With me, The Raveonettes can do no wrong…
Nice to know that the lo-fi pop professionals still have it. Super pumped for their album, Raven In The Grave to drop April 5. Check out the first single “Forget That You’re Young” below and, as a bonus, embedded is a recently released vid for another cut from the upcoming LP, topically titled “Recharge and Revolt:
Wow! This was a great week for music related videos. Some were so amazing, I couldn’t just wait around until the weekly round-up so I went ahead and posted a couple of my favorites already earlier this week. Not only that, but there were so many good vids that I decided to make this a sort-of mega-recap. So without further ado:
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:
(Courtesy: Juhi Sharma)
I vaguely remember first hearing about the Australian band Dick Diver from a fellow Aussie girl oozing compliments about them during Portland’s Music Fest Northwest this past fall, however it took a certain Swede‘s year-end favorites list to properly jog my memory and steer me towards checking out their music. Although their myspace page doesn’t provide much fanfare, the two tracks featured, “Tender Years” and “Walk for Room”, make for great listens, with the former providing me with enough incentive to buy their Arks Up EP off of iTunes.
No doubt the band name and possibly the track title is a nod to the F. Scott Fitzgerald work — with the slinking melody of the song providing a good hypothetical soundtrack to multiple scenes in the film adaptation. Opening up with a slow paced surf & flamenco guitar line that the Danish act The Good The Bad would be proud of, the dusky tone is set from the beginning and escalates over the course of the five-minute song. Lines like “take one step back from the edge…” and “he loves you / and he don’t want you to die / not just yet…” sung by the vocalist in an Alex Kapranos-like fashion certainly heightens the film noir feel, leading the track through dark passages and corridors similar to The Raveonettes’ “Aly Walk With Me”. As expected, everything keeps building until the inevitable climax — and boy is it a payoff! Reminiscent of Woods’ opening of “To Clean”, guitarists Alastair McKay and Rupert Edwards absolutely slay the last 90 seconds of the song before abruptly resolving and leaving the listener with only a haunting last chord echoing in their ears.
Embarrassing to admit I know, but I think I would have a problem generating a Top Ten Australian bands list. If it wasn’t for Cut Copy and The Presets — both acts who are immensely popular in their home country — I would have to at least scratch my head to come up with some names off the top of my head. However, if I take anything from Dick Diver’s tunes it’s that I need to be looking more closely because there is definitely something going on — something great — in the land down under.
It’s getting close to Christmas time, so if you haven’t gotten the tree up, your presents bought, and eggnog isn’t sitting in the refrigerator, I would recommend doing that now. Another thing I would suggest is checking out The Raveonettes fantastic Christmas song appropriately titled “The Christmas Song”, which may be the greatest holiday tune I’ve heard in a long time. Although bizarrely released on the TV show The OC’s Xmas album, “The Christmas Song” features all the best things about The Raveonettes: amazing guitar work, great airy harmonies, sing-along lyrics, and a little pizazz thrown in for the finale.
Now don’t get me wrong, the Xmas tune is great, but it’s chump change compared to what The Raveonettes have done in their career. Releasing some of my favorite albums of the latter half of the decade, this Danish duo has got the “60s with a twist” act down pat, providing noisy renditions of timeless pop melodies. Their latest effort, In and Out of Control, is arguably their best release, but unfortunately it has gone unnoticed in the blogosphere (but, ironically enough, not on Gossip Girls which has featured two of their tracks on the show).
Taking the strategy of composing a full-length from a string of 45s that their golden-oldies predecessors mastered, every track on In and Out — from the beginning bombastic “Bang!” to the wonderfully peaceful “Wine” conclusion — could serve as an attractable single. Although the album consists of only 11-tracks which, when combined, can barely outlast an episode of Seinfeld, The Raveonettes provide no throw-away or “filler” songs that so many bands seem to be using these days. In and Out is one-hundred percent pure noisy indie-pop gold.
After taking a cursory glance at the track titles (“Oh I Buried You Today”, “D.R.U.G.S.”, etc…), one would expect either heavy metal or hard-core emo oozing from every poor of this band, and this musical chiaroscuro of lighthearted instrumentals with dark lyrical content is exactly what makes this band so great. It’s easy for anyone to love what’s coming out of Sune Rose Wagner’s guitar on tracks like “Suicide”, but it’s tough to swallow the narratives evinced in the verses (“Your boyfriend’s mean / and your mom’s a bitch / little runaway girl / do it again do it again”). Even though the song is strongly against taking your own life (the line “lick your lips / and fuck suicide” is more than enough to determine this), it’s still not particularly a choice topic to accompany such a poppy song. An even more flagrant example of this dark lyrical undercurrent is the song “Boys Who Rape (Should All Be Destroyed)” — which somehow made it onto the conservative-leaning NPR Song of the Day. Although I wholeheartedly agree with the anti-rape message, it’s just shocking to hear it sung in such sweet harmony.
To better check out their style, here are a band released mp3 and an acoustic rendition (+ interview) of their song “Breaking Into Cars”:
When I was surfing the internet the other day, I came across a post on Nordic music blog It’s A Trap detailing the nominees for the 2010 Swedish Grammies. Hidden beneath the layers of umlauts and obscure sounding band names (at least seen through an American perspective) housed four nominations for El Perro del Mar‘s (née Sarah Assbring) stellar 2009 album Love Is Not Pop: “Best Pop Album”, “Best Producer”, “Best Composer”, and the oddball but entirely appropriate “Best Lyrics” category.
Now I’ve seen little press for this 34 minute too-long-to-be-an-EP too-short-to-be-an-LP composition compared to her other, more popular albums (like her extraordinary sophomore S/T), however I believe Love Is Not Pop to be some of Assbring’s best work. Sung in her patented monotonously restrained style (Andrew Bird’s female counterpart), Assbring is able to conjure up highly involved emotions — everything from utter heartbreak to euphoric love — with just simple sentences. With her sparse instrumentation and emotionless lyrics providing scant cover to hide behind, it’s no wonder she was nominated for “Best Lyrics” since her whole act pretty much relies on her words. She was doing The xx when The xx was in elementary school.
Easily the most interesting track out of the group and the one that best shows the growth of Assbring as a composer is the Sue Grafton titled “L is for Love.” Opening with the repeated haunting line “When the night is near / you can lean on…” sung over fading piano flickers and austere drum beats, the dark mood is set right off the bat. Similar to The Raveonettes “Aly Walk With Me”, you are unsure whether to take the mysteriously referenced lover up on her offer of aid, as she is most likely going to lead you through dark alleys and grimy passageways. There is no light either at the chorus, with the repeated “L is for Love”s making the scene more creepy than comforting.
Regardless if this is your first time listening to Assbring or your an avid El Perro del Mar fan, Love is Not Pop is a worthwhile album to own and one of the best of the year, even if it is only getting the recognition it deserves from her home country of Sweden. Here’s an mp3 of “L is for Love” to hopefully whet your appetite:
This is the first installment of a reoccurring feature highlighting albums that have slipped through the cracks when initially released but have since been resurrected from the dead.
I must admit that I was unaware that Mount Eerie existed as a band before a week ago, so I regret to inform you that there will be no comparisons or allusions to the group’s prolific past with this piece. Thankfully, Wind’s Poem, the latest LP from founder/band-leader Phil Elverum, is a brilliant enough composition that one doesn’t need background information just to fill an editor’s word count. Already cropping up on a number of Best of ’09 lists (most notably former Sleater-Kinney guitarist turned NPR blogger Carrie Brownstein’s single album year-end census), this 55 minute epic masterfully strikes a balance between the noisy and the serene and skillfully uses audio to paint a naturalistic scene Robert Frost would be proud of.
You don’t have to be Robert Langdon to realize how meteorological events play a huge role in anchoring the album (track titles named “The Mouth of Sky”, “Wind’s Dark Poem”, and “Wind Speaks” only require eyes and half a brain to figure this out), but Elverum takes this motif past superficial nomenclature and reinforces it with his music. If one were to glance at my notes, words like “deluge”, “thunderous”, “atmospheric” instantly pop out of the page and are present on almost every track. Take the opener “Wind’s Dark Poem” for example: opens with earthquake guitar rumblings / torrents of fuzz drown out the delicate vocals / briefly subsides just enough to provide a clearing for lyrics.
If you didn’t know better, it’s easy for one to interpret the above as a Sunn O))) analysis (which at times, Mount Eerie does have the bass to match), however, instead of bombarding you with harsh song after harsh song, Elverum understands the importance of resolution. Seldom is there a sonically whirlwind track that isn’t immediately followed by a melodically calm song. After “Wind’s Dark Poem”, the clouds break with “Through the Trees” and, as the lyrics suggest, “you can see the light of dawn / through the trees”. But this serenity is more equatable to what is experienced in the eye of a hurricane: just when you think you are in the clear, you are thrown into the backside of the storm. It’s not long (only two songs in fact, with “The Hidden Stone”) before you are whip lashed around with dischordant noise again.
This rough/soft duality is expressed countless times throughout the album, and not just from song order. Although “The Hidden Stone” is a stormy Black Mountain-like song with guitar crashing from all sides, Elverum pairs it with delicate vocals reminiscent of Horse Feathers Justin Ringle’s voice. This is part of the appeal of the band — Elverum’s singing is like a life preserver on top of choppy waters. In fact, the only time Elverum belts out some truly terrifying lyrics is during “Lost Wisdom Pt. II” when he exclaims “I think the screaming wind said my name” which is sung during a lull in Raveonettes-esque (a la Lust Lust Lust) chaotic distortion.
And just like all nightmarish thunderstorms which are destined to slowly fade into just a sprinkle, Wind’s Poem last track “Stone’s Ode” is a fitting conclusion to this mentally taxing album. A brightly composed indie-rock song, “Stone’s Ode” would be viewed as just another above average track that would be forgettable within a week in any other setting. However, after the tumult that is Wind’s Poem, it provides a nice transition to whatever you have next alphabetically on your iTunes.
Here are some tracks from Wind’s Poem that you can check out:
