Bridge Carols

A really beautiful collaboration between electronic collagist Ethan Rose and Portland songwriter Laura Gibson. It’s called Bridge Carols and it’s out tomorrow on Holocene Records.

Here’s a bit from my Dusted review.

Ethan Rose has made a career – and some very beautiful music – out of manipulating old-time sounds electronically. Player pianos, carillions, music boxes have all provided the fodder for his dream-like collages. He chooses sounds that are layered with history, seeped in associations, so that even muted, stretched or sculpted via computer, they carry an emotional charge, glinting like memories in the drone and chatter of consciousness. Now with Portland, Ore., folksinger Laura Gibson, Rose has turned to the most evocative sound of all, the female voice, as the keynote for a new series of dream-like meditations.

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“Sun”

Sharon van Etten feature

I know I’ve been posting a lot about Sharon lately, but this is the last one, the feature I wrote on Monday about her and her show with Damon & Naomi in Cambridge. I thought it came out pretty well.

Here’s a bit to get you started:

She stands alone at the mic, clutching a bright red guitar that seems too big for her. Dressed in a sensible cardigan and khaki pants, she is small and sharply drawn, all cheekbones, flashing eyes and little spikes of pixie hair falling forward over her eyes. She looks like a girl you might share a cubicle with, quick, bright, young and eager to be friendly. And yet, when she looks sideways, lifts her chin and lets loose with the crystalline croon of "Much More Than This," the girl next door disappears, and Sharon Van Etten joins a long line of mournful songwriters, unearthly, tragic and cutting right to the heart of the world's saddest love stories.

The rest is here.


There’s also a new mp3 from Sharon at Weathervane Music, a nonprofit run by Brian McTear, who produces pretty much every record worth caring about in the general Philadelphia area.

It’s called “Much More”

Liking, not loving the new Liars

Sisterworld is all woozy menace, downtempo paranoia, creeped out organ drones and freak folky croons …There are no catchy tunes, but that shouldn’t surprise you since Liars have been done with catchy tunes for a while. I’m kind of liking it, though not in any extreme, omigod you gotta hear this, kind of way. Also bearing in mind that some people think it’s crap (hi Michael!), here’s “Scissor.” What do you think?

Delta Mirror

Hey, remember Interpol back at the dawn of the zero decade, wearing their sharp suits and cranking that brooding, echoey, sound that reminded everyone of Joy Division? Well, there’s this new band called Delta Mirror that sounds an awful lot like Interpol, at least the first album from Interpol, which is the only one that I really paid much attention to. (I liked it a lot, but didn’t really need any more. Does that ever happen to you?)

Here’s a preview track from Delta Mirror which is called “He Was Worse Than the Needle He Gave You.”

They’re only giving away via Pitchfork, so I hope it works, but if it doesn’t, it’s their fault, not mine.

Sharon van Etten, Damon and Naomi and Kurihara

So, I got off my winter-ized lazy ass yesterday and hied me down to Boston, mostly to see Sharon Van Etten sing finally, live and in person. She was playing a show at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, which was mostly a Damon & Naomi Show, celebrating the release of Naomi Yang's tour diary film Song To the Siren. This was a record of D&Y's eight years ago tour with Michio Kurihara, supporting the Damon & Naomi and Ghost album, so for this retrospective moment, they brought back Kurihara. Actually, the show went like this:

Tour film
Q&A with the head of the film department at Harvard tossing kind of softball questions, if you ask me.
Sharon
Damon & Naomi and Ghost

The video was okay -- it's a nice theater and a good place to see almost anything -- but the Q&A made it plain that they'd left most of the interesting parts out. Like, okay, brief footage of a silly national television show in Spain telegraphed the fact that they had canceled an actual live show with paying customers so as to make TV, and the promoter was so mad at them that he didn't pay them for the remaining week of shows in Spain. Not only that, he was calling venues ahead of time to tell them that Damon & Naomi had cancelled, so when they showed up, no one was expecting them and they had some explaining to do.

So, anyway, this may have been implied in the film, but I didn't get any of it and neither would you. But D&Y told another story about this whole incident which made me decide never, under any circumstances, to ever interview them. (Except for a little email exchange for the story I wrote about Sharon, which was already done anyway and MAY NOT BE THE SLIGHTEST BIT TRUE!!!)

The story is that to commemorate the incident of skipping a show in San Sebastian Spain in order to be on some cheesy TV show, Damon & Naomi and Kurihara came home and recorded all of their material in their home studio and called it Damon & Naomi Live at San Sebastian. As a joke. They played it for Sub Pop, their label at the time, and Sub Pop liked it and decided to release it as an actual live album, with audience noises intercut from a bootleg. And when it came time to promote the album, it was promoted as an actual live album. Damon recalled the first interview they did for the album, and the journo asked them, "What was that night like?" And they flailed around for a while, because of course, there was no night and who knows what it was actually like. But the point is, they never admitted that it wasn't a live album and apparently none of the reporters were diligent enough to check the tour dates and see that it had been cancelled.

The show afterwards was very beautiful, and Sharon is just as heartbreaking in person as she is on record, though only on stage. Off it, she seems perfectly normal and very nice and well-adjusted. So there.

Anyway, there will be a nice long piece about her in Blurt at some point.

Retribution Gospel Choir

Kind of a silly review of the second Retribution Gospel Choir, which I really, really liked, but maybe I did a few too many reviews that week. It’s up today at Blurt. Here’s the goofy part:

When Alan Sparhawk switches between Low and Retribution Gospel Choir, does he have to change in a phone booth? It's a fair question, because RGC's louder, wilder sound stands in roughly the same relation to Low as Superman to Clark Kent. It's not that the cape and the lack of glasses will totally fool you either, since there's plenty of Low's suppressed intensity tucked into the crevices. Yet there's a superpowered kick to this second in the series. Sparhawk and company (that's Steve Garrington on bass and Eric Pollard on drums) are leaping over tall stacks of Marshalls, and if they are not faster than speeding bullets, they are awfully damned powerful.

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The video for “Hide It Away”


I put “Electric Guitar” on my last mix, too.

Brunettes

New Zealand’s Brunettes seem to have fallen off the Sub Pop roster, but they are still making very nice, slightly twee romantic pop. My review of Paper Dolls ran today in Dusted. Here’s how I wound it up.

Paper Dolls is a really delightful piece of work, tender and whimsical and, despite a certain amount of artifice, touchingly sincere. To say that the music is lightweight is to miss the point. The songs are light as dandelion fluff, certainly, but this is what allows them to drift free of the mundane.

Read the rest.

Here’s the video for “Red Rollerskates”, which is also on my last mix.