TV Buddhas

Ben Donnelly from Dusted really liked this 1960s-loving, psychedelic garage-punk-blues threesome, originally from Tel Aviv, but now based in Berlin, and now, so do I.

Here's the first single off their eponymous EP, which is called "Let Me Sleep".

And a video of "Fun Girls"

Everything at once

Finally got around to the new Superchunk album Majesty Shredding (out September 14 on Merge) and it's a killer...really aggressive power pop, hard guitars, soft melodies, and remarkably consistent, not a bad song anywhere.

Here's a video of "Crossed Wires" played live at the Seaport in NYC


And a live SXSW performance of "Everything At Once", which is the last song.

End of summer? Time for a mix

Hey, who am i kidding...this mix has nothing to do with the end of summer, except that it's mostly stuff I was listening to at the end of this particular summer of 2010. It gets a little disco-y in the middle, but hold on for the strong finish.

Tracks:
1. "I'll Be Runnin'" Woven Bones
2. "Rusty Old Clock" Limes
3. "Five Foot Category Five" The Graves Brothers Deluxe
4. "The Mistress," Amelia Curran
5. "Downward Road" Mavis Staples
6. "Draw the Stars," Andreya Triana
7. "A Day at the Carnival" Dam-Funk
8. "Round and Round," Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti
9. "Supergirl" Stereo Total
10. "I Hate the 80s" The Vaselines
11. "Baby I Got News for You," Kelley Stoltz
12. "Buried By the Blues," Black Mountain
13. "Big Sun Falling in the River," Richard Thompson
14. "Kiss Them All" Bottomless Pit
15. "Cicada" Versus

Download here

Enjoy. I made this before I went to Indiana and never upped it, so I've got almost enough for another one by this point.

How can I, how can I, stop in the middle?

I wonder if Graveface is really his name? If not, he sure likes the sound of it, since Ryan Graveface has named both his one-man band and his label Graveface. The label, you might know as the home of Black Moth Super Rainbow, a trippy, synthy, altogether fantastic psych-pop-break-beat outfit that Graveface sometimes plays bass in. The band, you also might have heard of, a year or two ago when I reviewed The Long Forgotten Friend for PopMatters. I liked it a lot. I like the new one modestly less, though it’s not exactly a throwaway. I noted, at Venus last week, that it has “a far more rustic aesthetic than on The Long Forgotten Friend, spurning the shimmer of sustained guitars and lulling prettiness of reverbed vocals for a four-square, heel-rocking country feel”


The rest of the piece


“Magnesium Light”

I’m back from Indiana and very glad to be here, though school’s started and we are all getting up at 5:30 again, ugh.

How does all the liquor make the heart grow fonder?

I had a review of the new Limes album Rhinestone River on Friday at Dusted. It's another of Goner's blues-garage offerings, led by Shawn Cripps (who played on one of my favorite albums, Mr. Airplane Man's Cmon DJ) and supported by Harlan T. Bobo, whom I've written about here before.

Here's a bit from the review:

Cripps slouches at the center of this casual mesh of talent, moving the songs along with slow blues-guitar licks and spoke-sung verses, widely spaced with contemplation and punctuated, occasionally by high hillbilly falsetto. His never-any-hurry delivery — he sounds like a bluesier Bill Callahan — twists ordinary imagery into vaguely surreal shapes…a cigarette machine’s lights turning psychedelic in “Rhinestone River,” midway lights and rollercoasters taking on mythic shape in “Rusty Old Clock.” Bobo is his chief partner in musical conversation, nudging the action forward with slumberous bass lines, adding ghostly commentaries on a variety of keyboards, and, at one point, banging on the piano like a cakewalk madman.

The rest of the review is here:
http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/5891

A video of Limes at SXSW

http://vimeo.com/3866188

Imbogodom

I reviewed a very nice noise-electronic-improvisational-type album from Imbogodom, a collaboration between Alexander Tucker and Daniel Breban last week...and it ran last week at Dusted.

A bit of the review...
More like one, long piece with movements than a series of freestanding compositions, The Metallic Year traces a conversation between organic, instrument-based sounds and electronic manipulations, improvisation and tape manipulation. Often lovely, occasionally dark and foreboding, the album seems to encapsulate the tenor of post-terror times, a thread of worry running through even the most serene landscapes.



The rest of the review is here:
http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/5917

I can't find any mp3s but there are previews of all the tracks at the Thrill Jockey page
http://www.thrilljockey.com/catalog/index.html?id=104957

(the embedded links feature doesn't seem to be working with my parents' computer, so I'm just putting in the URLs for now.)

Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby on covers

PopMatters just put up my piece on Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby, specifically their new album Two-Way Family Favorites which consists entirely of covers.

And why not, since it was a cover that brought them together.

When Amy Rigby heard that new wave legend Wreckless Eric was coming to her show in Hull a decade ago to DJ, she was understandably nervous. After all, Eric’s “Whole Wide World” had been a staple of her live set for years. She was planning to play it that night, by coincidence, in the very pub that Eric had launched it decades before, while a student at the Hull Art College.


Jumping in with both feet, the alt-Americana songwriter asked Wreckless Eric to join her for the song. After a bit of two-guitar fumbling, he said to her, “There are just two chords in the song and both of yours are wrong.”

Read the rest (and please do, Eric is very entertaining)

And here they are, playing "Whole Wide World"





I'm interviewing Michael Rother from Neu! on Monday, wish me luck.