|
 |
| |
 |
|
CD: $15.98
|
Adult
Why Bother
What happens when its getting late in the night at your cities hipest
dance night? All the pretty skinny ladies dressed in their leggins are
hangin with "white girl"? You haved on too many Sparks and are feeling
restless. The PBR's are almost sold out at the bar. I know what you can
do. Head over to that DJ booth and if he knows whats up. You tell that
superstar of the night that its time to grow this crowd up. How? your
probably wondering now. Adult! thats how. "Why Bother" you ask well that
is the name of this Detroit duo's fourth release. This is according to
their own press relese sheet "uneasy listening music for uneasy times."
With names of songs like "I Feel Worse When I'm with You", "Inclined to
Vomit" and "Plagued by Fear" I was a little scarred at first. However
giving this a listen through a few times it has really grown on me. The
first time I played this it took me by suprise. Its very brash, noisy,
and experimental. At times the beats are very spastic and chaotic other
times soothing baselines. The vocals are very 80's new wave in the vein
of Missing Persons. This is very much a forward thinking dance punk album.
This will have people on the dance floor either raising their hands for
more or sending those people who were close to the edge of inebriation to
the bathroom. This album is for those wanting to step over the line. -JP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Thrill Jockey
Genre/Style: Electronic
MP3 Inclined to Vomit
|
CD: $14.98
LP: $14.98
|
Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound
Ekranoplan
Like a lost Fillmore broadcast scrambled in the ionosphere before crashing meteor-like into the Mojave sand—the Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound funnels a Technicolor panorama of California rock and roll history into soulful, high-energy nuggets of contemporary, bluesy choogle n’ fuzz and wistful moonbase laments. Born in San Francisco in the dim dawn light of the new millennium, The Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound is built around a core of three musicians, Jefferson Marshall, Sunburst 3 (M.I.K.E. Lardas) and Charlie Saufley, who stumbled upon each other from divergent experiences in funk platter dealing, heavy space pop brewing, noise punk scrambling and a shared love of raga, Mudhoney and Pink Floyd. -CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Tee Pee
Genre/Style: Stoner Rock / Psychedelic
MP3 Myspace
|
CD:$13.98
|
Big D & the Kids Table
Strictly Rude
"Strictly Rude" is the product of a focused and hardworking band confident in their ability to lead ska's next resurgence. From the catchy opener "Steady Riot", a song reminiscent of "...And Out Come The Wolves"-era Rancid, to the ominous minor-key creepiness of "Snake Bite", to the slower, sunny "Shining On", which wouldn't sound out of place on a Lily Allen record, you get the idea that this might just be the record that ska needs - an album that's as sophisticated as it is pleasing, as adventurous as it is fun. Most importantly, it's a deeply candid album that was shaped by and incalculable amount of effort, energy, thought and love. "Strictly Rude" was produced by Mighty Mighty Bosstones' bassist and fellow Bostonian Joe Gittleman. -CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Side One Dummy
Genre/Style: Pop Punk
MP3 Myspace
|
CD: $15.98
LP: $14.98
|
Andrew Bird
Armchair Apocrypha
Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist and lyricist Andrew Bird picked up his first violin at the age of 4. Actually, it was a Cracker Jack box with a ruler taped to it, and the first of his many Suzuki music lessons involved simply bowing to the teacher and going home. He spent his formative years soaking up classical repertoire completely by ear so when it came time for a restless teen-ager to make the jump to Hungarian Gypsy music, early jazz, country blues, south Indian etc., it wasn't such a giant leap. It's fitting that now, though classically trained, he has instead opted to play his violin in a most unconventional manner, accompanying himself on glockenspiel and guitar, adding singing and whistling to the equation, and becoming a pop songwriter in the process.
A cast of collaborators was drawn from the surrounding music scene: Drummer and keyboard player Martin Dosh, singer Haley Bonar, bassist Chris Morrissey, and multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Ylvisaker (who, along with Dosh, now features in Andrew's live lineup) added their talents to the album, which was mixed at the famed, haunted Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota. It is an album that sums up where Andrew's career has taken him, yet is completely very much of his artistic present.
Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist and lyricist Andrew Bird picked up his first violin at the age of 4. Actually, it was a Cracker Jack box with a ruler taped to it, and the first of his many Suzuki music lessons involved simply bowing to the teacher and going home. He spent his formative years soaking up classical repertoire completely by ear so when it came time for a restless teen-ager to make the jump to Hungarian Gypsy music, early jazz, country blues, south Indian etc., it wasn't such a giant leap. It's fitting that now, though classically trained, he has instead opted to play his violin in a most unconventional manner, accompanying himself on glockenspiel and guitar, adding singing and whistling to the equation, and becoming a pop songwriter in the process.
A cast of collaborators was drawn from the surrounding music scene: Drummer and keyboard player Martin Dosh, singer Haley Bonar, bassist Chris Morrissey, and multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Ylvisaker (who, along with Dosh, now features in Andrew's live lineup) added their talents to the album, which was mixed at the famed, haunted Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota. It is an album that sums up where Andrew's career has taken him, yet is completely very much of his artistic present.
The album opens with "Fiery Crash," which Bird describes as a superstitious incantation to protect him from plane crashes ("just a nod to mortality before you get on the plane"). As the album progresses, songs of "Dark Matter" ("do you wonder where the self resides, is it in your head or between your sides, and who will be that one who will decide its true location?), "Heretics" and "Plasticities" are sung with humor and lightnessthe belies their lyrical depth. "Scythian Empire," amid lush pizzicatoviolin, considers an obscure corner of history and its lost civilizations, and apocalyptic horsemen. And so it goes through to the final notes of "Yawny at the Apocalypse," varied and stunning musical tapestries embellished with lyrical vignettes and musings that veer fluidly from almost childlike innocence to seasoned, darkly comic wit, with brilliant and unexpected twists at every turn. -CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Fat Possum
Genre/Style: Chamber Pop
MP3 Heretics
|
CD: $13.98
LP: $14.98
|
The Chinese Stars
Listen To Your Left Brain
Band History: Being made now. With "Listen To Your Left Brain", the Chinese Stars declare a new cold war. Formed in 2003, the band's pedigree reaches back to legendary acts Arab On Radar and Six Finger Satellite, seeds that inform this new efflorescence, but now the band has filled out in all the right places, having honed their chaotic four-on-the-floor, post-punk dance style into an unequivocal signature. Here The Chinese Stars set in motion a tsunami of new waves, crafting an atmosphere of propulsive sonic escapism - fueled by noodle-stringed guitar riffs, seat of your pants lyrics and hallucinatory synths. This is a fast, forward audio movement, taking music back to the base pleasures. Razor sharp, aural pop-art: the overblown are busted. -CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Three.One.G
Genre/Style: Dance Punk / Art Rock
MP3 Myspace
|
CD/DVD: $15.98$9.98
|
Earth
Hibernaculum
"Hibernaculum" is a very special CD and DVD package (1 cd and 1 DVD) release from avant-experimental drone innovators EARTH.
The audio material consists of (3) old Earth classics redone in a different, stark and clean tone (akin to the "Hex" material) plus the track "A Plague of Angels" which was previously available on a rare tour only split (w/ sunn 0)))) 12". The lineup assembled by Dylan for this album compliments the aesthetic and direction perfectly. Adrienne Davies who brought a patient, consistent and complimentary rhythm and percussion to the "Hex" album is again behind the drum kit. Don Mcgreevy and Jonas Haskins provide bass support. Steve Moore assists on keyboards and horns. Greg Anderson (sunn 0))) ) adds subsonics via analog synth on "Ouroboros is Broken" and "Coda Maestoso in F (Flat) Minor. As with the "Hex" album the present Earth is focused and precise yet the heavy darkness remains unbroken.
The video material is on a second disc, a Earth documentary filmed by Seldon Hunt. The documentary features many interviews with Dylan Carlson and live footage from the groups 2006 European tour. It is the first time ever that footage of Dylan Carlson and Earth have been released since the resurrection of the group. Detailed insight into the process of the band as well as candid, intimate conversations were captured on the fim. -CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Southern Lord
Genre/Style: Drone
MP3 Myspace
|
CD: $14.98$9.98
LP: $16.98
|
EL-P
I'll Sleep When You're Dead
El-P's first solo long player, "Fantastic Damage," was a masterpiece of dystopian, sci-fi, modern hip-hop angst in which a hyperwired, junk cluttered future shock mixed imperceptively with a paranoid, enraged vision of the present as an assaulted landscape in which the individual is terrorized and bombarded without relief by corporatism, technology, and corruption. The exact same can be said of his long awaited follow up, "I'll Sleep When You're Dead." The temptation is to criticize an artist for repeating himself, but I think this is missing the point entirely. El-P seems to have reached an artistic state like that of filmmaker David Cronenberg, who also makes very individual works haunted obsessively by the same themes, styles, and motifs over and over to exhausting and exhilarating effect. El-P's albums and Cronenberg's venerial dramedies also share a flair for devising perverse images of the technologic invading, clashing and merging with the flesh, the individual, the soul.
El-P is one of the few emcees whose work brings to mind artists from other mediums as much as fellow rappers. In addition to Cronenberg, the cyberpunk prose of William Gibson and the decayed futuristic identity twisting of Phillip K. Dick are recalled, as well as the cinematic sci-fi touchstones based on Dick's work, Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" and Paul Verhoeven's "Total Recall." The world of El-P is full of robots and confusing machines, but it seems like now the more it is listened to. El-P does not have an amazing voice or flow, but he commands what he has with utmost confidence, never faltering as he lets impassioned, detailed verses spill all over. The lyrics are rare in that they would look more amazing than awkward in print, dropping conceits, images, wordplay and invective with the type of prolifacy that is worth devising delusions of reference about.
These lyrics are crammed without concern for the idea of stopping atop relentless tracks, packed with layers of hard, abrasive noise that recall the headiest days of the Bomb Squad. I remember when "Fantastic Damage" came out and I similarly geeked over it, a friend complained that it had "too many lasers." True, this is not easy listening, but the constant pounding has a method in replicating the multitiered noise of worlds personal, metropolitan, national and worldwide. Each track drills into the brain with multiple noise devices, from the ceaselessly pounding snares to the nonstop angry swagger of the verses to the DJtastic twists of sound to the layer upon layer of noise, composition and samples. Like vintage Public Enemy, the amped up, dense, shifting, relentless dynamics are headache material, but they cloy in the most positive provocative way, creating a mental state of constant attack and rage that legitimately creates the emotions punk is still trying to acheive through mere petulant volume. The way that these tracks intrigue is like a loud sneering hypnotist with guns, and the more you can become accustomed to the noise, the more rewarded you will be by discovering actually ingenious grooves and symphonies beneath.
I personally get tired of endless bellyaching about negativity in hip-hop. A lot of my favorite music is ugly and nihilistic, because it happens to have a lot more imagination and conviction than contrasting reactions that earn praise for positivity while regurgitating an all too respectable sound. "I'll Sleep When You're Dead" is a negatively charged gem like last year's long stare into the void, "Hell Hath No Fury" by Clipse, with whom El-P shares a vicious, kettle black sense of humor. Clipse's vision of a world revolving around cocaine and little else seems almost intimate in comparison to El-P's epic maelstrom of malevolent chaos and exploitation. It is too bad audiences are still so seggregated, as his music shares more of a kinship with gutter gothic NYC hip hop than the backpacker movement he is more often attached to.
Through the madness there is as sane a hope as can be expected. As the title indicates, on "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" El-P maintains a determination to stay vigilantly aware as long as fuckupedness exists. This is made abundantly clear on "Up All Night," which favorably recalls his classic "Deep Space 9mm." "Tasmanian Pain Coaster" proves his sick/awesome credentials by using a "Fire Walk With Me" sample to creepily and sedately open a monstrous track in which he lays down the gauntlet of the future present terrorizing the oblivious mass culture ("this is a sign of what you don't know killing you"). "EMG" personifies capitalism as sociopath, having a demented b-boy celebration of the slow murder of consumers via bloat and poison. "Dear Sirs" unrelentingly takes the paranoid schitzophrenic scrawlings of city life as apocalypse and chaos over mounting steccato slices of noise and incessent typewriter taps. "Run the Numbers" is a crucial example of a sub-genre El-P perfected if he did not invent it, the dystopian b-boy noise jam (we get another one with "No Kings"), before turning into a celestial space tragedy about halfway through. "The League of Extraordinary Nobodies" is a distorted cabaret of public confusion. "Habeas Corpses (Draconian Love)" is a sickly humorous tale of confusing love told from the POV of a human weapon of holocaust. That track ends on a disturbing note of terrifying bleakness (laughter) to plunge into "The Overly Dramatic Truth," a song whose title mocks itself. Indeed, the self deriding unworthy of love lyric risks flat embarrassment and loathing, but is sold by its impeccable music that delivers on the swirling symphonics that are elsewhere buried. The exhausting album ends on one of many highlights. "Poisenville Kids No Wins" takes the foreboding dark psychedelia of 90s Tricky and does something Tricky never managed to do with it despite his best attempts: he marries it harmonious to grimy NYC hip hop.
Buried somewhere in all this are contributions from Cat Power, The Mars Volta, Cage, and Trent Reznor. It is a tribute to El-P's distinctiveness that the guests are not conspicuous, and everything is mired deep in his own aesthetic. "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" is a triumph that will, like its predeccessor, take years to unpeel. El-P is one of the most uncompromising, excessive, passionate, progressive, ambitious, and noisy producers working, yet his beats pack more of a classic boom bap than artists who claim to love hip hop so much they rap about it almost exclusively. As a lyricist, El P has much more on his mind, painting nothing less than a phantasmagoria of the oppression, assault, and confusion of the modern world "where everything has a meaning but none of it makes sense."-GB
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Def Jux
Genre/Style: Hip Hop
MP3 Myspace
|
CD: $14.98
|
I'm From Barcelona
Let Me Introduce My Friends
Named after Fawlty Towers' Manuel (he's from Barcelona, si?), and formed in Jonkoping, Sweden by Emanuel Lundgren, I'm From Barcelona are 29 (count em!) friends who gathered together and, fuelled with the energy that only a sunny summer holiday can bring, created an album of explosively happy pop songs.
Emanuel's flat transformed into a factory where band members embraced a do-it-yourself ethic, coming and going loaded with banjos, accordions and kazoos and eventually releasing a DIY EP.
Elsewhere on the album is a true pop spirit; melodies are essayed by an infectious playfulness and on songs like Treehouse and Chicken Pox, Emanuel has given tribute to the energy of children, looking for the kinds of magical juxtapositions we normally only have time for in childhood.-CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Mute
Genre/Style: Pop
MP3 Myspace
|
CD:$14.98
LP:$14.98
|
Innocence Mission
We Walked In Song
The members of The Innocence Mission were still in high school when they met and started making music together. Through eighteen years of recordings and tours, both on their own and with acts such as Natalie Merchant, Emmylou Harris and 16 Horsepower, the band has gained legions of devoted listeners. and grown immeasurably as songwriters, singers and musicians.
Their new album, We Walked in Song is one of their strongest works, though there was great tragedy in the beginning stages of creating the album. "Sometime after the passing of her father, Karen Peris began to write some of the most heartfelt material I have heard from the band. I believe she turned to songwriting as a way of coping with this great loss and celebrating those she loves in her life," says Badman's Dylan Magierek.
With eleven new, memorable and genuinely moving songs, We Walked in Song is the kind of intimate recording where each note seems essential. From the socially conscious opening track, "Brotherhood of Man" to the longful closing lines of "My Sisters Return from Ireland," Peris's hauntingly beautiful voice communicates with immediacy. Her visual, engaging lyrics have a rare, emotional depth and a firm sense of place. Don Peris's ringing, tremulous electric guitar and Paul Simon-inspired acoustic guitar weave their own touching melodies around Karen's voice. The tracks are further lit by gentle lines of melodic piano, upright bass and baritone acoustic guitar.-CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Badman
Genre/Style: Pop
MP3 Into Brooklyn, Early in the Morning
|
2CD: $15.98$10.98
|
J Dilla
Ruff Draft
“Before we get this started, let me explain it. It’s Ruff Draft. For my real niggaz only. DJs that play that real live shit. You wanna bounce in your whip with that real live shit. Sound like it’s straight from the ma’fuckin’ cassette! Ruff Draft... Let’s do it.”
... Thus begins Ruff Draft. These self-produced tracks make up one of the late J Dilla’s least known works. Released on vinyl only in February 2003 by Dilla’s own newly-formed Mummy Records and distributed by the German label Groove Attack, this sought-after release remains elusive and virtually unknown to the casual Dilla fan.
In retrospect, Ruff Draft proved to mark a turning point in Dilla’s career. He spent the ’90s making a name for himself as an all-around, top-notch hip-hop producer. First arriving on the scene with his own group Slum Village in his native Detroit, Dilla would establish himself throughout the decade on classic tracks for A Tribe Called Quest, Common, The Pharcyde and De La Soul, eventually branching out to work with a variety of heavy-hitters in hip-hop and R&B, from Busta Rhymes and The Roots to D’Angelo and Erykah Badu.
In contrast to the often understated, mellow vibes and minimal, crisp drumbeats he brought to the boards for those groups, Ruff Draft revealed – to those who heard it the first time around – a whole new side to Dilla’s musical genius. Freewheeling, in-your-face synthesizers, blend perfectly with an uncharacteristically sample-heavy approach that was as bangin’ as it was experimental. And, as he indicated in the intro to the album (quoted above), it’s supposed to bump in your car like an old cassette – one of those well-loved ones that get played over and over and over.
This album marked a geographical change for Dilla, as well as a musical one. 2003 would be the year he transplanted to sunny Southern California. At the same time as he was completing Ruff Draft, Dilla was crafting the beats that would become his contribution to the Jaylib album, Champion Sound (Stones Throw, 2003) – his collaboration with the L.A.-based Madlib. The two iconic visionaries had been influencing each other from halfway across the country; now, they were collaborating on wax – each rhyming over the other’s beats. Dilla’s stylistic unpredictability and technical rawness announced first by Ruff Draft became undeniable with his work on Champion Sound, as he and Madlib joined forces to champion all things “ruff.”
Dilla would spend his last few years in Los Angeles. As his health gradually declined, his pace of music making never did. His beats became, if anything, more urgent – the product of a visceral need to create, as if he knew he had only so much time left. His first and only solo LP on Stones Throw, the 31-track instrumental suite Donuts (2006) plays out like a vinyl fanatic skipping through radio stations on the dial in his perfect universe. With a fresh style from one beat to the next, Dilla conceived this cut-and-paste masterpiece mostly from his hospital bed with nothing more than his sampler, a portable record player and whatever vinyl his friends brought through. Coming full circle from his slick productions of the ’90s, Dilla was now practicing hip-hop at its most essential: bringing out the soul in any style, from any source, with the most fundamental tools.
Dilla’s final album, The Shining (BBE, 2006), hints at the future music that might have come had his health not declined so severely. The sound is thick, with robust soul samples at the forefront, the culmination of the bombastic latter phase of his career. Stones Throw Records now presents the reissue of Ruff Draft as a crucial milestone in the evolution of one of hip-hop’s greatest producers.-CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Stones Throw
Genre/Style: Hip Hop
MP3 Myspace
|
CD:$13.98
|
LCD Soundsystem
Sound of Silver
It appears the jig is up, and the man who persuaded thick glasses to dance has gone and gotten mature. The thing is, he's even better now. As half of the DFA, the production duo and label heads most responsable for forcing the beauty of electronic dance music into the once stubbornly funkless world of independent rock (and vice versa), and as LCD Soundsystem, source of the aging music snob anthem "Losing My Edge," James Murphy has been a crucial maverick kicking up shit the whole way along. On "Sound of Silver," he doesn't sound like he's sweating it.
Where the sounds on the first LCD album popped and insisted upon themselves as if screaming, the sounds here, all the chants and the beats and the guitars and the cowbell solos, cohere. "Get Innocuous," "Time To Get Away," and "Us v Them" are full of such DFA staples, but are executed here with an effortless swagger and ease that approach...wait for it...smoothness, and it sounds great. Some vocals swathed over them recall "Remain in Light" era Talking Heads hypnosis, and "Time To Get Away" throws in some nice Nile Rodgersesque chickenscratch guitar to fine effect. "North American Scum" and "Watch the Tapes" are here to remind us that Murphy can still rock, but they can't help but have a relative lightness about them as if he doesn't need to remind us or himself that he used to be a punk (after all, Even Ian McKaye has gone quiet).
What makes this album remarkable happens somewhere in the middle, with "Someone Great." The beats shift to extreme mid-tempo, and the sound goes transcendently pretty, and Murphy sings a sincere lament to the people he loves and misses. Though the pace picks up a little bit with "All My Friends," the sadness remains over a hypnotic and moving piano loop. The lyric builds slowly and methodically, going deeper into themes of nostalgia and loss, climaxing with the addition of a New Orderish guitar into a bittersweet reverie.
Surprisingly, the greatest impression of "Sound of Silver" is not of anger or snarkiness, but of loss, resignation, and sadness. Like fellow early middle ager Damon Albarn, who built a supergroup (The Good, The Bad, and The Queen) out of legends older than he, Murphy has crafted one of the year's best sounding releases in tones of melancholy. The minimal title track adresses aging directly, as the color of the title refers more to hair than to futurism. With mellow house rhythms, Kraftwerk space keyboard effects, sticky bass lines, and shameless floating choral yawns and deep piano chord echoes, the number could at some points fit into a chillout collection, and is a reminder why that was not always a bad thing. The intonation that reoccurs bluntly states the fallacy in yearning for the incompletely remembered glow of youth.
The last song, "New York I Love You," cements "Sound of Silver" as a classic bummer album, the kind that can't help but spur a goofy, humbled smile. Most notably, it is a conventional song, completely shorn of dance rhythms. Over a pretty, and yes, sad, piano melody, Murphy laments his dissillusion with his city and its development. True, the one thing more annoying than New York worship is complaints from New Yorkers with more exciting lives complaining about being tired of it. This one, however, recalls Interpol's "NYC" in that its sincerity and beauty make the sentiment universal. -GB
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Astralwwerks / DFA
Genre/Style: Dance Punk / Electronic / Hipster House
MP3 Album Sampler
|
CD: $15.98
LP: $16.98
|
Ted Leo & the Pharmacists
Living With the Living
For their fifth full-length release (and first with Touch and Go Records), Ted Leo and the Pharmacists met up with Brendan Canty (Fugazi) to iron out a new set of anthems that arrive with a confident and outspoken immediacy. With Living with the Living, Ted & Co. wipe clean the slate that once held names like Weller, Strummer and Bragg and indulge some of their farthest-reaching musical ambitions. "Army Bound" and "La Costa Brava" evoke the melodic spirit of Andy Partridge, Ray Davies and ArgyBargy-era Squeeze, while "Colleen" is Ted's most successful meditation on pop music yet. "A Bottle of Buckie" clinks pint glasses with The Pogues and captures Ted conjuring up the rhythms of his Irish ancestry. And stretching his boundaries further still, songs like "The Toro and the Toreador", "The Lost Brigade" and "The Unwanted Things" find Ted taking his falsetto in new directions, with vocals that caress each composition with the greatest delicacy and grace. Along with the punk sound and energy found in Ted Leo and the Pharmacists' previous works, Living with the Living finds soul, funk and R&B injected into the trajectory of Chris Wilson's dexterous percussion, Dave Lerner's bedrock bass and an onslaught of combustibles from Ted's possessed fingertips. -CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Touch & Go
Genre/Style: Rock
MP3 Bomp.Repeat.Bomb
|
2CD: $13.98$9.98
|
The Locust
New Erections
As destructive as they are innovative, the Locust – San Diego’s boundary-crushing merchants of abrasive, noisy, synth-infused grind-punk – sets the hazmat meter on high and expands its sound on New Erections, which drops March 20, 2007. Praised by The L.A. Weekly for “creating a new, more dangerous paradigm for punk” this resourceful foursome builds on that belief with the vast, textural Alex Newport-produced follow up to its 2003 ANTI- debut Plague Soundscapes. Be it the reckless, riotous “We Have Reached an Official Verdict: Nobody Gives a Shit”; the scathing, cathartic “Full Frontal Obscurity”; or the sonic skull fuck “Book of Bot,” the Locust’s ongoing satire of America’s Wonder Bread culture is destined to give you a stiffie.
-CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Anti
Genre/Style: Punk / Metal
MP3 We Have Reached an Official Verdict: Nobody Gives a Shit
|
CD: $13.98
LP: $14.98
|
Low
Drums and Guns
FREE 7" w/ Purchase!
Formed in 1993, Low is from Duluth, Minnesota, and features Alan Sparhawk on vocals and guitar, Mimi Parker on vocals and drums, and Matt Livingston on bass and vocals. Sparhawk and Parker are married with two children; they first met in fourth grade in rural Minnesota. Drums and Guns is the band’s eighth full-length album and second for Sub Pop. It’s also, after 2005’s The Great Destroyer, the second album they’ve recorded with producer Dave Fridmann. Drums and Guns features a number of songs that ardent Low fans will recognize from the band’s recent live shows. These songs appear here in substantially altered forms, as though they’ve been taken apart and reassembled in striking new ways, or seen with new eyes. Or, given the lyrical emphasis on murder and death, a more insightful interpretation might see the band killing these songs and bringing them back to life anew. There’s no contrivance here, however. While these songs feature new elements (looped vocals, drum machines, etc.) and are thoroughly, radiantly contemporary, they remain undeniably Low’s. Drums and Guns possesses the unique, subtle beauty and power we’ve come to expect from Low, but the record is also profoundly exciting in ways that it’s easy to forget music can be. -CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Sub Pop
Genre/Style: Pop / Slo-core
MP3 Breaker/a>
|
CD:$14.98
|
Jesse Malin
Glitter in Gutter
Glitter in the Gutter is the new album from NYC's Jesse Malin, an artist who has transcended tags like "singer/songwriter" for something different and largely indefinable. Penned "a fearless storyteller", after releasing two critically acclaimed albums The Fine Art of Self Destruction and The Heat, Jesse has established himself as a career musician who writes songs that connect on so many levels that above all, he's a healer. The songs on Glitter in the Gutter have kept the intimate slice of life and detail of his previous records but also work on a larger palate. Jesse writes locally but thinks globally and makes his songs identifiable so that they can connect with people in every part of the world.
On this new album, he writes about hope, struggles and smiles; about finding ways "to keep on keeping on." Through his characters, like the woman who searches for salvation across the car radio dials in his song "Broken Radio", or the kid hiding his face in the cereal box in "Modern World", Malin points out "the little things that keep us laughing." Malin is able to convey happiness and sadness in the same note. This happens throughout Glitter in the Gutter. He explains that Glitter in the Gutter is "just a record about people and the things we do to stay alive."
The available time and iconography surrounding Glitter in the Gutter allowed Jesse to make the album he's only hinted at with previous releases. "I've never made a record outside of New York my whole life—not even above 14th Street—so it was a different experience to be locked away in California," he explains about the experience of recording the album in Los Angeles. "Right before we came out to [to California] I lost my apartment in New York, so I threw everything in storage in Queens and packed my life in a suitcase. So, yeah, this album had a lot of transient fugitive properties. -CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Adeline
Genre/Style: Pop / Rock
MP3 Myspace
|
CD: $12.98
|
Willy Mason
If the Ocean Gets Rough
Willy Masons new album, If the Ocean Gets Rough release with Save Myself as the lead single. After two years touring and rambling, Willy headed home to Martha's Vineyard. Thoughts moved to recording the new songs Willy had written on his journeys. He decamped to a small studio in North Brookfield, Massachusetts. The album turned out to be a family affair with Willy's younger brother Sam playing drums on all tracks and Willy's mum, Jemima singing backing vocals on several others as well as Roseanne Cash and KT Tunstall.-CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Astralwerks
Genre/Style: Americana / Blues
MP3 Myspace
|
CD: $16.98
|
Modest Mouse
We We're Dead Before the Ship Even Sank
FREE 7" WITH PURCHASE! SUPPLIES LIMITED!!
I'm rather convinced Modest Mouse can never succeed with the majority of their core fanbase ever again. To remake The Lonesome Crowded West or The Moon and Antarctica would be pointless; to diverge from them would be sacreligious. And maybe that's why they're making music "more accessible;" the indie eleite have already made up their minds and closed the door. We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank leaked weaks ago, and I've heard almost nothing and negativity from the old school fans, but I just can't quite figure it out. I will certainly concede that Good News... was not a fantastic album, but We Were Dead... is really, really good. Close to great, even.
The constant recent complaint that Modest Mouse only make "pop records" anymore is a bit ridiculous. For one, no matter how gritty some of their songs were, their songs have always been based on a pop foundation. Secondly, though there certainly have been more "hits" on the last two releases ("Dashboard" has to be one of the catchiest pop songs since Talking Heads), no way could songs as rough as "March Into the Sea" and "Parting of the Sensory" make it anywhere near the airwaves. Brock still has the grit and the spit and the rasp to make the angry, atonal, rough numbers that have always worked their way into their records.
In fact, if the increased poppiness comes from anywhere here it's from newest member Johnny Marr (guitarist for the Smiths), whose distinct catchy syncopated guitar picking marries with Brock's style fantastically (this is especially evident on songs such as "Dashboard," and "Florida,"). I could have picked no better addition to Modest Mouse than Marr, a man arguably responsible for the indie-pop genre as it stands today.
The complainers can say what they want; I love this record. The average songs are on par with Good News...'s best song ("The View") and the best songs are new and full and layered and dark and catchy and marvelous ("March Into The Sea," "Parting of the Sensory," and "Spitting Venom"). The album is referential all the way back through the entire Modest Mouse Catalog and even to that of Marr's work in the Smiths, and still I feel this is a record entirely different from anything they have done in the past. Even the radio single "Dashboard" is incredible in my opinion. Well done gentlemen. One and a half decades and you're still one of the absolute best in the game. -JM
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Epic
Genre/Style: Rock
MP3 Myspace
|
CD: $29.98
|
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
Abattoir Blues Tour
The Abattoir Blues Tour features songs from critically acclaimed 2004 double album Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus, plus an array of classic material from the band's repertoire. The 2 CDs contain live recordings from various dates on the 2004 "Abattoir Blues" tour. The 2 DVDs contain footage from two live concerts: first disc taken from one of the bands' 3 sold out "Abattoir Blues" concerts at London's Brixton Academy (November 11th 2004); second disc offers excerpts from London's Hammersmith Apollo show filmed during 2003 "Nocturama" tour. The DVDs also include all the promotional videos from the last two albums, plus special bonus behind the scenes footage of the "Bring It On" video-CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Mute
Genre/Style: Rock
MP3 Myspace
|
2CD:$19.98
2xLP:$19.98
|
Willie Nelson, Ray Price, Merle Haggard
Last of Breed
Three of the original country outlaws have come together to record this 2 CD collection of 22 classic country hits…timeless songs made famous by Bob Wills, Buck Owens, Hank Williams and many others as well as a few penned by Willie and Merle. -CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Lost Highway
Genre/Style: Country
MP3 Myspace
|
CD: $13.98$8.98
|
A Northern Chorus
The Millions Too Many
On their fourth album, Canadian indie pop combo A Northern Chorus fits together all the pieces of the puzzle to make their finest album yet. While the band has expanded its line-up with original violinist Erin Aurich rejoining and the addition of new drummer Craig Halliday, it has done the opposite with song structure. Previous albums contain songs stretching out towards the eight minute mark, this time the band has created nine new songs that are all under six minutes in length. The songs are more concise and the arrangements more grandiose but the band has refined their direction. Recorded and engineered by Holy Fuck's Graham Walsh, The Millions Too Many is undoubtedly the best A Northern Chorus album to date.-CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Sonic Unyon
Genre/Style: Post Rock / Chamber Pop
MP3 Myspace
|
CD: $14.98
|
Other Men
Wake Up Swimming
Sprung from the fertile musical ground of the early '90s San Diego scene, Heavy Vegetable stood out and apart from their contemporaries with hyperspastic mood-swings mixed with complex melodies and baffling dynamics that made their performances the stuff of legend.
After yielding two groundbreaking records and while at the top of their game, they called it quits. Now, 11 years after their last studio album, the band have reformed as Other Men and seem to have picked up directly from where they left off.
Instead of treading the sounds of the past, Other Men seem intent on creating new sounds from the depths of a played-out genre.-CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Robcore
Genre/Style: Rock
MP3 Myspace
|
CD: $13.98$9.98
|
Panda Bear
Person Pitch
Animal Collective member Panda Bear (a.k.a. Noah Lennox) boldly returns with his long-awaited third solo record Person Pitch. Years in the making, Person Pitch marks a dramatic departure from Panda Bear’s previous solo record Young Prayer. The acoustic instruments of Young Prayer have been replaced with samplers and electronics.
Fusing Panda’s dramatic life changes over the past few years (marriage, moving to Lisbon, becoming a father) with his ever-increasing sonic palette (standouts include Caetano Veloso, Berlin Techno, Scott Walker, and Kylie Minogue), Person Pitch is suffused with the kind of feel good modern toe-tapping pop that seems harder and harder to find these days.
Paw Tracks feels that the passing of time will show Panda Bear’s Person Pitch sitting alongside the great solo albums of Paul McCartney, George Michael, and Ghostface Killah. Luckily we don’t have to wait. -CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Paw Tracks
Genre/Style: Pop / Experimental / Pysychedelic
MP3 Myspace
|
CD:$13.98
LP:$13.98
|
The Ponys
Turn the Lights Out
Chicago's PONYS follow their two critically acclaimed albums on In The Red with their Matador debut, recorded at Electric Studios with John Agnello (Dinosaur Jr., Son Volt, Screaming Trees). A classic twin-guitar rock band fronted by the impassioned vocals of Jered Gummere, THE PONYS' songwriting range from psych jams to pounding rockers to twisted singer-songwriter material, evoking influences from Television and Dream Syndicate to The Only Ones and The Jesus and Marychain. Turn The Lights Out is denser, noisier and more fucked-up than its two predecessors, and sounds bigger to boot. The complex interplay between the guitars and the reverb-drenched vox and keys emerges more effectively than ever before in Agnello's massive production. -CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Matador
Genre/Style: Pop / Rock
MP3 Double Vision
|
CD: $15.98
LP: $15.98
|
Radical Face
Ghost
The second musical face of Ben Cooper (aka electric President). Chamber folk, pocket symphonies, pop condensed to it's essence.-CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Morr Music
Genre/Style: Electronic / Pop
MP3 Myspace
|
CD: $13.98
|
The Snake The Cross The Crown
Cotton Teeth
"Cotton Teeth" is the culmination of a year and a half of introspection, experimentation, and discovery for the four talented young men known as The Snake The Cross The Crown. At a time when bands are exhausting every resource to get to the top, The Snake The Cross The Crown have poured their energy into finding and developing their sound. Honest and unassuming folk inspired rock, stripped of all gimmicks.-CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Equal Vision
Genre/Style: Rock
MP3 Behold the River
|
CD:$16.98
|
Up, Bustle & Out
Mexican Sessions
The 8th album by the colourful band Up, Bustle & Out is ready for release - featuring an exciting & fun international crew, one funky video, a whole host of remixers from across Europe, USA and Mexico. If you have seen the films ‘Camores Perros’, ‘Raising Victor Vargas’, ‘Volveras’, or ‘Motorcycle Diariesc’, heard the exciting sounds and fusions taking place across the USA, Central America and the Caribbean, & been moved by these rhythms, then this album will capture your imagination.
‘Mexican Sessions - Our Simple Sensational Sound’ captures the feelings and ease of a musical journey. Up, Bustle & Out went to Mexico in 2003 to collect an award for Mexican film music. Being loved for their Latin fusions, their presence created a little buzz, collaborations were quickly formed. A bus journey passed the temple of the Moon & Sun and delivered them at the doors of the northeast Mexican city Monterrey, to meet platinum selling Hip Hop band Control Machete (who also feature on Cypress Hill albums!). Control Machete are big and deeply involved in Cumbia Music experimentation. In short, what was to be a 12Inch single first, grew to an album. Up, Bustle & Out embraced a fresh musical challenge without any phone calls or industry concerns. The ‘Mexican Sessions’ was born in Monterrey, Mexico, then went north to California & NYC, glided over the Caribbean islands of Puerto Rico & Jamaica before landing safely again in Europe.
-CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Collision Cause of Chapter 3
Genre/Style: Reggae / Dub / Funk
MP3 Day at the Bookies (UB&O Mix)
|
CD: $17.98
|
Various Artists
Rockabye Baby! Lullaby Renditions Of The Beatles
Golden slumbers await your little pride and joy at the end of lullaby road. The Beatles are the most famous songwriters of the twentieth century. Their songs are known by people of all ages here, there, and everywhere. The dreamy quality of their later work provides the blueprint for these beautiful lullaby interpretations. It will glide your little one out across the universe, through an octopus's garden, and lay them down in a slumberland of strawberry fields.-CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Baby Rock
Genre/Style: Children
MP3 Myspace
|
CD: $17.98
|
Various Artists
Rockabye Baby! Lullaby Renditions of Björk
Love. No one can quite express it like Bjork. Love for her children. Love for her homeland. Love for the world. All is full of love. No matter what she’s working on, you can be certain that the final product is full of the most beautiful and lush sounds found on this or any other planet. These instrumental lullaby renditions of some of Bjork’s most cherished songs are an extension of the musical world she has created. This is a hidden place for your child to dream and escape, and it’s oh so quiet. -CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Baby Rock
Genre/Style: Childrens
MP3 Myspace
|
CD:$15.98
|
The Zincs
Black Pompadour
In 2005, The Zincs released a second album, Dimmer, and proceeded to tour the country for the first time. A steady regimen of ten-hour desert drives and poor domestic lager will change a band, and The Zincs found an edge creeping into their music that hadn’t been there before. The creeping edge was still with them on their return home to Chicago and plans were made to record an album that reflected the change. As the acoustic and spare sound of Dimmer began to evaporate, the electric shine of the group’s dormant influences began to come through, from the Postcard and Rough Trade bands of 1980’s Britain to the minimal, organ-driven drones of 1960’s New York. All of this contributed to the album you see before you, Black Pompadour.
Named partly after the haircut that English singer/songwriter James Elkington aspired to construct for himself during his teenage years, Black Pompadour was recorded and mixed by John McEntire at Soma E.M.S. with additional recording being handled by Mark Greenberg at Mayfair Studios. All instruments were played by The Zincs: Nathaniel Braddock on guitar and unprepared piano, Nick Macri on bass and saxophone octet, Jason Toth on drums and James Elkington singing, writing the songs and making most of the other noises. Edith Frost sang on three of the songs; “Hamstrung and Juvenile”, “Rice Scars” and “Lost Solid Colours”. This last song was a duet that Edith had performed with The Zincs during their spring tour together in 2006.
Lyrically, Black Pompadour is a mix of veiled self- truths and non-sequiturs. The writing reflects the semantic styles of Flann O’Brien or Dylan Thomas augmented with the heightened unreality that comes with sitting in the back of a van on a six week tour eating dry sandwiches. Elkington’s dark sense of humor is dolled with Victorian restraint over a wide range of topics, from why it should be that the public are so willing to take advice from entertainers in “Lost Solid Colours” to the plight of the single person in “Hamstrung and Juvenile”:
“Now you know that once your copulations fail, you’re only half of that creature with two spines, and every new acquaintance that you add will say ‘you get thee gone, part-beast, you bear the signs,’ but which half are you now?”
The Zincs have succeeded in marrying their classic song-forms with a brighter electric sound to make a vital album for the times. What makes them such a singular band is how they weave such dark prose into their beautiful melodies, a reward that the casual listener could miss on first hearing. From the electric chimes of “Coward’s Corral” to the pulsing synthesizers of “Rice Scars”, Black Pompadour dashes expectations like a bullet through a fish-bowl and represents that rare thing amongst groups, a genuine progression. -CP
Release Date: 03/20/07
Label: Thrill Jockey
Genre/Style: Pop / Rock
MP3 Head East Kaspar
|
| |
 |
|
|
|
