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This Week's Free Song Downloads Since his early days as Manitoba, Dan Snaith has constantly evolved his music, moving from downtempo, IDM-influenced electronica to his more recent percussive, Krautrock-inspired explorations as Caribou. His latest, Swim (out now on Merge Records), finds the producer morphing once again, here inspired by outsider disco and its auteurs -- particularly Arthur Russell -- and the results are as imaginative and captivating as you'd expect. Here's a preview of the album, via this free download of the record's opening track, "Odessa."
Free download of "Apparent Horizon," off of Trans Am's new full-length, Thing, (out now on Thrill Jockey). Anchored by live drumming and some fluid guitar work, analog synths buzz and pulse around a vocoder melody, inevitably coming off as a command to dance and do the funky robot. Of course, it wouldn't be a Trans Am album without lots of twists and turns, and the rest of the record does just that, from soaring electro-rock and pummeling instrumental metal, to some ambient interludes.
This Week's Featured Downloads
For about three years now, this young Providence duo of cousins have been slowly building a cult following around their Plunderphonic, cut-n-paste-based pop nuggets, not to mention their intriguing live shows, which feature a home built PA system made out of 20 boomboxes painted in vibrant day-glo colors, all tuned to the same FM station. Their first proper full-length sounds as if they sampled a crate full of dustbin 45s, but in fact Javelin actually "played" many of the snippets themselves, combining that breezy haze of '60s DIY world pop with playground funk and messy post-punk new wave aesthetics. Like James Pants, Panda Bear, Adventures in Stereo, Ariel Pink, Madlib or J Dilla, there's a controlled sloppiness here. Still, the distorted steel drums, acoustic guitar, hushed vocals and primitive MPC rhythms can't mask Javelin's universal love for a good hook in all of its forms; even when the songs are splintering apart, the melodies stick in your head long after the album has played through. Imagine a laidback Go! Team meeting the Avalanches' cinematic productions, and you're partway there. Consider this one a highly recommended soundtrack for your long walks as spring works its way to the summer. Full album download includes the exclusive bonus Excellence #3 EP. -Duane Harriott
DIGITAL ADVANCE. This Spanish quartet has been gaining some real steam of late, likely coming to a head with the release of this excellent new full-length, the first readily available in the States. A blend of Euro dancefloor production and sweetly melodic, hallucinogenic indie-pop, the album delivers a richly layered concoction of vocal harmonies atop swirling percussion and synth hooks, held together by a steady 4/4 pulse.
This Brooklyn trio featuring members of Small Black and Silk Flowers is brand, brand new -- like, they told us they've only played one show ever! As one of the newest members of the expanding "glo-fi" family (Washed Out, Pictureplane), their debut single is a new take on that hazy psychedelic pop sound that you just can't get enough of, with melodic, light-heartedly noisy, post-Talking Heads pop maneuvers.
Trunk Records shines a spotlight on British electronic pioneer Tristram Cary. I won't go into the musician's esteemed history in detail here, but suffice to say he developed a taste for synthesized sounds early on in his career, and was quickly snapped up by the BBC to write incidental music for the then fledgling TV series Doctor Who. What resulted was a sound that would not only come to define the longest running science fiction series of all time, but also define its in-house sound studio -- the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. While Delia Derbyshire, Dick Mills and Paddy Kingsland might have achieved more notoriety, as not being an official part of the team Cary's input is mostly forgotten -- yet he was crucial to the early sound of the show. Indeed, it was Cary who added incidental music to the Daleks -- the first appearance of those soon-to-be legendary pepper pots. On top of this Cary also lent his peculiar otherworldly vision to plenty of Hammer productions (notably Quatermass and the Pit) and advertisements, art pieces and corporate presentations (the Olivetti story is particularly good) and Trunk have been absolute darlings in compiling a good chunk of this back-catalogue here for us to consume rabidly. Sound-wise Cary's music shouldn't surprise those with a taste for British Radiophonic sounds -- his work with the EMS synthesizer was pioneering and to hear it used here by one of the masters of the genre is inspiring to say the least. Bubbling, hissing and eerie ambience, pulsing ramped synth sequences and off-track bonkers rhythmic tape experiments are pasted together to produce music as original as it is unmatched. It's hard to compare it to much we find currently -- there are shades of the nu-synth set (Emeralds, Oneohtrix Point Never, et al.) but this is nowhere near as knowing. And there are plenty of lines to be drawn between these pieces and the more rhythmically intense work of Moondog, but the truth is that Cary was doing something truly singular, and this disc is all the more enjoyable in the knowledge of that. Hugely recommended. -John Twells
After fifteen years of hemming and hawing I finally bit the bullet and bought a pair of chinos, and now I don't know how I ever lived without them. Kind of the way I feel about Can: an essential pillar that, once it hits, most other things don't seem to make as much sense. (For the record, Can is way better than those pants, Jon -ed.) Bands, they come and go, rise up from the primordial soup, asserted as new conquering tribe only to disappear back into the recessive gene pool without warning, forgotten like a vestigial tail. Then you have Can. Along with maybe Fela and the Fall, Can are one of the few things that pretty much always sound good to me. So it goes without saying that the appearance of Irmin Schmidt's soundtrack to the 1968 erotic/educational film, Kamasutra, was a pleasant, if unexpected surprise. Given the subject matter, much of the film was set in the Kamasutra's native India, and thus demanded an appropriately adventurous, Eastern-tinged soundtrack. One wonders if the filmmakers fully grasped their good fortune in drafting the nascent Can to soundtrack their exotic paean to the sexual revolution. Although Schmidt is the only member explicitly credited, one listen confirms that the musicians brewing this love potion can be none other than Michael Karoli, Jaki Liebezeit, and Malcolm Mooney -- the original Can lineup, still known as Inner Space at this juncture. These recordings pre-date the proper Can debut, Monster Movie, and offer evidence that everything (acid-fried leads, avant-garde restlessness, ethnic trance, etc.) that would come to distinguish Can as arguably the most singular voice in an already highly unconventional peer group (Krautrock) was already firmly in place from the outset. The music here, while unmistakably Can-esque, also incorporates more traditional Eastern instrumentation in the form of sitars and flutes, assuming a meditative hash-den vibe at times. However, any notions of nodding off are swiftly cast out by vocal turns from Mooney and Margarete Juvan, who manages to temporarily steal the spotlight with her luminous "I'm Hiding My Nightingale," a tune that could almost be mistaken for Fairport Convention or Pentangle at their most psyched-out. Far from being a completists-only proposition, the music here is strong enough to stand alone, setting a mood that works beautifully independent of the film itself. Far superior to that Inner Space Agilok & Blubbo foolishness that came out a minute ago, this points the way forward towards Monster Movie and (duh) Soundtracks in the Can canon. Cop one for the country house and one for the penthouse. -Jonathan Treneff
Essential comp of early recordings from Athens, GA's Method Actors. One of the first on the same scene that brought us Pylon, the B-52s, Love Tractor and future super stars R.E.M, this duo's tightly wound pop incorporates the skronk of Captain Beefheart with the angular, rhythmic attack of Entertainment-era Gang of Four and early PiL. While the post-punk vaults had seemingly been mined to death years ago, This Is Still It proves to be an unexpected treasure trove. |
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