I’ve always had a soft spot for The Killer’s Hot Fuss. That’s why I was excited to hear “Easy Answers”. Tapping into the same electro-pop vein as the Las Vegas quartet’s debut, Paul Bethers’ new single rides a towering wave of pulsating synths and anthemic vocals to create an infectious sing-a-long vibe. With summer right around the corner, “Easy Answers” is bound to get a good work out in your car stereo.
Paul Bethers – Easy Answers
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“Keep Your Eyes on the Road” is the first single from Paul Marshall’s new project, Lone Wolf, and serves to introduce the new project as the new face of Paul Marshall (mustache included!) with the accompanying music video. Marshall pays tribute to one of his musical influences, Peter Gabriel, by making the video a tribute to Gabriel’s 1987 music video “Sledgehammer.” The stop action animation mixed with claymation creates a tripped-out Fantastic Mr. Fox atmosphere, and manages to both emote Marshall’s lyrics and pay direct tribute to the animators of Gabriel’s team. According to Lone Wolf’s label, Bella Union, Gabriel and the animation team have “seen and approved” the video. The music is equally as impressive, demonstrating Marshall’s ability to take what could have been a great acoustic folk song and expand it into a fuller statement.
Remember Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2? As a 14-year old kid interested in skateboarding, videogames, and pop punk, this was pretty much it. This game was my introduction to a number of great artists including Millencolin, Consumed, and Lagwagon. My favorite track on the album was “May 16” and I always try to make a silly point of listening to it today. My summer break after this game came out consisted almost exclusively of laughing at the ridiculous game physics, teaching myself punk songs on guitar, and getting injured trying out tricks on a home made half pipe (with maybe two inches of actual vert). I hope it invokes the same kind of nostalgia in you that it does for me.
Lagwagon – “May 16”
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If there’s a band that better embodies summer than Philadelphia-based five-piece Free Energy, I haven’t found it. Driving with the windows open, hitting up the beach, lazing away on the couch with absolutely nothing to do or plan other than doing whatever the hell you want – summer is just as much a feeling as it is a season. And Free Energy’s superb debut, Stuck on Nothing, encapsulates that indescribable sense of freedom better than anything I’ve heard all year. Summer’s here: don’t let it go to waste.
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Jadea Kelly is perhaps best known our readers as the voice of Kezia on Protest the Hero’s 2005 album of the same name, but in the ever-expanding Toronto roots music scene her work with the progressive metal outfit is little more than the prologue to her ever-growing solo career.
Eastbound Platform, Kelly’s second album, was released two weeks ago to the day and has already been met with positive reviews from Exclaim! Magazine and CBC Radio—expect SputnikMusic to join these ranks shortly. Praises of her work is warranted, as the album shows the evolution of a once nervous performer who—in her on stage debuts with Protest the Hero—occasionally struggled to find her voice in the band’s often boisterous, hairy-chested performances. Nervous no longer, Jadea has taken takes her soft spoken demeanour and turned it into the quiet confidence of an artist who now bleeds self-assurance (although not literally, I’m sure).
“Never Coming Back” is the lead track off of Eastbound Platform and features a uniquely groove-laden take on a traditional country rock track. On top of Jadea’s stated vocal performance, make note of the interplay between the bass’s walking plod and shifting guitar lines, all of which climax in the tracks’ wind-swept refrain. Listen to the track below.
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The closing seven minutes of Mouth of the Architect’s new EP The Violence Beneath should sound freakishly familiar to anyone that remembers the best of 80’s rock music or has a parent that does. It takes a few minutes to realize that the post-metallers are covering Peter Gabriel’s 1986 pop-hit “In Your Eyes” because the massive hooks and gentle crooning have been replaced by sluggish volume swells and ghostly howls, but once you get it, it’s hard not to crack a smile.
Mouth of the Architect – In Your Eyes
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“Do the Astral Plane” is Flying Lotus’ late-album reminder that you’re supposed to be having fun. Forget all the self-serious overanalyzing. Don’t mind the perfect scores and the dazed, knee-jerk responses like “blown away” or “shit-hot.” Enjoy precisely what holds this collage of experiments above its pretensions: you can laugh, long and hard. From that goofy opening beatbox to the sweeping strings, right down to the album’s most generous and easily digestible beat, Flying Lotus bounds across the line between cred-approved irony and actually surrendering to these melodramatic DJ tropes, amping up each element in an ascending escalator of synths and horns. Anything goes by the time you’re thinking “free jazz” at the expense of Nintendo glitches. I can only imagine what “do the astral plane” can mean for a track this flamboyant and sexy.
Note: This youtube version of the song includes the outro of “Mmmhmm,” the track preceding this on Cosmogramma. This is preferable for your listening pleasure for the sake of continuity and, well, it’s great. Just really great. Tell all your friends.
The Opus is an instrumental hip-hop project out of Chicago, and they’ve just released their latest EP, Praying Mantis. The EP is jam-packed with seven dense tracks of strong beats and interesting samples, with a flair for ambient openings. Oddly, the EP begins with “Divorced”, labeled as a bonus track. I have yet to see a version of the EP without the “bonus” track, and I couldn’t imagine a better opening to the EP.
It’s a little bit difficult to call Crown on the Ground a pop song. While the vocals of Alexis Krauss are firmly rooted in accessible, catchy melodies, they’re caught in a whirlwind of Derek Miller’s (ex-Poison The Well) aggressive, in-your-face instrumentation, a flurry of dense guitar wailing, handclaps and loud, buzzing synths that engulf what is otherwise so sweet and simple. Go loud or go home. The best part is, for all its disorienting, decibel-abusing madness, it’s actually fun.
Their debut album, Treats, drops May 11th on M.I.A.’s NEET Recordings label.
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It’s been a little over a decade since the alternative rockers Far last put out an album and yet, barely any of their luster was lost. On May 25th, At Night We Live drops as the follow up to their cult classic Water & Solutions. Opening A Night We Live, “Deafening” is certainly the heaviest Far track to date, and while it does not reflect the rest of the album, it provides a glimpse of how the band has changed since their hiatus. To purchase At Night We Live, click the album art provided above.
Is Old Man Luedecke leading a banjo revolution? Probably not. But his latest album rules.
Regarding their late 2009 release Sigh No More, our own DaveyBoy suggested that Britain’s Mumford & Sons were, “delivering folk – and the banjo – to the masses.” While Mumford & Sons do employ the use of a banjo, they do so on an almost superficial level. On “Little Lion Man”, Sigh No More‘s obvious standout, the banjo is used as little more than a reaction to the guitar. It always sounds nice and it always works but it’s never the focus.
The banjo is definitely Old Man Luedecke’s focus. He’s a “banjo revivalist” based out of Canada’s east coast. I could lazily compare his music to The Tallest Man on Earth and I just did. Maybe now you’ll listen.
On My Hands Are On Fire and Other Love Songs, his latest release, Old Man Luedecke (née Chris) enlists the help of a guitarist, bassist and fiddler (he-he) but more often than not the emphasis is on his words and his banjo.
“Foreign Tongue”, which you’ll hear below, is a prime example of how Luedecke does more with less. A uniquely written song, “Foreign Tongue” evolves from a love song about a distant, unfulfilled love into the desperate plea of a shy and nervous man who’s clearly convinced himself of a love only he’s aware of. Its 21st Century ambiguity makes it…
Yesterday Future Islands released their second LP, In Evening Air on Thrill Jockey Records. Our track of the day is the first single from that album, “Tin Man,” a track that has an upbeat but moribund energy. Future Islands combines sparse guitar lines with a steel drum and gruff but sensitive vocals that sound somewhere between Hot Water Music‘s Chuck Ragan and Pixies‘ Frank Blank. “Little Dreamer” is the final track of their first LP Wave Like Home which was released on vinyl earlier this year. “Little Dreamer” is a sweet ballad cast in the same lo-fi, bristly electronics of “Tin Man.” Future Islands are strange in that on paper they seems like a combination of common sounds – new wave, punk, indie, folk – but somehow they are leagues above all the other bands dabbling in similar genres.
Future Islands – “Tin Man”
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Future Islands – “Little Dreamer”
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After solo albums by practically every member in this indie supergroup, Canadians (and Virginian fox Neko Case) the New Pornographers released their fifth album today, the aptly named Together. I wanted to pick a lesser known song then their first single for this Track of the Day, but damn! it’s just too good. One of the most propulsive melodies on the record lit up by a killer lead vocal by Case and surprisingly apocalyptic lyrics coming from one of music’s sunnier bands. After her strong performance on this album and last year’s Middle Cyclone, I’d have to consider Case in my top 3 female indie vocalists.
“The ruins were wild / Tonight will be an open mic.”
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When Ronnie Drew died in the summer of 2008, having lost a two-year battle with throat cancer, his death was greeted with the kind of pomp and reverence usually reserved for a military hero – the Irish President and Prime Minister issued statements of condolence within hours, and streets were lined as his funeral procession came to a halt in Greystones, Co. Wicklow. At his funeral, it was telling that, of all the songs and poems that were cited, none was as poignant as the excerpt from a lament to Brendan Behan: “Words have no meaning now, silence is master, laughter and songs bow.”
Behan was a child of old Dublin, born shortly after independence to a family of revolutionaries. His father fought in the War of Independence and his maternal uncle wrote the national anthem, which persists to this day and graphically recounts an ambush attack on a troop of British soldiers in Ireland. Infused by that same spirit, at the age of 16 Behan joined the IRA (Irish Republican Army) and went on a rogue mission to England to blow up the Liverpool docks. He was caught and placed in a youth prison for three years, whereupon he wrote his memoir, The Borstal Boy; years later, he would write his defining work, the play The Quare Fellow, and had his brother Dominic, himself an ex-convict, write a haunting ballad to open the work.
The track is usually performed a capella with a single lead vocalist, in this…
Black Moth Super Rainbow’s Tobacco, aka Tom Fec, has always had a knack for quality hip-hop inspired beats. On his first solo outing away from BMSR, 2008’s Fucked up Friends, he took his analog wizardry over to Anticon records, the home of Sole and Why?, and went all out. Following in the vein of his solo debut, “Fresh Hex” is the second single from Tobacco’s upcoming album Maniac Meat. One of two songs on the album to feature a guest spot from Beck, “Fresh Hex” is Tobacco at his best, his nightmarishly twisted beat thumps along as Beck relives his Odelay glory days. It’s one hell of a ride, even if it only lasts a bit over a minute and a half.
Tobacco – Fresh Hex (feat. Beck)
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