Alright, Resonator-ers! I’m back with some pretty special stuff– the Royal Chains have been so kind as to give me advance files of their finished masters for their forthcoming 7″, as well as some tracks that won’t be available on vinyl, and I am bringing it all to you lucky kids before it hits the merch table at their next show.
Their crowd favorite, “Crime Scene” is the lead single and it sounds great on record– but I have to say it is the parallel to Franz Ferdinand’s “This Fire.” Sure, it sounds good on your iPod, even approaching favorite status, but the energy these guys put into the track live just cannot be captured in a studio. If you dig this track at all you owe it to yourself to get to their next show (and Resonator will keep you abreast of when that is, of course).
“No Love in Your Punches,” which I’ve featured before, gets a great clean up in the studio and will see the b-side of the 7″, but my absolute favorite of the recorded tracks is “Girl On Fire.” Lead vocalist Adam Roddick’s just-barely tape-slipped vocals are, in and of themselves, an argument for the continuation of analogue production. Add to that the Beatles-worthy lead guitar and you’ve got an equally as hot contender for first single.
Not since the halcyon heydays of Factory Records has there been a cohesion of art and sound that, together, crafts a highly-consumable, incredibly addictive and obsession-caliber total package the likes of which comes from the camp of UK’s Various Production. In addition to their phenomenally collectible 12″ releases, which feature art from long-time collaborator (in fact, “collaborator” isn’t really the word-in discussing anything released under the Various Production header, it would seem that everyone’s a part under one moniker) Bonesy. The weird little Bonesy creations juxtapose grotesque horror, cutesy cartoon creatures and explicit sexuality-the perfect image to front the unpredictable sounds crafted from, well, whoever it is that does the sounds. The guys in Various Production (formerly just Various) are notoriously elusive, preferring to let their always-instantly out-of-print records do all of the speaking, all of the press, handle all of the publicity needs for them. And it does a fabulous job, as do the creators themselves, of shirking genre labels, definition, expectations. The first full-length Various LP, The World Is Gone jumped from dream-folk to carport-shattering garage bassdrops, with honeyed vocals and shrieking guitars just as often played against as with one another. In the span of a year, they’ve dropped any associations with major labels, released a crap-ton of vinyl, put out the only thing I’ll ever want for Christmas/Boxing Day/Yule, and formed a boutique-of-sorts to continue the multimedia sensory assault that is the base of Various Production’s various productions.
They’re always about contradiction, and that’s what I love-the newest bit of Various Production insanity, Diver, is wonderfully contradictory to everything I stand for musically at the present moment.
Boston’s Basstown Productions’ own Lauren Hynde and I were having a conversation the other day that consisted of a too-long diatribe, voiced by yours truly, against the current obnoxious glut of electronic music that, to quote, well, me, ’sounds like ppppprrrrupruprupruprupruprppppppprrrrrrrrruprupruprupruprupppppprrrr”.
Keep that in your mind, Piaget fans, and listen to this:
Yup-it’s electrockrap, with a ….waitafuckingminute…that vocal sample is…no. way.
There, see? See why I can deal with this? A certain self-(over)important female M.C. is injected with an off-kilter sense of humor, the song itself is brought to a level of death-metal intensity, and, despite probably having been done by Camp Various in the time it takes for Chinese take-out to arrive, it’s still guaranteed to drop jaws and melt cement floors.
Not one of their best works (though the rest of the “Diver” release is truly monstrous), but definitely one of the most fun. Plus, when you’ve put out as much, encompassing every freakin’ sub-genre to have been cool-and-then-not in the past two years, as they have-”quality” becomes incredibly relative.
The destructive, apocalyptic title track from Various’ way-too-overlooked piece of LP genius, re-cut to feature vocals from Cat Power. “Holy crap”, you’re thinking-and you’re right. Chan holds her own, though, as the death march strings and that closed, echoing bass rattle lead the way into the dark.
I paid zero attention to Thom Yorke’s solo record until the Child Rebel Soldiers (Kanye, Lupe, Pharrell Williams) song took a major sample from something off his album. Now, with the release of some mindblowing remixes, it’s almost as though a handful of songs are being given second lives. With no familiarity whatsoever of the original, it would appear to me that Various stripped all but Thom’s vocal here, replacing whatever laptop sounds he’d crafted with one of their trademark dubstep earthquakes. This is beautiful stuff.
If you’ve an hour to blow, and you’d like some visual accompaniment to your Various Production listening, tool around on their gorgeous-but-functionless site.
If there’s anything at all that I’d be more than eager to label the musical equivalent of the mixture of chocolate and peanut butter, it’s the combination of dark, echo-filled minimal techno landscapes with moody goth textures. The likes of Superpitcher and Michael Mayer are oft labeled the pale-skinned, fanged posterboys of this sort of thing, but with their recent voyage into funkin’ around that is the Supermayer album, it’d be easy to assume the whole damn darkness is dead.
Not so, thankfully.
One of my favorite, if not my absolute favorite, “new-release” music websites, consistently pushing forward sounds and artists eighteen steps ahead of the Hype, is Manchester, UK-based Boomkat. I freely admit that, nine times out of ten, when a new tune or a new band/artist begins eating up all my time and laptop memory, it’s usually something I discovered by being beaten over the head with snarky, snappy prose related to said piece of music from the folks at Boomkat. Their weekly “must-have” list is exactly that-they copped Various Production, Modeselektor and Burial while most people were still thinking Beth Ditto the second coming of, uh, whatever she’s supposedly the second coming of.
To wit, when I read the Boomkat review of When Horses Die…,the new album by seminal German minimal experimentalist pioneer and all-around freakin’ legend Thomas Brinkmann, whose last album, Lucky Hands, was one of my unsung and forgotten favorite full-listening experiences of 2005, I was struck not just by the fact that I was totally unaware Brinkmann had done anything new since 05 but by Boomkat smacking this new album straight into my vein with necessity:
Boomkat writes:
Strangely enough however, here we avoid the stuttering Minimal experiments of his more popular work and are introduced to his electro-pop side. Of course this isn’t electro pop as we now know it, The Gossip are nowhere to be seen and there’s nary a haircut in sight, but think Depeche Mode, think Human League, think Factory and you’ll be on the right tracks.
Now, how the hell does one argue with that?
The world, at least my aural world, is made better, especially on this gloomy, rainy Georgia day, by the fact that they were 100% spot-on, as they always are. Released on Brinkmann’s self-owned Max Ernst record label, When Horses Die… is a razor-sharp, gloom-drenched rainstorm of minimalist electro-pop, heavy on the low-end, the synth pads and the trembling vocal moan of Brinkmann’s own voice. Both a dance-floor record and a home listening record (not to mention something that could work in the bedroom, or the kitchen floor, for the more adventurous), When Horses Die… is, to me, both the grimmest and most welcome piece of sonic experimentation yet lay to wax by Brinkmann. It’s only complimented by the fact that these 10 pieces of German Gothro (who knew that genre was still alive) are also the most listenable, the most song-structured, tracks he’s ever done.
Several touchpoints could be used to explain the musical place of “Meadow”, but to me this track will always sound like Nick Cave’s reserved side making minimal tech. Think Nick the gothic storyteller, not Nick the fire-and-brimstone preacherman, playing with hi-hats, and you’ve got the picture. “Meadow” is awash in creeping ambiance, a low moan and little else, before it literally begins a percussive attack, a gallop, if you will, about two minutes in. Consider this one a mild haunting.
From the Lucky Hands album, which was more a study in minimalism than anything else. This was by far the standout track, featuring Brinkmann’s labelmate Tusia Beridze, aka TBA, slowly sultrifying (it’s a word) Moz’s now-classic lyrics and somehow making the whole song a lot sadder and a lot sexier.
Bless Brinkmann for pushing the palette back to dark. Check him out at Boomkat.
Several things occurred to me yesterday as I was reveling in the wonderful, unexpected metallic stutterdrone that is English IDM duo Autechre’s forthcoming WARP records release Quaristice. The first of these was, for any and everyone who’ve clung to the straws of hope that the beloved to the point of cult near-celebrity status duo would end the toneless calculator experimentations of Confield and Untilted and return to making music– head-fucking, depth-plummeting, brain-twisting music but music nonetheless–finally, after what feels like a decade, are vindicated. Beyond vindicated, actually-yesterday, as the echo that at times wooshes in to fill the nature-abhorred vacuum of nullspace that Autechre actually allow room throughout Quaristice, I felt pretty damn chuffed for being the last of my circle of “when we say dance music we don’t mean indie rock” friends to still give a damn about Sean and Rob as Autechre.
Autechre’s Incunabula, from ages ago, is a hands-down brilliant record. Gorgeous, glorious, and very close to the windswept soundscapes and structures that formerly-acoustic singer-songwriters are now resorting to to plump their stuff with relevance. The rest of their back catalog is smart, metallic, demonic and brainy, slowly moving further and further away from those straight-up warehouse raves that handed them their start.
2001’s Confield was the first sign something was wrong with the sounds coming from Camp Autechre. Sounding fairly like an hour of hubcabs on a highway, it was the first thing they’d ever done that was almost universally hailed as not only unlistenable, but incredibly uninteresting.
The resulting tour, however, was cataclysmic in the best way possible, a way that only Autechre can pull off.
Then came Untilted, basically Autechre’s Metal Machine Music, and a tour that found them larking and joking on the fans who dared pay 25 bucks to see them turn the bass down, the treble up and hammer cats with tin cans before microwaving them.
I pretty damn near gave up, and would have continued to do so, if not for initial whispers ’round the WARPfire about this year’s forthcoming Quarisitice being not just a return to form, but a new and humbled beginning. Shorter songs, working as a unit, and at times flat-out raving.
Today’s PeeFork review of the Steve Aioli Aoki mix for Dim Mak served as another contextualizer, for me, of Autechre’s cultural place. With the watering-down and Dafting-up of what electronic music is and was, how many of the skinny jeans kids actually know who the hell Autechre is, and how many would care?
Quaristice forces care. “Simm” is the most immediately accessible song on the album, and one that immediately sums up the concepts Sean and Rob play with over the disc’s 20 tracks A dirty, twisted and tin electro-rave jam slowly distorts, becomes minimal and then, sensibly but emotionally, drops away into a wash of warm shoegaze.
This is the sort of stuff Autechre had seemingly abandoned, and it’s refreshing, warm, a bit scary, and entirely welcome. Nice to have y’all back.
Ok, look, it’s been a couple days (ok like two weeks). We never claimed to have our act together
Anyway, this isn’t a full-fledged “hot new stuff” post, but rather a little somethin’ somethin’ from a duo I earmarked quietly to myself at the end of 2007 to watch. Free Blood, namely former !!!-er John Pugh and his fellow pughilist, fashion designer Madeline Davy, have taken that whole “hey, we’re two people that have some cash for gear, let’s make elecro-rock that goes puuuurrprprprprpuuuuurprprprprprurrrrrprprprrrruuurp” concept and, somehow, despite all the forces working against them (”uh, !!! may be awesome, but individually they’re, uh…hairy” “…and a fashion designer making dance rock? oh jeez, are we back in 05 again?” etc), made a handful of tunes that are dark, moody, infectious and pretty damn powerful
To wit: their first video, for “The Royal Family”
Some things to note:
–John Pugh is obviously possessed by the holy freakin’ spirit of Tiefschwarz circa the Goldfrapp remix, or something. He’s overtaken by a power much larger than himself, or his razorbass.
–Madeline Davy can’t dance for shit. Sorry, but that arm thing is how hipster girls cover up their inability to do anything short of standing still to any sort of propulsive beat.
–The song is fucking good.
–The breakdown’s better than the rest of the three minutes combined
I’m waiting to see how this whole Free Blood thing pans out before I make a judgment call.
Your regularly-scheduled Grammy Live Blog just ain’t happening tomorrow night, folks. Now that everyone from Arianna Hufflestuff to some dude who, like, LOVES Feist, man, no really man, she speaks to him, man, over at some other blog with some combination of the words “fork’, “gum”, “punk”, “rock”, “vegan”, “Lower East West North Southside” “daft” or “electro techno baba ganouj” think that they have the skills to properly, at exactly the right moment, type out whatever caustic comment they made about Bono and his Africa-saving sunglasses to the room full of their friends and manage to entertain the net ‘verse, we really have no reason to.
Plus, face it, guys-Winehouse ain’t gonna be there. Ain’t no Grammys without getting to see a Kanye/Winhouse slapfight. My money would have been on Wino-crack makes ya ornery.
All right, that’s all. You can dance if you want to and all that.
-The Management. No, not the MGMT, that’s totally different.
So… It’s getting to be that time of year again, where the Res kids tell you about all the cool shit to check out at SxSW because, well, we’re not going.*** This year is a great year at the old Austin festival because it’s going to be chiptunes madness.
That’s right– not only are the lovely 8 Bit Peoples going to be hosting a showcase, but the movie (yes, MOVIE!) about the Blip Festival is going to be playing at the film festival. Featuring all of my favorite chiptunes artists, Bit Shifter, Nullsleep, glomag, Bubblyfish and loads of other musically brilliant nerds, it is going to be THE must-see movie of the festival… What I’m saying is take a break from dancing your ass off and GO SEE THE DAMNED MOVIE.
As if you needed more convincing, here is the trailer for Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet:
Yes, that track’s great… But my favorite, and I think SORELY underappreciated of the Shifter’s tracks is the self-titled off of the “Information Chase” EP. The symphonic hold breakdown is enough to make college girls the world over have Garden State-like make-out moments… Well, provided that they’re cool enough to dig on Gameboy music.
***Res doesn’t go to SxSW because we are too damned old to be drunk and sleepless for a week. Just ask Shaun about his old Winter Music Conference days. But while YOU are down there, make sure and get your chiptunes on AND check out our darling Loren Hynde’s party over at the Planetary Group bbq– we hear there is soy meat and hardcore (the guitar kind, not the electronic kind).
It was our friends at Wordsmiths Books that first introduced me to Athens/Decatur, Georgia trio Hope For Agoldensummer, when they made the band’s gorgeously-packaged Ariadne Thread album the first CD stocked by the bookstore.
It’s taken a while, a good couple of months, for this album to begin nestling in my heart, wrapping itself deep and low around those guttural, blood-and-bone places that, when lingered in, makes music become part of the very fiber of being.
Together, Page Campbell, Claire Campbell and Deb Davis call themselves a “junkyard soul trio”, but they’re actually so much more. This is music that’s definitively southern, definitely rural, and reminiscent of a folk-art angel singing her heart out. At times, the territory tread by Hope For Agoldensummer is equal parts Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor with weaponry provided by Nick Cave-the sort of songs that hold knives behind their backs, lingering in sweetness just long enough to unveil the darkness lingering ‘neath. Other times, the songs are southern field gospel revivals, celebrating the sweaty southern pastures of life and love.
This song treads the territory of the morning after that is the latter, but only after passing through the darkened terrain of the former.
In my morning, things didn’t feel as they should-in my heart or in my head. It’s possible I guided iTunes to this song, but I have more faith in the fact that it was kinda chosen.
The thing with the soulful vocals, the soft finger-plucked instrumentation-it’s all so damn tangible, so damn human, so present. So much of the redemptive quality of all of Hope ForAgoldensummer’s music comes from that ever-present (even in darkness) humanity, and it’s what I didn’t know I needed this morning when this song found me.
Sometimes you just have to let it all go, let it all break, y’know?
It’s been a good few years, musically, for Sweden-which in Blog-time pretty much amounts to several hundred decades. If you check the HypeCalendar, I’m fairly certain you’ll find it inscribed in binary that Peter, Bjorn and John discovered America. I dispute: everyone knows the Dreijer siblings did, duh.
It feels like it’s been ages since there was a tune that had me so possessed that I literally had to spend an entire evening fighting the urge to rush here to post it, tossing and turning all night attempting to construct textual support for a drooling, insane love for both song AND singer. Every time it’s happened recently, I can usually pinpoint it to one country of origin. Ok, two: Berlin or Sweden.
Last night I fell in love again. All things go, right? All things go. This time, however, it’s more than a fleeting, passing interest. This time I’m crushing hard-x-core on a little (surprise!) Swede going by the name of Lykke Li.
It started with a tossed-off blog comment somewhere, extolling the virtues of Sweden’s answer to Britney Spears without the meltdown Robyn, and her “hey I know that damn record must be out in the states by now because I got three different versions of it from Soulseek” self-titled album. Try as I might, I can’t write this without discussing Robyn, so I’ll try to keep this commentary contained to this paragraph, and to a minimum:
If you’ve missed the blog-clamor about Swedish pop singer Robyn and Robyn, her long-delayed album, fuhgeddaboudit-it’s all a bunch of hooey-hype. Robyn’s voice leaves a lot to be desired, the music’s not that interesting, and, frankly, if you want a futuristic piece of robo-pop without, say, Janelle Monae’s intense desire to funk around and tell stories, go buy the new Britney Spears record. It stands head and shoulders above anything Robyn puts voice to, though she did sit behind the boards for some of it. Robyn, basically, is the Swedish Butch Walker: keep both of ‘em away from the mic but let them stand behind the scenes and finesse to their little talented-but-misguided hearts’ content.
There. Still with me? Good.
The point of that rant was that Lykke Li was mentioned as, essentially, “some weird Swedish chick who got OMFG ROBYN in a video with her OMFG ROBYN”, etc etc. I clicked on this “video”, and what I saw has become what I’ve been humming for about 24 straight hours now (yes, this includes in my sleep):
This is the video for an acoustic version of “I’m Good I’m Gone”, a song from Lykke Li’s literally-JUST-released-in-Sweden album Youth Novels. Coming across like a half-nuts, precious-voiced, wide-eyed and drunkenly seductive Swedish Hot Tin Jug Band Tent Revival Party (or Arcade Fire), Lykke and her band of assembled hometown all-stars (folks from Shout Out Louds and the Concretes, as well as, yes, Robyn, looking like a post-menopausal Heinrich Malfoy) stomp, shout and bring the freaking house down. Channeling Lee Dorsey’s “Workin’ in a Coal Mine” into a dance-revival ode to choosing the love of the crowd over the love of a lover, the refrain of “I know your hands will clap” is the understatement of the year. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ll love anyone who starts a song using a bullhorn. Maybe it’s the fact that, coming from that bullhorn, I never expected Lykke’s voice to sound that silken, seductive and addictive. Maybe maybe maybe, one thing’s for certain: I immediately attempted to hunt down information a stateside release of, well, anything she’s ever done, and to no avail. As such, I have no qualms with sharing, with the desire to actually give money to this sound once the option for those of us not in Sweden exists.
THE BULLHORN WAS A VOCODER. That’s the first realization I pulled from this, the studio/electronic version of “I’m Good I’m Gone”. The second was that it would be impossible to pick a “favorite” version of this song, were the studio and live/acoustic to be placed next to one another. I should know-I tried for about three hours last night, and finally decided, after some Vodka-Grapefruits, to give up. This version’s a little stompier on the low-end, and, surprisingly, a little more lo-fi, with the haunted ghost of schaeffel-tech strutting its’ red lips and heels throughout the beat.
A track from her first EP, and something that I, believe, has the involvement of Bjorn from the aforementioned Swede PB&J whistleboys. It’s her phrasing, her cadence, in this song that made my jaw drop-when she wraps her voice around the opening verse, she has the kind of voice that Ne-Yo or Chris Brown would drop grands to either co-op or blatantly rip off. The acoustilectronic, sighing gray of the undercurrent sweeps her along with tiny, pretty keys and wistfulness. “Everybody But Me”’s a lament in a smoke-filled club, a thinking person’s Zero 7 jam all Reese’s-ed up with some R Kelly flow. Pure, utter genius, and beautiful genius at that.
There’s more, much much more, where that came from, but for now Youth Novels is still bedding down in my brain, various snippets of chorus at times surfacing to make each song a favorite until the next track comes on. This is the sort of jaw-dropping stuff that grows and then sticks. It’s only a matter of time, really, ’til I know my hands will clap again.
This is less something “current” or “cutting edge” in terms of release timing than it is “current” and “cutting edge” in terms of the fact that you have never, ever heard anything quite on this level before. Around the midpoint of 2007, self-released with little fanfare, a quiet storm dropped on the city of Atlanta in the form of a time-traveling futuretro funk-rock goddess calling herself Janelle Monae and her debut E.P. Metropolis.
She would then proceed to tear shit up.
Metropolis took a little time to grow on the city, and it’s still spreading itself thick and oozing, but one listen to the too-brief five tracks and there’s an immediate hook, evidenced so not just by the amount of critical in-city “Best Of” lists this EP (an EP! on Best-Of lists!) ended up on, not just by sold-out shows, but by the fact that her biggest fans are the duo who last changed the face of southern urban music forever: Outkast.
Big Boi’s proven himself to be more than just a fan by signing her to the now-defunct Big Purp, and Andre himself has shown her Janelle studio time. So what, pray tell, does this seeming wunderkind sound like?
In this case, a picture’s worth a thousand notes:
This IS the sound of Janelle Monae-a futuristic blend of old-school classic funk, hard-ass rock and some sort of crazed electroglam stomp that both Marc Bolan and Prince would pawn their souls, pool their money and yet still be unable to afford. Metropolis, the story thus far, involves a far-flung society and a forbidden robot/human lovestory. Metropolis, the sound, is even more impossible, and instantly catchy.
The first real “song” off of the E.P., this is an absolutely perfect example of the nutsoid, cyber-hop funplex of candy-colored terrorbliss Janelle and her band are carving out for themselves. That stuttering beat in punk/funk time, Janelle’s way of phrasing, the fact that this is both a love song and a death march…holy holy crap.
From outside the Metropo-verse, off of one of the Big Purp comps that y’all kids ignored because you were too busy listening to Girl Talk mash up “Kryptonite” with something dumb, probably by Nirvana. Janelle’s early venture into bringing the world into her color scheme, this is actually a hell of a lot more frantic than any of the E.P., and for good reason-she’s singing like her life depends on it here, and who knows-maybe, by the time the full Metropolis suite reveals itself, it will.
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