Two great videos surfaced today from the Primavera Sound Festival that wrapped up yesterday in Barcelona. Although both vids are shot from the outer rim of the crowd and are optically zoomed in to the max, the integrity of the audio remains pretty much intact (a surprise in festival settings).
The first video is of the inevitable cover of Wavves’s “So Bored” by PT-Music favorites Best Coast:
The second is a smooth recording of Real Estate’s “Fake Blues”. Enjoy!
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And here is one more Primavera 2010 video dug up from the depths of youtube, this time “Cold Freezing Night” by The Books:
Shane & Gabe have a dream. A dream to host the raddest festival that ever existed.
That’s the intro to one of the latest kickstarter music projects that caught my eye. I got to hand it to these two dudes, they certainly know how to dream big! Coordinating with the folks at Underwater Peoples Records, Shane and Gabe have decided to crank their music love affair to 11 and are trying to put on a very impressive one-day, listener-funded festival in upstate New York.
No doubt the largest obstacle this festival needs to overcome is the $65,000 that must be raised in a one month time frame — an amount that, according to a back-of-an-envelope calculation, equates to sixty-two $35 tickets sold daily — however, the coordinators seem undaunted by the challenge. Smartly, the group has already launched a kickstarter page to help generate funds, resulting in a type of transparency you don’t usually get with events of this magnitude. Not only can you track in real-time how many attendees the festival will have (something a data nerd like myself loves), but you also get a rough break-down of the expenditures: sound & lights = $4000, venue rental = $3000, and, impressively, $48750 = band fees, just to name a few.
So if you know you’ll be in New York or a surrounding state on Saturday, July 24, do yourself a favor and reserve your ticket now and check out the most kickass festival Saratoga Springs, NY has ever seen!
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:
No doubt, the mind-boggling amount of bands that descend upon Austin for the annual clusterfuck of SXSW is more than enough to overwhelm even the most seasoned music fan. Thankfully, music blogs, magazines, and random celebrity chefs sift through the clutter and put together some tremendous showcases, thus making the job of 6th St. wonderers a lot easier.
However, even with artists and bands divided in this fashion, the number of curated stages is still enough to put your head in a spin. After looking through the myriad of sponsored sets, here are four of my favorites:
My favorite in the bunch, this Gorilla Vs. Bear/Mexican Summer Party is probably the event that everyone will be talking about during the festival. Although my Swedish faves jj dropped off the line-up, the event is still stacked with some of the best up-and-comers out there. I mean, out of the 16 bands playing, who do you not want to see?!?!
Billed as a “girl blogger rock and roll party”, this showcase put on by the female blogging trio Visitation Rites, Pixelhorse, and Microphone Memory Emotion features a wealth of Underwater Peoples signees, which is never a bad thing. Family Portrait: check. Pill Wonder: check. Alex Bleeker & The Freaks: check. Seriously, this alone is enough to warrant attendance! So seeing Twin Sister, Cloud Nothings, Campfires, and all the other bands on the bill certainly feels like icing on the cake.
I’ll be honest, the biggest reason why I dig this Weekly Tape Deck & Co. showcase is because of the amount of Lubbock bands that will be playing. If you go to this, get ready for your minds to be blown by the insane live set by noise-rockers The Numerators, the beautiful soundscapes of La Panza, and the alt-country flair (reminiscent of Whiskeytown) of One Wolf. Lubbockites aside, the three day showcase highlights a great collection of garage and noise artists that will be sure to compliment whatever wat you decide to order!
Last but not least are the guys down at I Guess I’m Floating, who just released their SXSW line-up yesterday — and man is it a doozie! This Friday early show, featuring Tanlines, Javelin, and Small Black/Washed Out, is sure to get you into a dance mood before heading out to the late-night festivities (or debaucheries, depending on your perspective) 6th St. is famous for!
With a vanity myspace URL of levarmotherfuckingburton, it’s obvious that Philadelphia noise-rock duo Reading Rainbow exploits its PBS namesake (hosted by a certain VISOR-wearing Star Trek alum). However, the similarities end with the moniker, because Robbie Garcia and Sarah Everton’s music is anything but kid friendly.
Lo-fi and noisy even by lo-fi and noisy established standards, every Reading Rainbow track is an auditory assault on the ear drums — it’s like I can feel my cochlea yelling at me everytime I listen to them. However, unlike pure-noise bands like AIDS Wolf and Pre, there are nuggets of melody that help keep you upright when you are being dragged through the rough. Although not used as expertly as Wavves (I can feel the backlash already), the sing-along lyrics, like the closing lines “who can direct us where to go / my mind is made up / the answer’s no” on the recently released “Underground”, are certainly more than enough to pique your interest and at least get you excited thinking about what a 30 minute SXSW set of theirs would look like!
Currently, Reading Rainbow are prepping another album before heading towards Austin in March. They’re slated to play a hell of a lot of shows (most notably Weekly Tape Deck’s AWESOME showcase), so if you’re on 6th St. during the festival, it will be difficult to NOT see them. Here are two tracks to let you in on what Reading Rainbow is about:
I’m going to go ahead and give the band Happy Birthday my recommendation based more on a hunch than on any built up reputation they may or may not have. Why is this? You see, this Vermont based garage pop band has only one track to their credit: the wildly infectious (and widely publicized) “Girls FM”. It’s true — scour the internets far and wide, and all that you’ll come up with is this lone mp3 that’s made a hit everywhere from Sub Pop loving it enough to sign them and put it on their Cybersex V2.0 mix as the opener to Pitchfork throwing it up on their forkcast.
So you know the track has to be pretty damn good in order for everyone to make such a fuss about it. Take the poppiness of a typical Girls track and square it while still not sounding to incredible cheesy due to the lo-fi quality of the recording, add in some witty lyrics (“see them play like the internet band / try to hear them but you couldn’t understand”) and voila!: the perfect recipe for a summertime hit. Sub Pop is going to make millions…
Happy Birthday’s debut album is dropping March 16, which coincides with the band’s SXSW debut (how convenient!). So if you’re just as excited about the potential of the group as I am, be sure to check the band out at the festival and see what they are all about! Here’s the hit single as well as an older track from frontman Kyle Thomas’s past band King Tuff:
In comparison to their northern neighbors, Denmark doesn’t have as much of a reputation for being a musical hotspot. However, there are severalDanishbands trying to change their country’s image and one of the latest and greatest is the surf rock group The Good The Bad.
I was fortunate enough to catch this band perform during the first warm-up day of the 2008 Roskilde Festival, where I just happened upon their set midway through and was astonished by the amount of energy they possessed. Going the strictly instrumental route (from the band: “We don’t need a vocalist anyway. The music speaks for itself. We use the music so we don’t have to say ‘I Love You’”), the group is a complete 180 from the cerebral acts like Explosions in the Sky or Eluvium — opting to rock out rather than create delicate soundscapes.
Playing mostly low-key venues in Copenhagen and around Europe, there is no doubt in my mind that they will shine at the dingy bar/club scene that’s 6th St. in Austin. Not only that, but with a sound that’s tailor made for the next Tarrantino film, they are sure to please the festival goers with their high intensity surf & flamenco tracks. With a spectacle to match the music, this group is a must see for SXSW ’10. Check out this live video from one of their shows in Copenhagen:
A little over a month until the music part of SXSW begins, I thought I would start to bring you this year’s previews of bands you should check out in between Mexican food meals and Shiner Bock binges. For those lucky enough to be heading to Austin for the 2010 festivities, you have more options than ever of checking out your favorite bands as well as discovering some new ones. Not meant as a definitive list (they’ll be plenty of those to go around elsewhere in the coming weeks), here are some of my favorite acts listed on the official schedule:
Starting off with the person responsible for one of my favorite albums thus far in 2010, Torontonian singer/songwriter Basia Bulat possesses such a unique voice that is guaranteed to bring in the masses wherever she performs on 6th St. With already over 600K myspace views and two beautiful LPs to her credit (both released on Rough Trade), I have to say I was a little late to the party when I picked up a copy of her latest Heart of My Own a couple of weeks back. All it took, however, was one run through and I instantly fell in love with her fluttery vocals and folk-pop melodies.
Some of my favorite tracks of Bulat is when she opts to use the autoharp instead of her typical acoustic guitar, like on the very poignant “Sparrow”. Choosing to abandon her backing band, the song’s near a cappella feel is the perfect recipe to highlight how powerful and extraordinary Bulat’s voice really is. Although it’s easy to get drowned out by the crowd noise at SXSW, I predict that after the first few measure at the mic, she’ll have a hypnotizing effect on the audience, silencing them in the process. You can check out the label-released mp3 “Gold Rush” below just to get a taste on how special seeing a Basia Bulat performance live would be:
Want to hear a sad story? In a last hoorah before my undergraduate graduation, I was slated to go with a group of my friends to Coachella 2007. We rushed to buy three day tickets, arranged where we were going to stay, and had all the logistics planned out, unfortunately, none of us bothered to cross-check the dates with our academic calendar, as the festival fell squarely in the middle of finals. Bummed out to the max, we had to sell our tickets on ebay (one of us unable to recuperate anything for them) and sulk for the rest of the semester. And since then, I’ve been unable to make the festival for one reason or another (well, actually only for one reason as I’ve been in Europe for grad school).
This year, however, my luck might change as Coachella just released their initial lineup and I think it’s stacked enough to warrant a drive down to Southern California. The festival is so dense that even the acts relegated to the 6 pt. font are impressive (Beach House, Girls, Flying Lotus, Local Natives, and recent favorite Gil Scott-Heron). Here are the results after drawing up a list of acts I would like to see each day:
Friday: Sleigh Bells (I figure I should see them live before bashing them further), Lucero, Yeasayer, La Roux, The Avett Brothers, Grizzly Bear, Fever Ray (if the Live in Lulea album is any indication, this could be the best of the festival), LCD Soundsystem, and Jay-Z
Saturday: Beach House, Flying Lotus, The Raveonettes (my “white whale” when it comes to seeing them live), Camera Obscura, The XX (I’m thinking they won’t work well in a festival setting but I would still want to check them out), The Dirty Projectors, Major Lazer, Hot Chip, and Tiesto
Sunday: The Soft Pack, Local Natives, Gil Scott-Heron (this will be hit or miss I think), Little Boots, Local Natives (want to see these up-and-comers live), Deerhunter, Matt & Kim (always a good time), Charlotte Gainsbourg, Spoon, Phoenix, Thom Yorke????, and Pavement — possibly the best day of the festival.
Here’s the poster of the lineup for those wanting to pick out their must-see bands:
Well the SXSW elves have been busy this holiday season adding another 200 bands to the lineup, thus doubling the slated bill to 400 total. For those of you who missed my take on the initial lineup released a mere two weeks ago, you can get the recap here.
I couldn’t find too many recognizable acts this go around; however, there are a handful that I would consider seeing live. Topping the list is the highly blogged about LA afro-pop group Fool’s Gold — whose shtick includes all lyrics are sung in Hebrew. Not to be confused with Levar Burton‘s second best show, Reading Rainbow is a Philadelphia based duo that can be grouped together in the lo-fi garage punk scene with like minded acts Finally Punk, Vivian Girls, and Wavves. Similarly, That Ghost is the work of California teenager Ryan Schmale that, along with The Smith Westerns and Cymbals Eat Guitars, would make anyone’s top ten underage acts list. Finally, NPR’s love crush and former Grandaddy singer/guitarist Jason Lytle is set to descend upon Austin for the second year in a row.
No doubt, more acts will be listed, so I’ll keep you posted. Here are some mp3s/videos from the acts mentioned above:
