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This Week's Free Song Downloads
Although the past Bird Show releases from Ben Vida (also of Town and Country) were solo ventures, for his latest the Brooklyn resident enlisted Tortoise percussionists Dan Bitney and John Herndon, and keyboardist Jim Baker and bassist Josh Abrams. As you'll hear on this free download of "Quintet Four," Vida is moving away from the more free-floating, minimalist-based arrangements of his past Bird Show works, his new album built from a series of improv sessions with the influences of Sun Ra and Cluster weaving around the free jazz grooves. Full-length out tomorrow, January 26th on Amish.
Free song download of "Photographed With Ease," taken from Home's seventeenth album. This Brooklyn by way of Tampa combo has always defied categorization -- sometimes epic, sometimes intimate, sometimes raucous, sometimes psychedelic, and quite often all of the above. Through the years, folks like the Flaming Lips, Grandaddy and Oneida (whose Brah imprint is releasing Seventeen tomorrow, January 26th) have all hailed the twisted pop genius of Home, and fans of any of the aforementioned should download now. Label Spotlight: Kanine Records
This week we're pleased to offer an 11-track sampler from Brooklyn's very own Kanine Records. Formed in 2003, the label's initial roster of bands was culled from New York's burgeoning music scene -- a time in which the whole globe seemed to be listening to the new sounds coming out of the Big Apple. Within a year or two, Kanine had introduced the world to indie faves like Oxford Collapse, Professor Murder, and no doubt one of Brooklyn's most acclaimed artists in recent memory, Grizzly Bear. Kanine has since broadened their scope of talent beyond the five boroughs, releasing records by bands from Los Angeles (Monsters Are Waiting, Princeton), Philadelphia (Drink Up Buttercup) and Florida (Blind Man's Colour, Surfer Blood), and across the Atlantic with artists from Sweden and France (Holiday for Strings) and the UK (the Whip and the Rumble Strips). And more recently, the label saw their profile raised even higher with the success of Chairlift's full-length Does You Inspire You. This year is off to a great start as well with Astro Coast, the debut album from West Palm Beach's Surfer Blood, being one of the most talked about indie records of 2010. We'll be offering this great compilation priced at $3.99 for the next 30 days, along with marking all of the full-length albums in Kanine Records' back catalog (anything released in 2009 and before) to $5.99 for the next two weeks! -Gerald Hammill
Surfer Blood has been getting tons of blog love as of late, and for good reason: this young West Palm Beach quartet creates some of the catchiest rock music around. It's completely opposite of the groundbreaking avant-pop made by store favorites like Dirty Projectors, Animal Collective and more recently Owen Pallett. There's nothing too heady or out-there about this record at all in fact, but that's okay, as these ten tracks will have you hitting the repeat button time and time again -- never mind that Astro Coast was created by four guys barely out of high school! Songs like "Floating Vibes," with its rolling, distorted bass line and James Mercer-influenced vocals, will surely gives the Shins a run for their money, while "Swim" is a perfect slice of pop music featuring a Weezer-esque chorus guaranteed to lodge itself into the head of any music fan between the age of 16 and 46. (And does anyone have a problem with that? Certainly not me.) Surfer Blood also mirrors indie's current fascination with high-life and Afro-pop during "Take It Easy," but they own it here with their jaunty distorted guitars and slippery reverb melodies, and what results is something that's both fun and new. It's almost unbelievable that a group of 19-year-olds has made one of the best pop records that I've heard in ages, and I can attest that they back it up on the live stage as well. Expect big things from Surfer Blood this year, they deserve it. -Jeremy Sponder
Juggling synths, guitars, and pent-up energy, Williamsburg's Dinowalrus exemplifies the young, collage-minded approach to modern post-punk. With a bevy of influences ranging from the Pop Group ("BEAD") to drone ("I Hate Letters") to sultry shoegaze ("Haze on the Mobius Strip"), it's not so much what they manage to put together as it is how they do it. Reflective of the all-available, all-the-time climate of today's music marketplace, you have to hand it to these twenty-somethings for jumping in feet first and making sense of all that they love about music.
Shoegaze fortress guitars meet 8-bit drum program crunch. This side project of Pains of Being Pure at Heart bassist Alex Naidus sandblasts with obscured vocals, sandblasted noise and Commodore 64-style bleeps-n-bloops, creating a restless vehicle for melody and musical energy. There are enough ideas in here to power any number of bands (including Naidus' main project) for a handful of albums, and the sensibilities to go over the top with them without wearing them out. It's a great album and one of Kanine's best releases of last year. -Doug Mosurock
Though Grizzly Bear's first full-length bears none of the fleshed-out production and complex arrangements that would shape the band's more recent albums, the hazy, homemade drone of 2004's Horn of Plenty made for one of the most intriguing debuts that we heard that year and still stands as a high point in a discography of nothing but. Here's what we wrote when we reviewed the album, and were already speculating where the band would go next: Grizzly Bear's debut album Horn of Plenty is essentially a bedroom 4-track project by Brooklyn's Edward Rosie with overdubs and production help from Christopher Bear. It's a mellow and dreamy lo-fi record primarily built around Rosie's voice and acoustic guitar and augmented by simple but effective embellishments: bells, whistling, keyboards, bare-bone string arrangements, percussion, and some nice vocal harmonies. If I had to guess what artists they were listening to while putting this album together, I'd wager that Iron And Wine, Galaxie 500, Elliott Smith, Neutral Milk Hotel, Sufjan Stevens, the Microphones, and Syd Barrett were among them. Now a trio, the live incarnation of the band apparently sounds a bit closer to Animal Collective, which should make for an interesting change of direction on their sophomore release. All in all, Horn of Plenty is a solid and interesting indie singer-songwriter album and one of the better local releases in recent memory. -Rob Hatch-Miller Also available: Horn of Plenty (The Remixes) featuring 17 album reworkings from the likes of Efterklang, Dntel, Simon Bookish, Solex, Ariel Pink, Hisham Bharoochah & Rusty Santos, Final Fantasy, and more.
On Princeton's first full-length, Cocoon of Love, the Los Angeles-based band plays rich, charming chamber pop at its finest. These tracks have a catchy innocence to them, but by no means are they lacking in depth; Princeton have successfully orchestrated a layered, complex album, complete with strings, synths, bells, chimes, and who knows what else. Perfect for fans of Belle & Sebastian, Of Montreal, and the Twilight Sad, to name a few.
Three years after the breakup of Out Hud, former cellist Molly Schnick resurfaced as Jean on Jean with a record of personal pop songs equal parts lush, coy and unnerving. Recorded at home over the course of those last three years, the sound is homespun and warmly amateurish. These types of "years in the making" records are great, especially in cases like this where you can hear the process of an artist's development unfolding and also the idiosyncrasies of someone learning how to use their new recording software. Kick off track "Tonight" is a great example of both, charging meekly from the gates like a John Hughes soundtrack if it were all mid-'90s K Records artists. Far-away sounding instruments come in and out of focus with belted-but-awkward harmonies and tambourine rhythms. An imaginary girl group in ratty twee sweaters materializes at various points out of Schnick's multi-tracked vocals, like a less intense Judee Sill or a happier El Perro Del Mar. Elsewhere, the vibes are just plain spooky, with a cauldron of ghost voices bouncing into layers of menacing cello and the occasional bird call or cut-up sounds of heavy breath. The winning moments of Jean on Jean come with the realization that there's nothing forced or affected going on here. That is to say, the songs are straightforward and beautifully honest, but in that, still legitimately a little cracked and subtly unstable. The tension between these elements makes more noise than the songs themselves. -Fred Thomas
Debut EP from this enjoyable Brooklyn dance/rock quartet, who graft bouncy rhythms onto anthemic, dubby Anglican post-punk proclamations. This makes for a cartoony, alive, inventive sound that's too fun and exciting to be lumped in with the general stagnation the genre has met in recent times. They come across like Mahjongg covering Adam and the Ants running aground on Liquid Liquid's secret island. Very highly recommended. -Doug Mosurock
Shock Cinema's 2008 full-length debut, Hell and Highwater, is a surprisingly nuanced offering, the trio notching down the guitar rumble of their earlier EP a little and using proper studios to enhance their cinematic (ahem) noir-sound. Split between sessions recorded in New York with producer Chris Coady (engineer for Blonde Redhead's 23 and Grizzly Bear's Yellow House) and in San Francisco with Fucking Champs' Tim Green (who's turned the knobs for Comets on Fire and Unwound), tracks like "Oddfellow" bring to mind the Yeah Yeah Yeahs covering a song off the Banshees' Hyaena. Here, singer Destiny Montague's voice is downright eerie, carried by Autry Fulbright's chiming, stereo-panned guitars and drummer Miyuki Furtado (ex-Roger Sisters) employing tribal, Budgie-esque tom-tom breaks in his timekeeping. The icy shuffle of "Atlas Shrugged" and the dubby, atmospheric "Mutineers Reconsidered" also reveal a restrained dimension for the band that we didn't hear on 2007's Our Way Is Revenge, but it doesn't mean the album is a complete departure from the propulsive post-punk of that EP; tracks like the driving album opener "Leviathan" and "Albatross" rock out like a riot grrrl in art school. Fans of the aforementioned Siouxsie and Yeah Yeah Yeahs will find much to love here, but Shock Cinema are far from derivative. A strong album debut. -Gerald Hammill
This was, in fact, Oxford Collapse's first official demo, released by Kanine upon their signing of the Brooklyn band in 2003. Here's a glance at the Brooklyn trio in its infancy, strumming hard and laying on the hi-hat, confronting the disco-punk revival head on with a blast of heartland guitars, sincere vocals, and farmhand dexterity, reminiscent of both Mission of Burma and the Embarrassment in the best of ways. The band would lose the dance beats in later releases for Sub Pop, and their songwriting would improve by leaps and bounds, but the infectiousness and immediacy of this first release gives it the legs necessary to stay relevant in 2010, where numerous bands (Real Estate, much of the Woodsist/Captured Tracks rosters) would run with the loose, frantic jangle-pop put forth by these guys. -Doug Mosurock |
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