The Whitehaus Family, a Massachusetts collective (yes, another one), has put out an exceptional compilation highlighting folk and experimental electro-psychedelic acts the label is known for. Already home to buzzworthy bands Truman Peyote and Prince Rama, Whitehaus also has its share of unknown gems that shine brighly on this 27-track double LP.
Two of these such acts, and my personal favorites from the record, are the jungle beats of Many Mansions and the dark Mountain Man-esque a cappella rounds of Anna Rochinski — both of which you can check out below. You can stream the entire compilation as well as order the double LP in physical or digital format (the later costing you only $5) at the collective’s bandcamp page. And while you’re at it, head on over to their online store to see if any other titles deserve attention from your wallet.
Cecil from Gobble Gobble has to be one of the hardest working musicians out there these days. It seems that every two weeks I get an update from him concerning new songs or new projects that I can hardly keep up. Case in point, this remix tape appropriate entitled Gobbl’d Volume I set to be released in physical form by Scotch Tapes sometime in July (with cover art by Jheri over at GOTC).
Composed of tracks that he’s steadily been releasing the past couple of months on myspace under the heading GBL GBL RMX CABARET, the tape showcases not only Cecil’s talent of reconstructing a song from the ground-up but also his incredibly eclectic taste in music. I mean, I like to consider myself at least moderately informed when it comes to emerging groups and even then I find myself googling half the band names on the tape for the first time just to find out how the original sounds! If the whole “music thing” doesn’t work out — something that looks less and less likely as time goes by — there is certainly a spot for him in the blog world.
Below are two of my favorite tracks from the remix tape. If you like what you hear, for a limited time you can download the entire tape for free from Gobble Gobble’s tumblr page.
After a couple of repeat listens, I have to say that I’ve fallen head-over-heels for this group. First off, the band name is not only the best thing I’ve heard in a long time, but is strangely the best description of their sound: tasty pop gems oftentimes surrounded by viscous instrumentation (most evident in tracks like “Glass Mask”). Secondly, the songs absolutely kick ass all around. The tape opens with “(Baby) You’re a Starfish”, a track with a driving repetitive bass line and pulsating keyboard chords making it sound like the love child of Explode Into Colors and The Allah Las — which for me is always a winning combination.
“(Baby) You’re a Starfish” certainly sets the tone of the EP as the band blazes through “Glass Mask”, “Nobody’s Girl”, and “Julie K” in much of the same fashion. The second half of the release (presumably the flip-side to the Snuggle Hound Records cassette) features their most downtempo, chilled-out track in “Memory Foam” as well as two cover songs. The dark, slightly creepy, “Underwear” by the Magnetic Fields gets a face-lift with bassist Lindsay Crudele and guitarist Tim Scholl providing upbeat harmonizing vocals, striping the original track of any hint of back-alley seductiveness. The eight-song EP ends on a bit of a low point with a muddled rendition of Cuby & The Blizzards “Your Body Not Your Soul” that drags along a little too much making you long for the sharp guitar rifts of the original. Hey, 7 great tracks out of 8 certainly isn’t bad for a debut!
Check out two of my favorites from Ooh Mommy below and, if you like it, head to their website to download the whole thing at the cost of an e-mail address. Also, check out Thick Shakes’ muxtape page for some “baby demos and new songs.”
It’s been a while since I’ve done a record review, but Pill Wonder‘s Jungle/Surf 12”, released on the much heralded Underwater Peoples label, is just what I need to snap out of my slump. Adhering to the records appellation to a T, the vinyl is thematically split — the A-side being more “earthy” and the B-side more “beachy”, as you would expect — showcasing the diversity of these Washington experimentalists. Producing some of the most original full-band stuff I’ve heard in quite sometime, it’s hard to pinpoint (or, as bands would say, “pigeonhole”) Pill Wonder’s sound. All your left with after an initial listen is a favorable impression and the desire to spin the record on repeat.
No doubt, the vinyl’s highlights are found in the mid-section of each side. Marked by a mishmash of percussion noise and a persistent squeaky sound, which I can only describe as a distractive recorder-gone-bad, the openers of both faces on the 12” (“Foggg Eater” and “Wasted By the Screen”, respectively) certainly don’t put the band’s best foot forward. However, all is forgotten and forgiven when the needle jumps to track 2. On the A-side, “What We Know” begins with an assortment of wildlife sounds which matched perfectly the animal projections they had displayed when I caught them live back in November. After about a minute of this, the melody begins to rise up from the jungle floor and whispered vocals — the type that is more secretive than seductive — take over the track. Towards the end, the “bubbling feeling” that is present throughout the song gets manifested literally by a rapid-echo on the “AAoohhs” before seamlessly transitioning into the next track. Arguably my favorite in the bunch, “Being Bored”, with its legato couplets at the beginning and end of each phrase and its bouncy beat, is a lot of fun to listen to and, I’d imagine, a lot of fun to record.
As for the B-side, the second track, entitled “Gone to the Market”, is a verifiable jammm. Equipped with a head-bobbing intro and chant-able repeated lyrics of “and they look you in the eye”, the track will easily rouse the most arms-crossed of hipster crowds and have them singing in unison to the “AAAAOOOooohhhs” by the end. After the dancing to “Gone to Market” ends and the dust is settled, the record concludes with two of Pill Wonder’s most ballad-like songs: “Family Vacation” and “When I Look Back”. The former is a pleasant-enough track that brings the listener off their high and back to planet earth while the latter is short and sweet enough to serve as a perfect palate cleanser to an otherwise raucous record.
Give a listen to “Gone to Market” and “What We Know” below as well as check out the amazing, but mildly-NSFW, video they put together for “Wishing Whale” (the closer to the A-side). And if you like what you hear, cop the record from Underwater Peoples’s store here.
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”:
Seems that while I was on break, a lotof thingshappened. But let’s not harp on the past, but rather dive head first into the future with, ironically, a band named Girls in the Eighties.
Now I’m not quite sure how I suddenly had a series of mp3s from this Nashville fuzzed-out group appear in my iTunes library, but thankfully it happened. Evidently, it can happen to you as well, as the band is giving away their debut, entitled Teenage Royalty, FOR FREE from their myspace page (or, for the less stingy, you can send them along $5 for a physical copy). What I like most about Girls in the Eighties’s album is how they somehow manage to mash together noise rock with mainstream pop without any blend occurring whatsoever. Just like water and oil in a bottle – together in the same container yet completely separate and distinguishable — it seems on every song you have a certain catchy-ness that you would find on the Billboard Top 100 while simultaneously blasting your ears with reverb filled vocals and staticy guitar lines. I mean, sure, we’ve heard plenty of roughed-up pop songs to go around this past year, but where The Pains of Being Pure at Hearts of the world work to blend together the elements of the two worlds, Girls in the Eighties are more keen on separation.
No track is a better example of this than their opener “Vacation”. Take away the bullhorn screamed vocals and the warbled looped sample midway through, and what you’re left with is a crystal clear pop-rock track that could be featured on Now That’s What I Call Music 33. It’s like they know that these tracks could be Grey’s Anatomy bound and are intentionally screwing them up with noise, all while giving a collective middle finger to mainstream music companies. Brilliant!
Now certainly, Girls In the Eighties bend both ways across the happy medium they found with “Vacation”. “Teenage Royalty”, for example, is much more muddled with only a discernible melody during the chorus and is frequently clouded with random electro bloops & beeps fluttering every which way. On the other hand, “Yesterday’s Don’t Mean Shit” and “Too Cool For This Crowd” venture too much into your High School Senior Class Song territory, but, fortunately, both are salvaged by their cheeky lyrics. If anything can be said about Teenage Royalty is that it’s a fun listen that’s good for a play pretty much anytime.
Found a copy at my local record of Austrian avante-garde extraordinaire Christian Fennesz‘s post-Black Sea 12” single entitled “June” which was limitedly released on Table of Elements, and man is it a doozie! This vinyl must be pretty obscure since there is no record of it on his wikipedia page and there are only a few places online selling it, ranging in price from $20 to £17 + shipping — almost as bad as a Mexican Summer release! Showcasing an etching on the A-side of what looks like a cartoon dragon eating a banana, this slab of orange wax is more aesthetically pleasing to the eyes than to the ears.
Although some will balk at the price tag for an album which only houses a bizarrely constructed five-minute track, with “June”, Fennesz puts together a hauntingly droney piece that’s a natural fit with the mentally taxing Black Sea. In typical Fennesz-fashion, musical textures are front and center — although much sharper and coarser than anything off its LP predecessor. Somehow included as part of Table of Elements 15th anniversary Guitar Series (featuring a slew of limited edition single-sided 12” vinyls), the spidery concoction of string plucks Fennesz highlights on the song isn’t remotely near anyone’s notion of what a “guitar series” track should song like.
Well don’t take my word on it, you can check out an mp3 of the track below:
Finding anything on Brooklyn based psychedelic folk rockers Woods before their stellar 2009 LP Songs of Shame is like finding a needle in a Burj Dubai-sized mound of hay. Check out their self-run label: nothing but a recently release 7”. Their subsidiary tape-only sister label: Sold-Out. Every single record store in Portland: nadda. Other than a couple of blog postings, it’s like they didn’t exist before 2009. The only opportunity I’ve seen of finding early Woods stuff was when I caught them on tour this past fall, where I purchased a reissue of their 2007 nine-song S/T album, recorded under the moniker Woods Family Creeps, without any hesitation. One would think that with an initial pressing of 300 and a subsequent one of 1000, copies would be at least somewhat available, but it seems that Woods fans are diehard collectors, leaving a $125 copy on ebay as the only alternative for the tardy listener.
When one listens to the earlier stuff, it’s kind of incredible how much they’ve changed in a span of a couple of years. Where Songs of Shame are an equal-parts blend of catchy pop hooks and psychedelic rock, their Woods Family Creeps stuff is almost entirely composed of mushroom-trip-gone-wrong type of material. The album starts with the cultish opening jam “End to End” which is full of ritualistic chants and spidery guitars that sends shivers down your spine before a 1812 Overture-like audio assault ends the two and a half minute track. The next song, arguably the most interesting in the bunch, “Creeps Collage” has a sound that is true to its name. Featuring a collection of 30-45 second snippets of recordings — ranging from full-on experimental to soothing acoustic folk — smashed together and lumped as a single track, it’s something you hardly ever see outside of a Girl Talk album.
Contrary to the eerie surrounding tracks, the A-side’s third song “Twisted Tongue” pleasant sounding — dare I say sweet — melody could have easily been considered an outtake or B-side to Songs of Shame. Coming in at just over two minutes, the track is a short reprieve from the haunting landscape set by the rest of A-side. Prominently featuring Jeremy Earl falsetto voice (and harmonizing nonetheless!), the track is home to such lyrical gems as “trade your lover for another / lover / you’ve been told you are a mother / fucker” and some other stuff that would appease the apostate youth (“oh you got to run from the fallen son / you got a twisted tongue”).
The B-side continues the mood set by its flip-side counter part. The opener “Howling on Howling” is almost a mirror image of “End to End” with one of the most disturbing Kum Bay Ya circles I’ve ever listened to. With the lo-fi recording method and the constant tape hiss present, it makes you feel as if you are more overhearing intimate bedroom takes rather than bearing witness to a finished product. Maybe this “reading somebody else’s diary without permission” feeling is what makes listening to Woods Family Creeps so, for lack of a better word, creepy. Maybe this ultra-private feel to Woods’s past records is what makes them so damn hard to find; they’re meant to not be heard by a mass audience. This is good for the band’s allure, bad news for the hordes of fans that are thirsty for a full discography of material.
Here are a couple of tracks from the LP to give you a taste of the pre-Songs of Shame Woods. The first two I would say are atypical examples (leaps and bounds more pop than most of the tracks), while the final one, “Sleep Sleep Sleep”, is more representative of the album as a whole.
Ever since I first caught wind of the project a couple months back, I’ve been counting down the days until Fanfarlo’s iTunes session become finally available, and today is the day! Included in the EP are live recordings of five hits from their Reservoir LP as well as a cover of the Smashing Pumpkins track “We Only Come Out at Night”.
I was first introduced to the band through a post made by IGIF this past spring and was subsequently turned into a rabid fan when NPR posted an amazing Tiny Desk concert (which, with five performers, wasn’t that tiny). Although the band has been rigorously compared to Arcade Fire or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and vocalist Simon Balthazar has gotten plenty of Zach Condon-like references, they have still been able to carve out a niche for themselves, bringing in flocks of fans who appreciate their complex, smooth sounding full-band arrangements.
You can check out Fanfarlo’s version of the classic Smashing Pumpkins’s song as well as a past cover of Bonnie Prince Billy’s track “A Minor Place” below:
I’m always amazed at the crazy releases record stores somehow are able to procure, and every now and then I find myself purchasing them just because of the rareness factor. Now this has proved disastrous on occasion (apparently Best Coast was also the name of a late 90s punk group), but this time when I caught a glipse of a limited edition EP from Spiritualized, one of my favorites British bands, I knew I had a winner.
Information about the recording is scant at best, with most of the stuff I was able to find coming from the Spiritualized website (even the label they recorded it for has been absorbed by Universal since the 2003 release, with their website evaporating into thin air). Basically, a month before they released their 2003 full-length Amazing Grace the group decided to split up the tracks on the LP into three highly limited EPs. The one I found was the first installment in the threesome, uncreatively titled Amazing Grace EP (1 of 3), featuring none other than frontman J. Spaceman on the cover.
If you are an avid Spiritualized fan, then the music on the EP isn’t anything new. Although not in the exact order you would find on the LP, the featured tracks “Cheapster”, “Hold On”, “Never Goin’ Back”, and “The Powers and the Glory” are identical to what’s on the full-length. The only interesting thing to think about is why these songs were chosen to be lumped together.
Even though they were five years away from completing their trompe d’oeil with A&E, there are a surprising amount of similarities between Amazing Grace EP 1 and their future work — especially concerning the structure of the album. One thing I noted in my description of A&E on my Top Albums of 2008 list (#2) was how it was essentially a triptych with the three parts being instrumental / alt. country / rock & roll. Even though there are only four songs on the EP, it follows in the same pattern. The first track on both the A & B sides (“Cheapster” and “Never Goin’ Back”) are classic rock anthems that are certainly stadium-ready. After the noisy one-minute intro, “Hold On” slips into country/folk acoustic ballad territory while “The Power and the Glory” is an instrumental jamfest — and voilà the tri-force is complete.
So, yeah, kind of cool stuff, especially if you are Spiritualized fan like myself. In an effort to convert the non-fans, check out two tracks off of Amazing Grace below:
