Saturday, February 9 Modular Records + People Don't Dance No More present:
JOAKIM AND HIS ECTOPLASMIC BAND - LIVE - (Tigersushi/!K7)
with DJ Sets by
JUAN MACLEAN - (DFA)
ANDY BUTLER - (HERCULES AND LOVE AFFAIR, DFA)
ROBOT BLAIR - (MUSIC FOR ROBOTS)
Studio B // $10 Advance tix at TICKETWEB.COM & Other Music $15 door // Doors @10PM // 21+
I still can't figure out how John Darnielle - aka The Mountain Goats - went seamlessly from recording songs on a little boombox to using a full band in a real studio. Both versions of his band are equally compelling; the intense intimacy of his solo work simply gave way to different arrangements. In my opinion, All Hail West Texas and The Sunset Tree are both great records, in different ways.
The Mountain Goats - Sax Rohmer #1.
Darnielle keeps cranking shit out, and I for one am happy about it. I was recently talking with a friend about his latest output, and this friend thought Darnielle needs to shake it up a bit. The past few albums, he says, sound the same, and are all good, but... they sound the same. I say: eh. If there's someone who doesn't need to change a thing, it's Darnielle. And Heretic Pride, out Feb. 19 on 4AD, is a pretty sweet record. It's not perfect - some of the middle tracks weigh the thing down - but most tracks, including "Sax Rohmer #1," are quintessential Darnielle.
Pre-order Heretic Pride from Insound.
Nancy - Mamba Negra Fashion Week
I've been falling into an unshakable routine with my wife in grad school and my day job in full swing. This leads to me to expect the familiar, and to pass time as best I know how with no disable income: playing Rock Band and feeling like a teenager again. I can't help but love to pieces how the developers of this game, being around my age, took this opportunity to nab all the songs they used to wail into their hairbrushes in their rooms as teens, so we can all do the same as well-adjusted adults to the same songs once again. The Weezer, the Smashing Pumpkins track, hell, even the STP are all great nostalgia trips. But it also brings back a whole sound palette that's harder to come by in the US an era of post-punk drums, vocoders and dirty (by which I mean fantastic) french dance tunes. Fortunately, the rest of the world is picking up the slack. Nancy, a Brazilian five-piece outfit consisting of Camila Zamith, Praxis, Dreaduardo, Munha Fernando and Ricky Ramirez is heavy, saucy, grindy, and lovely. And it's a natural fit for my ears these days. Fortunately for us, they'll be at SXSW this year, with more dates in the US of A to be announced!
So here's to Nancy, and to the weekend!
Al Kent presents The Million Dollar Orchestra - Rock Freak Boogie
As a lot of you folks know, I listen to a lot of dance music. Over the last year or there abouts, my buddy David and I have been doing a party that started out all electro-jacking but slowly became much more disco-flavored.
I have a decent little disco record collection, with stuff like a copie of Gwen Guthrie's Padlock, a Deodato promo 12" or two, Munich Machine, Erotic Drum Band, etc. which ain't bad. But I know I've got nothing on some of my fellow disco heads (I'm looking at you Roy), and now, I know I've also got nothing on Al Kent.
Al's from Scotland, is an avid record collector, and is at the helm of the Million Dollar Orchestra. He started the project in 2005, wanting to make music "that sounded the way it did in the 70s", using loops and samples. Over about two years it grew to become an eighteen-piece (ha!) behemoth real-live Disco Orchestra: Charlie Milne (keys), Stephen Westwater (bass), Kev McShane (guitar), Colin and Alan Train (sax), Gary Kainth and Ryan Buchanan (percussion), Jim Gash (drums), Lisa Marie (main vox), plus Rosemary, Susie and Shona, then Jane (minus Rosemary) of the Glasgow Gospel Choir, Douglas West (trumpet), Chris Pugh (trombone), Sarah Wilson, Graham McGeoch, Ruaridh Campbell and Nicola West (string quartet). It was all put to tape at 'the Barn', an all-analog studio, by Marco Rea, who seemed to know exactly what needed to be done. The results are fantastic.
The other live disco band, our friends Escort, are hard at work on their first album, but Al Kent and his band beat them to the punch with this one, and their full length album Better Days, is excellent. Simply excellent. Soulful, funky, totally ready for the dancefloor, and I can't recommend it highly enough to you folks.
Better Days came out last week, so you can buy it direct from their label, the UK's BBE, who is now distributed in the US by our friends at !K7. That means you can now find it at pretty much every record store in the US, or get it from Amazon, or download it from iTunes. Highly recommended.
The Plastic Constellations - Stay That Way.
The best way to stay warm is keep moving. Last night was cold as fuck (I understand that this is relatively speaking because my cold as fuck is way warmer than yours) and it would've been nice to have this here jam from the Plastic Constellations. It's a midwestern kerosene generator of light and heat. It's the one thing that works in that old POS you've been driving (the heat!). It's the fire-generating-tension between you two. It's the type of song they're going to sing to the fucking rafters when they play their final show soon. And man what a sad day that will be.
I mean, the Plastic Constellations are great. Do you not know them? They had that record on French Kiss back in 2005 maybe? And their first one from even later ago was totally ridiculous. Their back cataloge is worth digging through. They're the type of kick-down-the-walls midwestern singalong dudes that you want to crack a beer with and remind you that places like Madison and Iowa City and Bloomington and Omaha are valid american cities with shit to offer. Right?
So listen. These dudes have a new one on French Kiss called We Appreciate you. It comes out in April and it's gonna be a hootenanny. The band is going to play at SXSW with the rest of the FK roster, and then that's maybe it for them. Anyway, it's highly recommended.
Let's stop fucking around and do this. We all know where this has been going for a long long time and let's just wrestle this steer to the ground, hog tie it, and go do something- anything - else. Let's put on some neon speedos and go to the electric beach. Let's put on silk robes and blow bubble pipes and ride skateboards down the hallways of our mansions. Let's find the disco we've been looking for, I think it's just past that cotton candy machine and the guy with the roller skates.
Listen, Sebastian Tellier is a weird dude. There's no denying that. But he makes fun songs. We all remember La Ritournelle from a couple years ago, right? And the Metronomy remix? That was a total jam. So he's back. He's back with a new album called Sexuality and it's a pip. It was produced by our friend up there on the right... Guy-Manuel de Homem Christo. AKA, the guy that isn't Thomas Bangalter from Daft Punk. How promising is that? And how fucking gangster is that picture up there? Hot damn.
So anyway, this album is going to come out on Record Makers in europe, but no one seems to have any info on US distribution. If you know someone putting this out in the US, hit me up in the comments. I'd love to see a stateside release on this one so I don't have to pay import prices. Still, it's highly recommended.
I love this song, but it's totally not representative of the rest of the debut album, Every Joke Is Half The Truth, from Brooklyn's Scary Mansion. It's a weird little off-kilter thing. Queasy rhythms covered up with bottomed out distorted guitar and half breathy, half cracking vocals. It makes me think of Cat Power on some really unpleasant drugs. But in a good way.
The rest of the album is brilliant in a completely different way. More gentle emo singer-songwriter stuff. A sad girl singing sad but pretty songs reminding me a lot of a female fronted Songs: Ohia. Well, there's a nice undercurrent of strangeness to the rest of the album for sure, but it never quite comes to the fore again like in "Captain". I'm posting this song that isn't like the rest because I'm confident that bloggers elsewhere with tastes more on that side of things will post those songs and I want to make sure that this gem isn't overlooked. Or you can check out the MySpace page to hear those.
It's also worth noting that Leah Hayes, who appears to be the primary force behind Scary Mansion also draws comics which I happen to think rocks. More comic artists should become rock stars.
Prosumer & Murat Tepeli - Go Silla
I really like it when a dance album comes out that I can listen to all of, multiple times, and hear more and more in it each time. Serenity the new full length album by Berlin's Achim Brandenburg, aka Prosumer, and Köln's Murat Tepeli, is just that.
The album is the first full-length artist-album on Ostgut Ton, the in-house label of the famous Berghain/Panorama Bar, and it reflects an interesting slice of dance music in Europe right now. While the draw of 'minimal techno' still exists in quantity, this last year saw many artists make a return to house music, especially deep house. Besides this acid-tinged somewhat retro-sounding house track, Achim and Murat play with many different styles of house music on Serenity, a large portion of which include (gasp!) vocals by Achim, and guest vocalist Elif Biçer. The album reminds me a lot of Unai's 2006 album, A Love Moderne, which also did a great balancing act between styles for the livingroom and for the floor. Highly recommended.
You can get the lead single from Serenity, the excellent "Turn Around", right now from Beatport, which is already receiving some pretty solid reviews, but the album doesn't come out in the US for another week or two. The CD version of the album has seventeen tracks, and the DJ-friendly double-vinyl version has eight, dancefloor-tuned versions of the tracks.
For those of you over in Berlin, you should go to the release party, happening at Panorama Bar this Saturday, the 26th - I'm sure it will be a great night, and Prosumer & Murat Tepeli are performing live.
Ed: files are back
Here's a little secret: sometimes we Robots write these posts a few days in advance. So, for example, I'm writing this on Sunday morning, though you're reading it on Monday morning. It's like I'm the Marty McFly of blogging. Or would you believe that dude from Quantum Leap?
Anyway, my point is that I'm under a blanket in cold-ass Minnesota (Sunday's high: 6), drinking coffee, and listening to Jon Foreman sing quietly.
Jon Foreman - The Cure For Pain.
Sorry this won't kick off your week with a bang, but it's great right now. Jon Foreman is the lead singer of Switchfoot, a band I've heard of but know nothing about. Based on what I've heard, I'm pretty sure I don't like them. However, here Jon Foreman has a voice like honey and wrote a pretty song. So go Jon Foreman.
This track is from Foreman's record Fall. Foreman has been releasing seasonal EPs, and you can buy them in handy combos: all four together, or Fall and Winter together. And in the spirit of full disclosure: I wanted to post the song "Equally Skilled," but the powers that be have only cleared this track for download. I understand their reasoning, but if you like this, make sure and check out "Equally Skilled."
You can buy Foreman's EPs here.
Really, this one needs no explanation.
Everyone who knows Hot Chip loves them, and everyone else is just waiting to love them on hearing them.
Their music just gets better and better, as does their live show.
Yes, I am an unabashed fan of Hot Chip, but how could I not love them when I saw their first show at Rothko a number of years ago? Five guys standing in a line on stage, behind keyboards and drum machines, all singing in harmony, while simply blasting the hell out of us in the audience and making us dance. Magic.
This track, a subtle, mostly acoustic affair, (not unlike some of their early, hard-to-find material like "So Free" or live staple "Laws of Salvation") is the lead-in for their third and newest album, Made In The Dark, which comes out February 5th. Details on the album and touring news is available on their myspace page and check the official Hot Chip site for their blog. Pre-order the album here.
Buy it. I know it will be worth every penny.