It seems that pop punk has found my weakness. Keyboards. Blink 182 tried desperately for me to like their last effort with their synth laced songs and guest vocals by Robert Smith, at that point I resisted. Hellogoodbye covered their whiney emo voice with a vocoder and injected their songs with dance-y electro, this left me unable to decide whether they were actually good or if everything that I stood for musically was being compromised. Luckily, new artist Plushgun (Dan Ingala) isn’t forcing me to make such rash decisions about my musical taste. While he does include the traditional power chords of pop punkers, it is pushed way back in favor of synth strings and plucky melodies. Plushgun’s stripped down retro electro sound, especially on “The Dark in You”, calls to mind a more stadium ready Joy Electric or early Depeche Mode. The piano ballad “An Aria” sounds like a Snow Patrol ballad with a drum machine and synths, and that only makes it better. The crowning achievement up until this point is the catchy high school satire of “How We Roll” which goes from pop punk accessibility to a wafting melody to an aggressive dance beat and back again. Well there you go, I didn’t think it was that simple, but if you want me to like mainstream pop music, put the keyboards up front and give it a dance beat.
May 30, 2007
Plush Guns Shoot Synth Pop
May 28, 2007
Feces Dance Party
When I first heard Shitdisco, the New Rave band from
May 27, 2007
A New Taste of Spoon
Let me put this out there straight away. Spoon is one of my favorite bands and I enjoy nearly everything that they’ve put out. Ever since I saw Spoon on Austin City Limits in 2002, I’ve been hooked on their rock & soul minimalist sound. They are one of the primary reasons that I got into indie music towards the end of my high school tenure, and “Girls Can Tell” has remained one of my favorite albums of all time since I heard it. “Kill the Moonlight” took some time for me to get used to, but I love how they combined an experimental sound with so few elements on each song yet it still retained that blue collar accessibility. I enjoyed the expanding sound and grooves of “Gimme Fiction” immediately, while it still allowed for more subtle songs to grow into favorites.
If I were to compare the latest albums to different varieties of foods, I would say that “Girls Can Tell” would be the original recipe, “Kill the Moonlight” would be the low calorie alternative that is surprisingly filling, “Gimme Fiction” would be the 5-star restaurant interpretation into a 3 course meal, and the newest offering would be the spicy mélange of all three. “
As for songs, all the tracks are solid. There’s not a misstep to be heard. Brit Daniel’s vocals are as good as ever, Jim Eno’s drumming is, as per usual, hyper rhythmic, and all the grooves and melodies are as funky or as tough as they want to be. Opener, “Don’t Make Me a Target” (1), starts off with that familiar heavy “rough day at work” sound, bu then the beat changes, the piano becomes more menacing and the song glides on thoughts of what you would do to your incompetent boss if you could get away with it, before it comes calmly to an end. “The Ghost of You Lingers” (2) is a song composed of urgent piano hammering and panning vocals, which is probably the biggest departure from their traditional sound. The effects and atmosphere add an ominous edge that makes this track the most dramatic on the album. The two tracks I seem to always come back to are the sashaying thump of “Don’t You Evah” (4) and the triumphant melodies of “Finer Feelings” (9). To suggest that these songs would be better out of context to the remainder of the album would be a mistake as the feeling and presence of each song is enhanced by the track before and after it. So, a word of advice, you could listen to some tracks now, but for the full effect you need to hear the whole thing from beginning to end. Trust me on this, I am even a guy who enjoys singles immensely, but this album needs to be heard in its entirety. It’s just that good.
MP3 – Spoon – No You’re Not (A Series of Sneaks)
MP3 – Spoon – The Delicate Place (Gimme Fiction)
MP3 – Spoon – Take a Walk (Girls Can Tell)
Spoon – The Ghost of You Lingers Music Video:
May 24, 2007
The Faint Shuffles off to Buffalo
The Faint is putting on a short tour and making a stop in Buffalo tonight. It should be a good time. They’ve been playing new songs here and there and I can’t wait for them to release something new, it seems like it’s been so long since fall 2004. In the meantime, here are a few tracks and a video of them making “Wet from Birth” to quench the feverish anticipation.
The Faint – Dropkick the Punks
The Faint – Take Me to the Hospital
May 23, 2007
Pow Pow Pow Bam Bam Bam Chk Chk Chk
So, I’ve been a little busy since I got home from college looking for a job, but I do have some updates to put up this week. First up I’d like to talk about !!! (Chk Chk Chk). They came up to Montreal last Friday, but unfortunately my Great Aunt’s funeral was the same day, and family things tend to come before party things. So anyway, despite my not being there the show was said to have been great. Their new album is across the board one of the best dance albums of 2007. It was one of the very first reviews I wrote for the AZLTRON blog. They also recently put out a video for their awesome track “Must be the Moon” from Myth Takes, which is my favorite track on the album, so needless to say it’s pretty sweet.
MP3 – !!! – Intensify
Must be the Moon Video:
May 15, 2007
Herbie Hancock Synth Master of Funk
So, this past week I was looking up videos of Bob Moog (the creator of the Moog Synthesizer) and I happened to find a video of Herbie Hancock showing kids a Fairlight synthesizer on Sesame Street. From his congenial attitude toward the kids and funky jam on the outro, I was hooked. So, needless to say I found myself looking up lots of songs and videos of him from the mid 80′s in the past week or so. For those of you who aren’t familiar with who this guy is, he is a wildly inventive and Grammy winning jazz pianist and composer from Chicago Illinois who has worked with Jazz legend Miles Davis and contributed genre bending experimental music that is still surprisingly fresh and accessible today. “You Bet Your Love”, with its vocoder and slap bass, is certainly in the record collection of Daft Punk, and the jazzy drawn out funk storm of “Chameleon”, I’m sure, has a home in James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem’s house. Herbie Hancock was also one of the first musicians to use an apple computer to assist him in making music in the early 80′s, he also was the first performer to win a Grammy for a song that featured scratching on the 1983 single “Rockit”. I would be willing to bet, even if you’ve never heard of Mr. Hancock before, you’ve most likely heard “Rockit.” What I’m most impressed with though, is that despite that it’s been 20 or more years since these songs were created, they still sound great coming out of my car stereo.
Herbie Hancock Myspace
Buy the Essential Herbie Hancock
MP3 – You Bet Your Love – Herbie Hancock
MP3 – Rock It – Herbie Hancock
Rock It : Live
May 12, 2007
Those Crazy Cary Brothers
MP3 – Who You Are – Cary Brothers
Cary Brothers Music Video for “Ride”
A Sparkly vacation on Lazarus Beach
MP3 – Only the Messenger – Through the Sparks
MP3 – The Final If and When – Through the Sparks
May 11, 2007
Bob Moog would be Proud.
The Moog offer up a fun, if not redundant take on pop-rock. The Hungarian 5-piece plays music in the same vein as Rooney or Phantom Planet with clear inspiration from the Strokes’ early work. Their bouncy garage rock sound sounds perfect for radio, and will probably get any party started before you can say “Black Eyed Peas”. The obvious single is the aptly adolescent “I Like You” (4) with its giddy freak out sound. “Anyone” (7) sounds like, for a long time, like they’re going to keep it a subdued piano ballad but around 1:08 they break it out Beach Boys style, and it works. My favorite track here, “If I Died” (6) plays around with some Stills-esque vocal style along with the catchiest hook to be found on the album. While the album at times seems to follow a “song by numbers” type formula, you can’t deny that the formula works.
Moog Myspace
Buy Sold for Tomorrow
MP3 – If I Died – The Moog
The Making of the “I Like You” Video:
A Cascade of Graig
Graig Markel provides wonderfully layered down tempo pop, rich with slide guitars, violins and chiming melodies on his new album “Via Novella”. The inventiveness of the instrumentation helps avoid the usual pitfalls of down tempo pop. The lush soundscapes evoke at times the sounds of Air or Andrew Bird while being intimately unique at the same time. There are some absolutely stunning instrumentals here. “Black Mesa” (1) and “Figures in the Snow” (10) both allude to nature’s beauty in title and in sound. I hate to be redundant with the term “beauty” here, but I would use that adjective again for most of the ballads here as well, in particular the subtly electro-acoustic romp “Cascadia”. Graig Markel also has the knack to inject his songs with a certain emotional weight while nudging the song along at just the right pace, best exemplified in “Knives Drawn” (2) and “Sixes and Sevens” (5). While not flawless from start to finish, you’d be hard pressed to find a better formed diamond in the rough.
Buy Via Novella
