed out, noise-filled, and as close of a replica as you’re going to get to their killer live show, Human Blanket shows what The Numerators do best: getting you off the wall and on the floor going crazy alongside every track. Check out two of my favorites from the recording below and cop the cassette from Burgers Records here (send a message/e-mail to the label):

The Numerators // That’s So Raiden

The Numerators // Green

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Two for Tuesday // Memoryhouse

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

For those uninitiated, Memoryhouse is the bedroom project of Canadians Evan Abeele and Denise Nouvion. Creating some of the most delectably ethereal tunes, the duo puts on ice the chillwave movement — stripping all the glitz and glamor (aka fast moving components) of a Neon Indian or a Washed Out, leaving only the most mellow of mellow parts. This music they create is what sweet dreams are made of.

The first track, and one of my favorites, is the beautifully atmospheric “Lately (Deuxième)”. Listening to the lyrics closely, you’ll find that the track chronicles the thoughts and feelings of someone in a coma (“Lately I’m not sleeping / I’m not breathing / without machines”) and their desire to end it all through their silent shouts of “shut me off”. Although the patient is in purgatory, the music is absolutely heavenly. The second track, entitled Präludium, is a soothing piano ballad with spaced out synths floating around. Constructed “during the heady days of the B.C. (Before Chillwave)” by Abeele before Memoryhouse was formed, the track is certainly the most delicate song I’ve heard in a while.

You can check out both the songs below and, if you dig the tunes, head over to their myspace to download their four-track EP The Years for free. Also, Salad Fork has the group’s most jammed out track “Radium Girls” on his Vertigo mixtape, which I would highly recommend checking out.

Memoryhouse // Lately (Deuxième)

Evan Abeele (of Memoryhouse) // Präludium (removed upon band’s indirect request)

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The Numerators // City of Gold [Video]

Monday, March 29th, 2010

What can I say, I’m a sucker for low-budget slow-motion videos. A preview of what’s to come on their upcoming West Coast tour, Lubbock’s own (or should I say Brooklyn bound?) lo-fi garage rockers The Numerators just unveiled their first music video since forever ago. Check it out below and, if you like it, snag the mp3:

The Numerators // City of Gold

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Stalker // Nausea

Monday, March 29th, 2010

Props to GOTC for this one! In the land of slow-motion molasses-flowing tracks, Stalker‘s “Nausea” is the new king. A quick glance at the ID3 Tags give all the information you need: Genre – “Dead”, BPM – “51″. Enough said. It seems like Stalker’s musical philosophy is that chopped & screwed tracks don’t go far enough — opting to raise the pendulum weight on the metronome to produce uncomfortable tempos, dragging you along with every beat.

Stalker’s been recently releasing a track a day from his (her?) site and, from the look of things, they might be taking a short break before leaking out more material. For those like myself with a late introduction, here are two of the best tracks I could find:

Stalker // Nausea

Stalker // eeee

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David Byrne & Fatboy Slim // Here Lies Love Sampler

Saturday, March 27th, 2010

One of the things I like doing when sitting at home with nothing to do is to randomly search the Bandcamp artist listings to see if there is anything good that catches my eye (seldom there is, however). Much to my surprise, on my most recent scavenger hunt I spotted a very familiar thumbnail image of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s upcoming collaborative album Here Lies Love tucked away in the directory listing.

The three track sampler features the already released and widely circulated Santigold-contributing song “Please Don’t” as well as two other tracks which I haven’t seen anywhere outside of filesharing sites.

The first is a standard country track entitled “A Perfect Hand” featuring the legendary singer-songwriter Steve Earle. Opening with the lyrics “They’re occupying our country / we were almost overrun / I knew if I did not react / they’d kill us, everyone”, the song could double as a Tea Party rallying cry, overshadowing the intended depiction of the life and times of Imelda Marcos — the wife of the Philippines’ former dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The track is a stadium-ready jam that is very fitting for the hardcore troubadour. “Dancing Together”, the second “new” song on the sampler (and arguably my favorite), is a disco-funk track featuring the soulful sound of Sharon Jones.

You can stream the full tracks from the collab’s bandcamp page and you can also hear 30 second iTunes-ready snippets of each song from the album’s official site. As for the record itself, it drops April 6th on Todomundo/Nonesuch Records.

David Byrne & Fatboy Slim // Please Don’t (ft. Santigold)

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Spiritualized // Flux Festival ’98 [Bootleg]

Friday, March 26th, 2010

You’d be hard pressed to find a bigger Spiritualized fan than myself. That’s why it was so surprising when I came across a live recording of theirs from the 1998 Flux Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland which I haven’t heard before. Although it doesn’t dethrone the ’98 Roskilde taping as my favorite bootleg of all time by J. Spaceman & Co., the Flux Festival performance is one of the most unique live sets of theirs that I’ve listened to.

Backed on all tracks by a full choir leading to almost unrecognizable arrangements of Spiritualized’s most recognizable songs, it’s refreshing that the performance is more of a fusion of Jason Pierce’s space-rock music with standard church hymnals rather than a typical Spiritualized performance with some organ here and there. Although dedicating three of the eleven tracks of their live set solely to the choir may have been a bit much, the hybrid version of “Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space” makes it all worthwhile as it might be the best thing I’ve ever heard. It’s damn good.

No doubt the recording could be of better quality (keep in mind this was the pre-internet age), however, the roughness makes you almost feel like you are there witnessing the show alongside the sea of Brits. You can download the complete set here or, if you’re just interested in a taste, check out my favorites below:

Spiritualized // Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating in Space (Live Flux Festival ’98)

Spiritualized // Lord Can You Hear Me (Live Flux Festival ’98)

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Fulmarine Petrels // Absolute Social Deixis

Friday, March 26th, 2010

Although both the band name Fulmarine Petrels and the track title “Absolute Social Deixis” are phrases that could be easily misconstrued as show-offy Vampire Weekend lyrics, these Scranton, Pennsylvania indie-rockers are anything but pretentious with their music. Laid-back and chillaxed throughout the 5 minute song, “Absolute Social Deixis” is best listened to while soaking up the sun on a lounge chair with two Piña Coladas within arms reach.

No doubt, the best part of the track for me is the charmingly relatable lyrics about a party that I’m sure everyone in the world has attended at least once. I mean, who hasn’t found themselves “after midnight in a stranger’s house there is / talk of water being rationed out and the / smell of drugs in the next room / next room” or had “tunnel vision on the steps outside”? No one, that’s who.

Although the song’s not entirely perfect (for one, the mid-section instrumental drags on a bit too long) and their album is a bit hit or miss at times, Fulmarine Petrels still provides enough singles throughout their freely downloadable album to at least get you pumped about their pair of upcoming EPs. You can check out “Absolute Social Deixis” as well as my other favorite from Yes No Minutes Seconds, the danceable “French Amplifier” below:

Fulmarine Petrels // Absolute Social Deixis

Fulmarine Petrels // French Amplifier

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Videos for the Veekend // 3|26 – 3|28

Friday, March 26th, 2010

Surprisingly, I haven’t thrown up one of these video round-ups in about a month. So let’s cut to the chase and bring you some of my favorite music related finds from this past week:

Probably one of the best in-studio video recordings I’ve seen since The Morning Benders Yours Truly session, Annie Lennox (St. Vincent), Liars, OS Mutantes, and Beck all look like they are having fun covering the famed 80s and early 90s Australian rock group INXS [via GvB]:

Props to the guys over at Schmooze Blog for being the first to notice this awesomely constructed summer encapsulating video for the much-buzzed-about band Cults‘s track “Go Outside”:

Really been loving the latest Beko release by the French group La Femme — especially their killer track “Sur La Planche” (or, if my high school French skills are to be trusted, “On the Board” for us Anglophiles). Posted literally minutes ago on the always wonderful Delicious Scopitone, here is a spy-like vid for La Femme’s electro-haunting track “Françoise”:

Although relatively poor quality, here is Josiah and Yoni from Why? covering the beautiful Silver Jews track “Trains Across the Sea” a year and a half ago in Le Havre, France:

The tag-team duo of sweet singer Laura Gibson & mulit-instrumentalist Ethan Ross released a music video for their track “Younger” about two weeks back. Although I’m a little late to the party, the video is so beautifully shot that it is worth a second look even if you’ve already seen it:

Keeping it Portland, here’s the latest music video for White Hinterland‘s “Amsterdam” which You Ain’t No Picasso appropriately captioned as “easily the best video about wolves and pickles I’ve ever seen”:

What’s a video round-up without La Blogotheque? This time it’s five tracks from the artist of the year nominee Beach House:

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Old Bowl // Sand Swimming

Friday, March 26th, 2010

Isn’t purple such an underrepresented color? I mean, other than being the hue of the most famous Teletubby and having two shades in the popular mnemonic device, our short wavelength friend seems to be left out in the cold. I mean, boys can’t stand it and girls even seem to overlook it nowadays, so what’s a color to do?

Leave it to the the self-described “neighborhood kids” of Old Bowl to resurrect the shade of royalty. In their latest video for the track “Sand Swimming”, the blazing West Texas sunshine is uniquely purple filtered, providing soothing and cool visuals which compliment the chilled-out instrumental track:

If you like the music and/or the video, you can download Old Bowl’s entire 20-track debut LP entitled eggs pear, I meant for free from their myspace page, or if you want a shorter introduction, here are two of my favorite songs, the simply sweet “Heart v. Heart” and the slightly off-kilter sing-along track “You Wish”:

Old Bowl // Heart v. Heart

Old Bowl // You Wish

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The Letter Box Project // Memory Static

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

I’ll admit it: I’m a sucker for hazy superimposed images where I have no idea what is going on in them (however, I think I can vaguely discern a giant Curious George head in the foreground). The picture above is taken from the myspace page of one Tyler Bates, otherwise known as The Letter Box Project, whose music just so happens to parallel the foggy nature of the photo.

About a month back, Bates sent along a digital excerpt of his latest creation, the aptly titled Memory Static, which is a collection of fluidly moving songs that are sure to garner a handful of listens from Toro y Moi and Julian Lynch fans. Out of the eight tracks included in the abridged .zip, the two that stood out in my mind were the spaced-out “Flashback” and the bass thumping “Epilogue (Funeral Pyre)”.

With “Flashback”, Bates channels his inner Lindstrøm and weaves together an astronomical work filled with sci-fi bloops & bleeps and undulating synth swells — using a series of crescendo/decrescendos about as effective as his Norwegian predecessor. On the other hand, “Epilogue (Funeral Pyre)” is a slow moving head banger that’s more industrial than interstellar. With a blaring bass beat that could provide plenty of flash for a creeping rap-free ’67 Chevy Impala (if there is such a thing!), the track evolves imperceptibly by slowly layering whole-note synth lines on top of each other before stripping them off one-by-one abruptly towards the end of the track.

Fortunately, almost all of Mr. Bates’s work is downloadable from his Sound Cloud page which houses the demo version of Memory Static, his last EP entitled Oceans, and other miscellaneous tracks. However, if you just want a sample, check out the two tracks below as well as his trippy video to the Arthur Miller-approved “Death of a Salesman”:

The Letter Box Project // Flashback

The Letter Box Project // Epilogue (Funeral Pyre)

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