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Special Announcement
We mentioned in Wednesday's Other Music Update that we recently rolled out lots of new features on our download store that we're pretty excited for you to try out. Rather than taking up valuable space in your in-box, you can learn about these new functions by clicking over to Other Music Digital's News Page.
This Week's Featured Downloads
Loren Connors
St. Vincent's Newsboy Home
Other Music Exclusive
Family Vineyard
$9.99
Listen & Buy
Active since the late 1970s, guitarist Loren (formerly Mazzacane) Connors released dozens of albums before emerging from relative obscurity at the beginning of the 1990s (thanks in part to the praise of like-minded modern six-string iconoclasts like Thurston Moore, Jim O'Rourke, and frequent collaborator Alan Licht). A singular visionary with an instantly recognizable, beautifully melancholic sound, Connors has repeatedly carried his interest in blues and jazz figures into boldly original territory, offering a sometimes stark and melodic, sometimes discordant and noisy interpretation of quintessentially American songforms that reverberates with an emotional intensity few can match.
Seemingly unfazed by the Parkinson's with which he has dealt since 1992, Connors has continued to record at a furious pace, releasing albums like the beatifically bleak The Departing of a Dream trilogy, each volume of which etches haunting eulogies out of guitar, bass, and field recordings. 2007 has already seen the release of the excellent As Roses Bow collection, a two-CD set that compiles some of his best and sweetest airs, the shorter pieces built around simple repetition of subtle melodic phrases. And though a fair number of the man's works are tough to track down physically, a few are now available in the digital realm, shedding a little more light on Connor's prolific and endlessly engaging catalogue.
Recorded between 1995 and 1998 (ultimately seeing its first official release in 1999), St. Vincent's Newsboy Home is one of the more obscure and hard-to-find entries in Connor's oeuvre (and available exclusively now on Other Music Digital). Strange, considering it's also one of his more gorgeous affairs, an all-too brief collection of Spartan guitar movements and bittersweet remembrances. Simply recorded, tracks like "Angels of the Rooftops" and "Doorsteps" echo off into the distance, as Connors carefully sounds his notes and allows them to linger ever so slightly. Overall, however, this record is cut from distinctly darker material, as the ominous distortions of "Inside the Cruelty of Day" and "Oh, How It'd Be! (Without The Deaths Of The Innocents)" bear testament. Elsewhere, the windswept "Frozen Star" conjures images of blizzard gusts and desolate streets, as a guitar mourns in the background. Easily as evocative and powerfully moving as some his more well-known albums, St. Vincent's Newsboy Home is a worthy investment for fans of Connors, both old and new.
-Michael Crumsho
Army Navy
Saints - EP
Other Music Exclusive
Army Navy
$3.99
Listen & Buy
There is something about British pop melancholy that is just irresistibly sweet and sad and embracing, raw and real but sugarcoated so it goes down oh-so-easy like a delectable little nugget. While lonely misfit American teens grow their greasy hair, huff paint and make heavy metal in their mom's basements (now freak-folk, different drugs but the haircuts are the same), U.K. lads have been snipping some bangs and writing three-chord clear-eyed melancholia over a few pints in mum's garage, all the way back to the days of the Zombies. Now it may be true that Army Navy are from Los Angeles, and I'm certain that they don't live with their mothers, but I have little doubt that this young California quartet is next in line to become the toast of the NME (they already have gotten some love, actually), and Anglophiles everywhere.
Singer/songwriter Justin Kennedy used to share frontman duties in Ben Gibbard's pre-Death Cab band Pinwheel, and while Army Navy share a hook-heavy aesthetic with Gibbard, their loose and loud pop productions are much more in line with groups like Teenage Fanclub, the Posies, MBV, Redd Kross, Blur and the like, laying heavy distorted guitars and subtle instrumental flourishes over pounding rhythms to offset Kennedy's so sweet yet so sad vocals, creating buzzing rock and roll unafraid to leave its soft pink underbelly exposed. The band's new tracks were produced at Fireproof Studio West with Adam Lasus (Clap Your Hands, Yo La Tengo, etc.); and after a friend out west sent me an mp3 of "Saints," I got in touch with the group begging to debut some new songs on Other Music Digital. So we are thrilled to offer a worldwide exclusive on Army Navy's new self-released digital E.P., featuring four of the best tracks from what I can only imagine will be their forthcoming breakthrough LP. As the temperature drops and skies go gray, I can almost guarantee that these songs will transport you to dour old London-town, while they warm you in the California sun as well. (Check 'em out on MySpace .)
-Josh Madell
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