Got sent over this track from the London group Slandercat a couple of weeks back (my effort at end rhyme!). Haven’t had a chance to dive into the EP they released for free on bandcamp yet, but if “‘Broom Tree” is any indication, it’s going to be a good listen. Marked by an earth shattering bass pulse and booming percussive “clap”, the track is bumpin’ to say the least. The vocals enter near the one-minute mark and are a bit mismatched with the thunderous instrumentals, but nevertheless, it’s a pretty solid track. You can take a listen to it below and, if you dig it, download the whole Blood of a Broom Tree EP here.
After releasing one of my favorite 7”s of 2009, I’ve been super pumped for everything Fresh & Onlys. Their latest LP, entitled Play It Strange, is set to be released October 12 on In the Red Records and if “Waterfall” is any indication, it’ll be the best Fresh & Onlys album to date. CAN’T WAIT FOR THIS!
And if you’re living in Salt Lake City, the band is swinging by October 2 to play a set at The Woodshed (is there a better name for a small venue?) with openers Royal Baths.
San Fran’s Blackbird Blackbird has slowly been cropping up all over the blogs this past summer and, as a result, amassed a sizable following. Armed with a trunk full of tracks, remixes, and collaborations — all released since April — this guy is quite the workaholic, and for anyone who follows his twitter feed, there seems to be no stop to the deluge of released material in the foreseeable future.
Even more shocking than Blackbird Blackbird’s prolificness is the quality: every single track is an auto-hit. The two most recently shared tracks, “Fade to White” and “Starlight”, are certainly no exception. With a foundation grounded in “chillwave” (god forgive the name), atmospheric, and bedroom pop, it’s really tough to nail down a proper descriptor for Blackbird Blackbird’s music. Thankfully, this diversity of sound is what sets his music apart from the unlistenable set of imitators. Both of the new tracks have an added layer of female vocals, provided by Emily Reo and Steph Thompson respectively, which definitely compliments the delicate sound of each song.
“Fade to White” is a beautifully constructed track whose phrasing gives it such fluid motion. Reo’s vocals are soft-spoken and placed more in the midground, achieving a delicate balance between being spotlighted and completely overlooked (if the listen wants, they can easily pick out the vox, or if they’d rather just be washed over by the music as a whole, they can do that too). Now “Starlight” is a completely different beast. If there was ever track that was made for the latter stages of a discotheque party, it’s this one. Thompson’s stretched out, whole-note heavy vocals are a perfect pair to the midtempo, woozy synth lines fluttering about around her.
You can download the two tracks below and, while you’re at it, head on over to Blackbird Blackbird bandcamp’s page for a more complete collection of songs (you might want to do it quite because it seems that bandcamp is a contentious issue with Blackbird Blackbird).
Not one to brag, but I think I am in the top tier of Korallreven fans in the world. Due to my lengthy stint in Scandinavia, I think I will always have an incredibly large soft spot for Scandinavian musicians (see: jj, Jens Lekman, Taken By Trees, Raveonettes, Air France, ceo, etc…). Korallreven seems to be the Swedish import du jour, and this 22 minute mix that they put together is just one of the many reasons why.
The majority of the mix is an assortment of remixes and mash-ups — some of them theirs (SALEM, Taken By Trees), some of them other people’s (Teengirl Fantasy remix of Memoryhouse’s “Lately”, and of course slow-mo Bieber) — with some solid hits interspersed throughout. Love the start, love the mid-section, and the finale is phenomenal. This is a picture perfect blending of sound that is going to get more than the standard single listen for mixes.
Check out the track list below and download that shit (43Mb): (via GvB)
Somei Satoh // Organics | Inkuyo // Wipala
Korallreven & Taken By Trees // Honey Mine
Justin Bieber // U Smile (Shamanti’s 800 % Slower Version)
Inkuyo // Wipala
Cola Boy // 7 Ways to Love
Taken By Trees // No Letting Go (Korallreven’s Life’s a Bitch Version)
jj // My Way
Primal Scream // Higher Than the Sun (American Spring Remix)
Justin Bieber // U Smile (Shamanti’s 800 % Slower Version | Julianna Barwick // Bode
Memoryhouse // Lately (Teengirl Fantasy Natural Mix)
Walls // Burnt Sienna | Vashti Bunyan // Just Another Diamond Day
French Montana & Curren$y // So High
SALEM // Frost (Korallreven’s Indian Summer Version)
So yeah, it’s been five months since the last show I went to, which kind of sucks, I know. Even before I moved to Utah, I had a feeling that the drought would end when Owen Ashworth, aka Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, embarked on his farewell tour and was planning a stop in the basement of a record store here in Salt Lake City. I knew that seeing Ashworth in such an intimate venue and on such a sentimental occasion would be the best way to hear the sweetly constructed tunes of his before he hangs up the Casiotone moniker forever (he’ll still be recording music, only under the name Advance Bass from now on).
Playing mostly tracks of Vs. Children, his latest and arguably most well-received LP from his past thirteen years of recording, the show was less about reminiscing and more about celebrating the present and the future. Even after seeing Ashworth in person, it was difficult to gauge the emotional impact of this farewell tour on him, and at times I even got the impression that he’s ready to strike the final nail into the Casiotone coffin and just be done with it. Maybe that’s why he sort of “played it safe” with the show, hammering out slow-to-medium tempo songs one-by-one for forty-five minutes before calling it quits, sans encore, once his solo performance of “Tonight Was a Disaster” ended.
Or maybe it has something to do with his backing band, the Australian group Otouto, not being comfortable playing some more of his zanier, uptempor songs (here’s looking at you “Oh, Illinois!” and “Jeanie, If You’re Ever in Portland”) on such short notice, but the whole event fell a little flat for me. It makes me wonder why he even embarked on this tour, considering for his last stint across the US, the setlist was composed entirely of fan’s e-mail requests — a spot on way to end a project and a perfect way to say “thank you” to all the listeners over the years.
Not to say that the performance wasn’t good, because it was, but I guess I had impossible-to-meet expectations. Having the female vocalists from Otouto harmonizing on each track was certainly an added plus (“the first time I’ve had a band when playing in Utah”) — making songs like “Northfield, NM” sound ten times better than if Ashworth were to do it solo. Also, “Natural Light” and “Tom Jones…” should have been recorded on the spot and used for some live CD or something. All-in-all, it wasn’t the life affirming experience I was hoping for, but it was a great way to spend a Sunday evening.
Below, you can find a couple of my favorite Casiotone for the Painfully Alone tracks and a video of “Christmas in Oakland” recorded at the show. Also, The Flat Response has a nice bootleg of CFTPA’s show in Denver from the night before.
If you’ve visited the Lefse Records site recently, you can’t really miss that their latest release is from Ireland’s dark electro-pop outfit Low Sea. The label sent over two tracks from the LP, ironically enitled The Light, and I got to say that I’ve fallen head over heals with the group.
On casual first listen, I automatically lumped the group together with the music of Vancouver’s Cosmetics — they both have a back-alley dance party feel to them — however, on repeat listens it’s easy to distinguish the sounds of the two. For one, Low Sea relies more on lyrics and less on the bloops & bleeps of synthesizers, opting to tell a story first and providing dance fodder second. Stretching the tracks to their absolute maximum in length (6:12, 6:59 respectively), the group varies the music just enough so you don’t really get tired of listening and/or dancing to the beat.
Don’t really know why I haven’t posted about these killer Craig Cruiser tracks yet. I’ve pretty much had them on constant repeat ever since Widows/Watch brought them to my attention about a month ago. The brainchild of the Ice Cream Dreams blogger, Craig Cruiser demolishes each song with a series of punishing bass beats, leaving the airy synths there to pick up the pieces. Or, as the ladies put it, “modern retro-bangers”.
You can check out my two favorites from this six-song EP below (with “Tubing” being so good, I included it in my latest mix) and you can download the whole thing for free from Craig Cruiser’s bandcamp page.
Putting aside for a minute all the connotations an album entitled Ω has, these two tracks sent over by the still-mysterious, ambient electronic musician RxRy are pretty breathtaking. Although combined, it’s only about 3 minutes of atmospheric bliss — the two tracks are more than enough to whet your appetite for the upcoming record (which, according to his blog, is four songs in as of last week). So brush the dust off your headphones, take a minute to enjoy “Negat-ve Patterns” and “Bl∞dy Knuckle”, and pray to God that this isn’t the last release from RxRy:
Been waiting for LA musician Adam Anderson, aka Rraaiillss, to drop his first full-length album ever since he stunned me with his demo tracks a couple of months back. Mathematically entitled 1098 (which, for a numbers nerd like myself, got my brain spinning), the 12-track digitally released record spans a wide range of genres — shoegaze, lo-fi rock, indie-pop, noise — making it almost a chronicle of 90s/00s musical trends. What’s crazy is that he doesn’t fall short with his wide-reaching goal of the LP. I mean every track is an insta-hit, and it’s notjust mesaying that.
Interspersed throughout the album are some of Anderson’s well-received demo tracks, however, his new tracks pack just as much punch. “Out of the Bag” sounds like an old school Raveonettes song (circa Whip It On) with simple driving drums, a catchy-as-hell guitar line, and anthem-ready hazy vocals while “Kissoff” (no, not a Violent Femmes cover song) is cut in much of the same fashion. No doubt, the most interesting track in them mix is “Halogen” which features some shredding guitar licks and semi-whispered vocals reminiscent of the more raucous Spiritualized songs.
Although Anderson’s music reminds me of so many of my all-time favorite bands, he’s still able to cut out a sizable section of never-before-discovered sounds, and that’s what makes his music so exciting to listen to. It’s like you get a hint of the past and a taste of the future with every track. Below, you can listen/download “When You Feel Like…”, which is one of my top-five tracks of the year so far, as well as see a cool vid composed of, what else, archive.org footage! After you’ve been easily won over by the tune, head on over to Rraaiillss bandcamp page where you can stream the album for free or purchase it for a measly $9.99 (of course, I recommend the latter).
It’s been quite the journey. I started Part-Time Music about two and a half years ago while I was an engineering grad student in Denmark. Although a lot has changed geographically with me (Denmark -> Germany -> Texas -> Oregon -> Utah), the site has remained mostly the same since its inception — opting to stay with the “default” wordpress template throughout chieftly due to my ever-shrinking free time and my lack of web design skills. For me, the blog has never been about readership, or page hits, or ad $$ (the only one up is for an iPhone app my bro made), it’s been about the music. It’s always been about the music. I have nothing but the utmost respect for all the creative minds out there in the world doing things I know I could never do. With the site, all I ever wanted to do is piece together a few kind words to say about all the artists I’ve grown to love over the years and give a little praise (albeit a relatively small amount in this giant blog-o-world we live in) and maybe provide some motivation for them to keep going.
Anyways, enough sentimental stuff — let’s get on to the freebies! To celebrate this 300th post achievement as well as my recent move to Utah, I put together a collection of vinyl that I think best represents what my blog is about (starting upper left, moving clockwise):
Grouper // He Knows, He Knows, He Knows 7” // Incredibly super limited self-made vinyl by Portland’s dark experimentalist Liz Harris
Sleater-Kinney // The Hot Rock LP // Sleater-Kinney is one of my favorite bands of all-time. This is one of my favorite albums of theirs (released in 1999, pretty sure this is a repress as it’s brand new in package).
Dirty Projectors & Castanets // Unusual Animals Vol. 2 // A split 10” celebrating the Maned Three-Toed Sloth by experimental rockers The Dirty Projectors and alt country-ers Castanets. Released in 2006 on Sufjan Steven’s Asthmatic Kitty Records. Probably the most random release I’ve seen.
Big Boi // Sir Lucious Left Foot… // Who wouldn’t want the best rap record released this year? (Alternate cover, limited edition!)
So yeah, that’s it! A lot of limited releases, a lot of my favorite bands, a lot of random (yet cool) stuff. Mad props to Slowtrain here in Salt Lake City for having a lot of these releases in stock.
To win, just retweet this here message and/or leave an inspiring comment below (US residents are only eligible to win, if you leave a comment be sure to include a valid e-mail addy so I can get back to you). Thanks again to all my long-time readers and cheers to my new fans! Hope you find something you like!
