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This Week's Free Song Download Free song download of "Youth," off of Beach Fossils' eponymous debut full-length, out on Captured Tracks (available Tuesday, May 25). Beach Fossils is the brainchild of Brooklyn-based Dustin Payseur, whose breezy, lo-fi pop songs are filled with yearning nostalgia -- the aural equivalent of daydreaming while staring at old, faded photographs from childhood. The chiming guitars are as important to each track as Payseur's reverb-soaked melodies, ensuring that fans of groups like Felt right on up to Real Estate will love this record. This Week's Featured Downloads
Warp drops this excellent debut EP from the Brooklyn duo of Eleanor Everdell and onetime Boggs-man Jason Friedman, which follows up on the promise of their "Dressed in Dresden" single from last year. Influenced by classic European synth-pop -- there's an underlying romantic, French sensibility throughout these six songs -- the Hundred in the Hands are far more cerebral than your typical indie-disco set, Everdell's longing, ethereal melodies wrapped in a warm, beguiling shroud of synthesizers, atmospheric guitar and non-obtrusive beats, resulting in music that's as heady as it is catchy. -Gerald Hammill
With characteristic tongue-in-cheek spiritualism, Cameron Stallones told an interviewer at SXSW that his new album, On Patrol, is "for heavy-steamin' late nights in the city, inter-dimensional back alleys, ghost cabs and midnight sweat locker rooms." This sprawling double-LP affair matches Stallones' fantastical settings with a spaced-out soundtrack. "Deep Cover" is the ultimate late-night, summer-drive pop hook expanded into a song. The synthesizer sounds like a neon sign, the drum machine locates us near a city by the sea, and the layers of drone are smog, cigarette smoke, and heat. After all, summer is around the corner, and around these parts, it can't officially start without a new Sun Araw record. The album is decidedly not as heavy as Heavy Deeds, and not as sunburned as Beach Head. On Patrol leans more towards "world" music influences, with songs like "High Slide" and "Ma Holo" sounding like submerged shadows of tropical pop songs from Jamaica and Indonesia respectively. I like to think that there is a loose correlation between whatever is popular in the dollar bins and emergent musical sentiments. With records by Vangelis, Jean Michel Jarre, or Andreas Vollenweider overflowing in budget bins, it is only fitting that the hypnagogic miners of all things eighties take those synthesizer explorers and challenge them with 21st century aesthetics. Sun Araw does this with supreme taste and restraint, making original and surprisingly fresh sounding dub-pop jams from the future's past. -Brian Cassidy
Step inside the mind of psychedelic shaman Gary Ramon. There was probably nothing more unfashionable in late-'80s/early-'90s Britain than Other Way Out, with the Happy Mondays groovin' hard on E and a generation floppy-fringed kids being whipped into a frenzy by the shoegazer militia. So, what does Ramon do? Whips out an album trademarked by hour-long guitar solos, bamboo flutes, Tibetan bells and references to "sepia skies" and "the orange clock that turns backwards." Naturally. In Ramon's world there was only Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, and Rubble compilations, and his intense love for it all translates into a joyous celebration of psychedelia. Other Way Out is excessive and "far out" by choice (I'm guessing) and in this context these adjectives work as compliments, as the more overtly hallucinogenic the songs get, the better they work. In addition to the original six songs on the album, Cherry Red has tagged on an additional 23 tracks of outtakes, alternate mixes and archival material which makes this massive double-disc set all the more indispensable. -Andreas Knutsen
"Cant Feel Nothing" and "I Was Born" were both previously released as digital download singles, and are culled together here (or also as a limited 12") with new remixes. While neither track is included on High Places vs. Mankind, both songs do follow the darker, more skeletal path that Robert Barber and Mary Pearson have taken since relocating from Brooklyn to California. Rhythmic, dubbed-out pop that's just as alluring as anything the duo have committed to tape thus far, the remixes are more beat-driven without losing any of High Places' spacious atmospherics. A perfect companion to a great full-length.
In 1967, Terry Riley was contracted to record a 'theme' for a Philadelphia disco, Riley reworking the smoking Latin soul of Harvey Averne's "You're No Good" into a bizarre, 20-plus-minute exploration of repetition and cuts. His techniques are similar to Steve Reich's "Come Out" from the previous year, but Riley rearranges an actual song in different ways and sections, whereas Reich took one idea and a specific length of words on tape and ran it out. Riley's is, I think, the first remix ever made. As he cuts and snaps his blocks together and apart, it becomes numbingly repetitive here and there, but it's not uniform in structure, as the song is stretched, phased in and out, and completely re-imagined in only a way that Riley could think of. This has long been a staff favorite and finally available as a nicely priced Digital Download. -Robin Edgerton
Bassekou Kouyate is an established star in his native Mali, a virtuoso on the ngoni, a West African lute that's similar to the kora, but with a more percussive sound. Kouyate is somewhat known to international music fans through his work on Ali Farka Toure's very last (posthumous) album, as well as appearances with kora player Toumani Diabete and the American blues innovator Taj Majal, but this album from 2007 certainly made him a much more recognizable name throughout the world on the international music circuit as a bandleader in his own right. His band Ngoni Ba is comprised of a quartet of string players, bass, treble and midrange, and the group is simply mesmerizing. Intricate rhythms and melodies seem to effortlessly swirl throughout this album, so breezy and joyful, so melancholy and deeply emotional, you can hear the roots of blues music and strains of psychedelia and much more. The string players are joined by two percussionists as well as Kouyate's wife Ami Sacko, who nearly steals the album with her nimble, thrilling vocals, and a slew of guest stars like the earthy tenor Zoumana Tereta or Lobi Taore on electric guitar. This album is a huge pleasure and a major breakthrough for a seasoned musician. -Josh Madell |
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