Matthew Perpetua expresses perfectly what I’ve been saying for a while now: Tune-Yards is a musical genius and the best performer around, and even the very strong Dirty Projectors (for whom she opened) can’t hold a candle to her.
“Tomber La Chemise” - Zebda, “Essence Ordinaire” (Barclay, 1998)
I went to see my friend Tom play in a French cover band called Pamplemousse tonight at Bistro Jules near my apartment. The performance was great and I am hoping to get some mp3s that one of the band members recorded of the performance soon! Until then, here is the original of one of the songs they played, which was apparently a huge hit in France in 1998. It’s a really fun ska tune that translates well even if you don’t know any French. One of the things that I really enjoyed about the performance was that I know almost nothing about French music, so everything was pretty much new and interesting to me. A gap in my musical knowledge that I was more than happy to spend a couple of hours filling in!
(The title means “Take off your shirt” in French!)
“Cool Yourself” - Thao Nguyen & The Get Down Stay Down, “Know Better Learn Faster” (Kill Rock Stars, 2009)
About to run and not much time to post, so here is a fun and silly video for the new Thao record.
“Baby Baby You’re My Baby” - Herman Dune, “Don’t Lie About Me!” [EP] (Everloving, 2009)
The combination of the title and the bubbly opening notes made me think initially that this would be pretty annoyingly sweet. And I was right that it’s super-sweet, but as Sean at StG put it, “oh golly I still want to give it to my sweetheart with a handwritten note, one that says, succinctly, FOR YOU.” (E - For you. I wrote it by hand, on the keyboard!) I think it’s very rare to hear lighthearted love songs that are also high-quality, so I’m pretty impressed with this.
Incidentally, I am also working through some city-based shortest-path graph traversal algorithms for a problem set, so the geographic parts of this song are quite fitting.
“Like It Or Not (version 2)” - Architecture in Helsinki, “Like It Or Not” [EP] (Polyvinyl, 2008)
Alright, I think after my earlier post today I’m not up for writing too much on this. Note however that I have included the name of the label, Polyvinyl, in the header, as per my new plan. I’ve never gotten into AIH in general, but some of their songs are really catchy. This one is sprightly and weird and reminds me of Violent Femmes, and is another find off the Urban Outfitters LSTN mixtapes.
I saw a couple of references around the web today to this NPR chat on the role of (indie) record labels in the modern music industry. I sat down to read it tonight and was very impressed at the thoughtfulness of the participants, which include Carrie Brownstein (formerly of Sleater-Kinney) and representatives from a few indie labels. It’s definitely worth a read.
It was also interesting as a chance to reflect on my own orientation toward these issues. For the most part, I fit their characterization of the modern music consumer as a dabbler, which I think is part and parcel with the blog medium. Are there any good non-dabbling music blogs out there? A friend of mine tried to start a totally Rush-focused blog, which I thought was awesome, but the project tapered off. I guess the other blog alternative to dabbling would be to have unbelievably deep knowledge of a genre, to the point where you can regularly provide interesting and new content even from existing stuff. The one good example I can think of is the excellent Honey, Where You Been So Long?, which focuses on prewar acoustic blues. Phil Schaap could do it if he wanted to.
Record labels play a pretty small part in my exploration of music. For the most part, I have no idea what label a given artist is on. I know the names of the major indie labels but I don’t have any specific associations with any of them. The one label that really does act as a filter for me is Fat Possum, the Mississippi blues-focused label. They have consistently produced artists that I love, including R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, T-Model Ford, The Black Keys, and Heartless Bastards. I will be much more interested to listen to a blues artist if I know that he’s (or I guess more rarely she’s) on Fat Possum. I guess they do a good job of defining their sound (grungy and hypnotic blues shuffle) and associating their name with their artists.
The roundtable is right to say that there’s so much stuff out there that you need one or more “gatekeepers” to filter content for you, unless music is your full-time job (and maybe even then). When I can pull it off, I really love doing “primary” filtering, like earlier this year when I listened through all of the SXSW mp3s (though even that has already been curated once, just to a lesser degree). But it takes a great deal of sustained effort, especially when you’re not being paid for it!
Rather than record labels, I’ve found a couple of blogs that I can usually count on. I pay attention to the whole MBV family of blogs, but I make a point of listening to everything posted by Frank Yang at Chromewaves and by the various people behind Said The Gramophone. (This has had the odd result that I’ve ended up getting into a lot of Canadian music.) Chromewaves is a reliable source of fairly comprehensive coverage of new indie music, and I think my taste tends to agree with Frank’s. Said The Gramophone, on the other hand, is extremely high-variance. They post mostly relatively unknown stuff, and I end up hating a decent amount of it as well as finding some gems. But I always know it will be interesting. (As an aside, I hate the style of their accompanying writings, and never read them. For a long time, I didn’t even listen to their songs because of that, but at some point I realized that the music was damn good and I didn’t have to read the text.)
Finally, having recently started writing reviews for a Pitchfork competitor (two so far, hopefully they’ll be posted soon!), I was very interested in the discussion of that site. I hope they’re right that there’s room for competition!
As an experiment, I’m going to begin including the label of the artist in each post’s header on this blog, as much for my own interest as for any reader’s. I’m interested to see whether I’ll start associating particular “sounds” with particular labels. Maybe they are useful as gatekeepers, and I just haven’t realized it. And maybe I’ll find a new Fat Possum! Should be fun.
“Real Live Flesh” - Tune-Yards, live 4AD Session studio recording
UPDATE - the video is acting weird in the Tumblr interface for me, so if you can’t see it just click the link at the bottom of this post to watch it at MBV.
Of course live is by far the best way to experience Tune-Yards’ music, but even video is much better than just audio at capturing her charmingly idiosyncratic stage presence. This is one of the songs she performed at the show I saw at Union Hall a few weeks ago. It seems a little strange to see it in isolation from an entranced crowd, but I really like the way the video shows her building the textures and different parts of the piece in real time, which was one of the most fun parts about seeing her perform. She is an incredible singer and busts out some great soul-diva sound in this one. For some reason this video also made me think that her bassist should definitely be playing a standup acoustic bass instead of an electric bass guitar.
video via MBV.
“Broken Side of Time” - Alberta Cross, “Broken Side of Time” (2009)
I was very happy to see that Daytrotter posted a session with New York roots rockers Alberta Cross this week. I was even happier to see that they just released their first full-length album! I first heard them earlier this year when I was listening through the mp3s posted by SXSW and really enjoyed their song “The Thief and The Heartbreaker.”
This track is from their excellent Daytrotter session and is also the title track of their new album. Alberta Cross have drawn comparisons with the likes of Neil Young, from hardcore Neil Young fans such as my dad, for their earnest and slightly rough sound, but this song in particular reminds me of nothing more than Led Zeppelin’s “Achilles’ Last Stand”, with its changing time signature and slightly apocalyptic menace. I hope this means the band will get some more exposure, and also that they’ll come back to play some shows in NYC soon!
“Valley of Debris” - Heartless Bastards, “All This Time” (2006)
I’m going to the Heartless Bastards/Wolfmother show at Music Hall of Williamsburg tonight, but I won’t be writing it up on The Romp…because I’m writing it for another site! Stay tuned for the link when it’s up. Meantime, here’s a Heartless Bastards song that I hope they play tonight. I tend to like the HBs better when they show their rock side, and this is a good example of that, with a snarling guitar that is classic Fat Possum sound and Erika Wennerstrom letting her very strong voice loose. And how often does a song in 3/4 rock?
This is not the album version, but rather a live studio recording from their Daytrotter session.
“Outta Harm’s Way” - King Khan & The Shrines, “The Supreme Genius of King Khan & The Shrines” (2008)
A second high-quality piece from the first of the Urban Outfitters “LSTN” mixtapes. My first reaction upon listening to this piece was that it sounded like The Rolling Stones—the beginning reminds me in particular of “Satisfaction”, with the big horn section and the straight-ahead drumbeat (listen to the two intros back-to-back). But as the song develops it moves somewhat away from the classic Stones sound. By a minute or so in it starts to sound to me like The Hives at 90% speed. Part of this is that Erick Khan’s insistent voice reminds me a lot of Pelle Almqvist’s, but there’s also a similar willingness to have a lot of things going on at once without worrying too much about how much they complement each other, just enjoying the depth of the sound.
If you had told me before I heard this song to imagine a cross between the Stones and the Hives I don’t think I could have imagined it, but King Khan pulls it off very well.
