Came across two cover songs today that are amazingly good and are worthy of some Two for Tuesday coverage. The first is a cover of The Magnetic Fields song “Yeah! Oh Yeah!” by UK chanteuse Tracey Thorn and Swedish oddball singer/songwriter Jens Lekman. It seems like the two are diving head first into a musical relationship, as Jens is slated to be featured on a couple of tracks on Tracey’s upcoming album, while Thorn is returning the favor by writing lyrics about Lekman. Though a lot more melodic that the original 69 Love Songs-featured song, it is quite surprising how similar Tracey/Jens voices are to that of Claudia Gonson and Stephin Merritt.

The second song is an out-of-nowhere cover of Justin Timberlake’s wildly popular hit “My Love” by Portland native White Hinterland (née Casey Dienel). Stripping the overly-produced track of all its bells & whistles, Dienel takes Timberland out of the equation and replaces it with only a minimalist tribal drum beat and her soft, beautiful voice. What a great rendition! And if you like this, be sure to cop White Hinterland’s latest album Kairos from Dead Oceans today!

Tracey Thorn & Jens Lekman // Yeah! Oh Yeah! (Magnetic Fields Cover)

White Hinterland // My Love (Justin Timberlake Cover) [via: Dipped in Dollars]

After seeing that order shipments from Woodsist have been delayed until April 1, I got a nice surprise when my I Was Gone 7”, the latest from Brooklyn experimental folk group Woods, came in the mail this past week. Although probably not considered as rare as some of their other albums (an initial pressing of 1500 7′’s is the vinyl equivalent of what Dan Brown got for The Lost Symbol), it’s still one of my favorites as it explores what post-Songs of Shame Woods might sound like.

Similar to “Creeps Collage” off of their Woods Family Creeps S/T, the A-side “Days Gone By” is a mix-and-match of track snippets, transitioning from one to another sometimes abruptly, sometimes smoothly. No doubt the mid-section of the song is the preferred part, featuring a soulful guitar line and the delicate falsetto of Jeremy Earl chanting the line “many days gone by”. The B-side is filled with a duo of jamming two-minute tracks. The first of which, entitled “I Was Gone”, is certainly “Eastern inspired”, prominently featuring some sitar-like sounds that mesh well with the psychedelic-tinged tendencies of the band. On the other hand, “Hang On” is one of their patented creepy songs which showcases spidery guitar lines and haunting background moans that no doubt add to the overall sense of uneasiness of the track.

You can check out the mashed together “Days Gone By” below, and, if you like it, cop the record from Midhaven Mailorder for a timely delivery:

Woods // Days Gone By

Seems that while I was on break, a lot of things happened. 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.

Here are a handful of my favorite tracks and, if you want more, just head on over to their myspace to dowload the LP:

Girls in the Eighties // Slow Motion

Girls in the Eighties // Teenage Royalty

Girls in the Eighties // Vacation

I don’t care what Punxsutawney Phil says, it’s freaking springtime in Portland RIGHT NOW! To celebrate the handful of sunny days we’ve had this past month (my standard for declaring a season change is pretty damn low), I put this mix together while boxing up my SAD lamp and dusting off my sunglasses. Ah spring: summer’s warm-up act.

You can download the hour-long mix here (92.5Mb). As for the tracklist, it’s mostly new(er) stuff with some sprinklings of old favorites here and there:

• RxRy // Baulkn Slihts
• Ducktails // Oh, Magnolia Tree
• Sonny and The Sunsets // Too Young to Burn
• King Tuff // Sun Medallion
• Memoryhouse // Foreground (Grizzly Bear Cover)
• Cibelle // Lightworks
• Javelin // Mossy Woodland
• El Rego et ses Commandose // E Nan Mian Nuku
• Dominant Legs // Clawing Out at the Walls
• Efterklang // Modern Drift
• The Sandwitches // Grey Wizard
• Julian Lynch // Banana Jam Pt. 1
• Primary 1 // Foaming (Memory Tapes Remix)
• El Guicho // Prez Lagarto
• Tamaryn // Light Shadows

Also, if you like this mix, you might also enjoy some of the other ones I put together in the past.

It seems like the folks at Adult Acid are slowly becoming my de facto source when it comes to finding out about new lo-fi garage rock acts. Take the LA tapedeck-recorded surf-rock jams by the LA group Allah Las which AA posted about a couple weeks back: AMAZING!

How “glo-fi” was the critic’s pick for genre of the year in ‘09, it seems that lately there has been a resurgence in feel-good surf-inspired music which is having people trade in their laptops for tangible instruments — and I couldn’t be happier! Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy plenty of these electro-nostalgic groups, but after getting saturated by them for most of last year, it’s refreshing to hear catchy beach jams featuring twangy guitar recalling the 50s and 60s rather than the 80s vibe that “chillwave” groups use extensively.

Regardless how you feel of the different genre du jours, everybody can get behind the psychedelic tinged pop-gems that the Allah Las produce. Setting up the track nicely, “Long Journey” intros with a boogying bass line before transitioning to the easy-listening technicolor melody which I could see being used in the opening intro for some of Quentin Tarantino’s latest films. After a handful of “AaahhhhHHHHs” (appropriate for a group called the Allah Las), the first verse begins with “It’s been a long, long ride / I don’t know where I’ll stay tonight / under the stars / or maybe in the bed alright” — which, if the band was around for the Woodstock-era, would have resonated well with the nomadic hippy lifestyle. In fact, most of the track has a time-capsule feel to it, with its guitar-featuring bridges and drawn-out syllables of the vocals; transporting you back to your parents’ generation when people were spinning vinyl out of necessary rather than for appearance.

Below are a couple of handheld tape-recorded tracks the Allah Las sent my way that I’ve been digging. These are mostly in demo form (the band is planning on going to the studio the next couple of weeks to thrown down “Long Journey” and “Catamaran” for an upcoming 7” release), so no doubt they are a bit rough around the edges, however, they still make for a GREAT listen. There are also a bunch more “forgotten tracks, ideas, demos, etc…” on their muxtape page, so if you like what you hear below, check it out!

Allah Las // Long Journey

Allah Las // High Places

Cecil from the self-proclaimed “flu pop” outfit Gobble Gobble sent over a handful of new tracks to me yesterday which I’ve really been digging. Among them was the Delicious Scopitone and Get Off the Coast-approved “Lawn Knives”, which is one hell of a sonic ride.

The track intros with a five second snippet of fuzzy guitar, much like The Numerators’s “City of Gold”, followed by a flood of static-y electro elements making me feel like I’m helplessly trapped underwater. Finally getting pushed to the surface by a wave of suspended cymbal rolls, the track clears up a bit with crisp vocals of “We all cut close / snip snip snip” sung over the choppy background electronic bloops & bleeps. Once the song reaches this point, the remaining 90 seconds blow past you with a whirlwind of digital instrumentation floating in-and-out of focus — making you instantly press repeat to make sense of it all. It’s a pretty crazy and pretty awesome trip!

I don’t have much information on any sort of physical releases Gobble Gobble has in the works (other than a new repressing of an out-of-print tape called Neon Graveyard, which you can download from DS for free here), but if the “Secretly New” label the band attached to “Lawn Knives” and “End of Days” on their myspace page is any indication, then there should be a 7” somewhere on the horizon, so be on the lookout! And if you’re fortunate enough to live in the Toronto area, then you can catch their Man-Man-esque live show in mid-March.

Gobble Gobble // Lawn Knives

Gobble Gobble // End of Days

Seems like Göteborg, Sweden is continuing it’s quest for world dominance this past week. First came the amazing video for jj’s “Let Go”, then an equally impressive DIY-style video from Love Is All’s “Kungen” premiered on Stereogum a day later. Before long, we will all be eating pickled herring…

Although the latest LP from San Fran folk band Vetiver was a bit of a disappointment for me, this acoustic rendition of “Farther On”, captured by French zine WOW Magazine, reminds me why I originally liked this group so much:

The next video is another amazing acoustic performance, this time by the Danish ensemble Efterklang. Put together by the wonderful Austrian site They Shoot Music, this recording of “Me Me Me The Brick House” shows this seven-member incarnation of the group at it’s most stripped down. A really great listen! (Also check out The Shoot Music’s video for “Alike” here).

Keeping it in Denmark, The Raveonettes put out my favorite music video of this week with this awesome animation accompanying the track “Heart of Stone” (Note, if the video get taken down, you can watch it here — DAMN VEVO AND THEIR NO EMBED!):

Another crazy video snippet from the mysterious iamamiwhoami surfaced this past week, and I think it’s the best one yet. Who do I think it is? I don’t really care — as long as the music on the LP is just as amazing as these viral vids, they can stay an unknown!

Not really a video per say, but this recording of Beach House performing a new track entitled “The Arrangement” on Sirius XM Radio was too good to pass up:

My apologies to whoever originally posted about this video of Wounded Lion’s track “Friendly?” (I didn’t write down the source). Anyways, behold the amazingness of this MS Powerpoint generated music video:

Finally, it was only a matter of time before the sparse arrangements of The xx got covered by their equally minimalistic Göteborg counterpart El Perro del Mar (see, I wasn’t lying about the Göteborg takeover!). Well Sarah Assbring and company brought their own twist to the beautiful “Shelter” this past week in Brooklyn:

EDIT: Looks like Pitchfork was surfing youtube at the same time, as they’ve just posted two other videos from last night’s show which you can check out here.

In a piano, notes repeat every 12 semitones (or keys, both black and white), and each whole interval doubles the frequency of these notes. Together, these notes form what we call a pitch class.

It occurred me that the shape of a spiral has all the correct properties to represent this relation between notes. So I wondered, how would piano music look like if it was represented as a spiral of keys?

In this representation, the notes with lower frequencies are in the center of the spiral, starting with A0 (as in the piano). Each radial block of keys represents a single pitch class, so octaves (when two adjacent notes of the same pitch class are played togeter) look like a pair of keys being pressed radially

For the musically and mathematically disinclined, it’s a cool plot that shows interesting patterns based on the similarities between the structure of a piano and a logarithmic spiral! Enough talk, check out the cool result:

Found this gem of a song from San Diego electro-rockers Beaters off the Volar Records website. Entitled “Fishage”, the track is a three minute non-stop raucous jam that barrels through at 100mph without pausing once for a quick breath. Maintaining a driving beat and a pulsating electro-bass line throughout, the song’s energy is set from the beginning and doesn’t stop for anything until the abrupt ending. If you are looking to get sweaty on a dance floor, “Fishage” is sure to do the trick.

Looks like Volar is repressing the group’s debut 7” (and, coincidentally, the label’s first release) which includes “Fishage” as well as the topically titled track “Obamanation” on a very limited red vinyl, so hurry up and snag one of the remaining 125 124 copies (also, Single Screen Records has a few of the repressings as well)! You can also check out the group live as they are slated to open for most of The Soft Pack and Nodzzz’s US tour.