New David Kilgour

Good news, David Kilgour has another album Left By Soft coming on Merge Records this April. There’s a single available now, called “Diamond Mind,” check it out.

Arbouretum’s The Gathering

How's your day going? Mine's in the toilet and circling down from there.

We're in New York, though, and we'll get to see some people we all really like here, so maybe things will get better.

In any case, I've got a review of the new Arbouretum up today at Dusted.

The music, too, begins in recognizable Americana forms and turns disquietingly toward the unreal. Heumann’s guitar solos, for instance, often start by echoing the vocal line, as if having sung the verse, he is now compelled to hear it again through the different timbres of an electric guitar. Yet as these explorations go on, they slip increasingly away from the stately structures of verse and chorus. The notes bend and turn back on themselves, tangling in a curlicued proliferation of ideas. What begins as linear progression turns into something like a kudzu’s flowering: lush, profuse and uncivilized. Only a very strong rhythm section — Brian Carey on drums and Corey Allender on bass — keeps these excursions from running amok. Indeed, on the disc’s last and longest cut, “Song of the Nile,” Heumann’s sludgy, oscillating riff repeats and evolves, caroming off a rock-solid beat, spiraling out into space again, and then plummeting back to the main theme. It’s cathartic, rather than chaotic, because of the strong foundation.

More

Skull Defekts

My review of what’s going to be one of my favorite records of 2011 runs today at Dusted. (By coincidence, someone else’s review of another one of my favorites is right next to it. Read Mason Jones’ take on Psychic Paramount here, if you like.)


Of Skull Defekts, I said:
Most of the cuts are founded on insistent, repetitive rhythms, hard eighths and quarters that are punched out by drums, but amplified by clanking, menacing guitars. The sound is physically propulsive, enveloping and mildly psychoactive. The beat pounds hard on the most lizardly parts of the brain, bringing a catharsis, a sheer rush of physicality. Add to this Higgs layering dank, ominous and priestly intonations over the galloping drums, and you have an aesthetic that is as engrossing as it is disturbing. You can’t look. You can’t look away.

The rest


“Peer Amid”


I'll be in NYC for a few days this week and may or may not be posting regularly.

A free song from Thomas Truax

Thomas Truax is absolutely mad, but also one of my favorite songwriters. A New Yorker, he makes his own instruments, at least some of them, and has created a fictional universe called Wowtown. (My favorite of his albums is called Full Moon in Wowtown.) If you sign up for his email updates, you'll get a fairly detailed, fairly entertaining account of what's going on in Wowtown, as well as gig notices and so on.

I interviewed him once for Splendid.

Also, he's got a free song up here, so why not give him a spin. (You have to provide an email address to get the song.)

Bambi Kino

A gimmick, but kind of a fun one, Bambi Kino was formed to celebrate (and replicate) the Beatles' first concerts in Hamburg, Germany. The people in the band are medium well-known in other contexts. (I hesitate to say "super group" but maybe "semi-super group" or possibly "well-over-average group".) They include Doug Gillard from GBV (also see yesterday's Lifeguards blog), Mark Rozzo from Maplewood, Ira Elliot from Nada Surf, and Erik Paparazzi of Cat Power's band. The band originally came together for a concert in the summer of 2009, then were invited to Hamburg to the actual Bambi Kino club to re-create the earliest Beatles concerts.

I think everybody knows that I'm more of a Stones person than Beatles, but this is early, early, early Beatles, back when they were doing a lot of covers...and the disc (self-titled, out on Tapete records) has some killer versions of early 60s songs like "Shakin All Over" (Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, but memorably covered by the Who), "Ramrod" (Duane Eddy) and "Soldier of Love" (Arthur Alexander, but also done by Marshall Crenshaw and Pearl Jam, as well as the Beatles).

So yeah, super fun and performed with a great deal of enthusiam, what's not to like?

Paradise Is Not So Bad

Here’s the lead single off Waving at Astronauts, from Lifeguards, Robert Pollard’s occasional collaboration with ex-GBV guitarist Doug Gillard…it’s quite good, maybe not as good as Boston Spaceships, but eminently worth listening to.



I reviewed it for Blurt. Read the review here.

Out of step again…Mogwai edition

I loved Mogwai’s new one, Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will even more than I hated Let England Shake, landing, for the second day in a row, well out of the mainstream. This might be my favorite album so far this year, along with Skull Defekts Peer Amid and Psychic Paramount’s II. Perhaps I am writing for an audience of me, I don’t know, but in my review, up now at Blurt, I said:
With Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will, Mogwai is again aggressively tweaking its formula in ways that will offend purists, but which may be necessary if this band is to continue to satisfy its own curiosity and requirements for growth. The album starts in a shimmer and haze, in light-filled, slow motion "White Noise" which might sound like classic Mogwai if it were not so much brighter. The guitar effects seem less like murk and turmoil, more like the blinding glare off surfaces in sun. There's a transparency here, a sense of space and separation that continues, particularly through the first half of the album. It winds through buzzing, droning, pitch-shifting "Mexican Grand Prix," as close to pop as Mogwai has ever been, and distortion-bleached, drum battered "Rano Pano," and translucently beautiful "Death Rays." Even "George Square Thatcher Death Party" which sounds very much in the fuzz-crusted, over-driven vein of "Batcat" and "Glasgow Megasnake", incorporates the wavery robotics of pitch shifted vocals that bring it back to pop. A sense of play and melody leavens the heaviness in this seventh Mogwai album, especially near the front end, and if that's not what you want out of the band, too bad, that's what they're doing now.

The rest