Having trouble viewing this? Visit the updates archive |
||
 |
 |
Other Music Digital Affiliate Program Join Other Music's Affiliate Program and earn money by sending your web traffic to Other Music Digital for downloads. Click here for more details.
Free song download of "Damn These Vampires" off the Mountain Goats' latest album, All Eternals Deck, out now on Merge Records. John Darnielle's journey, from a DIY icon making hiss- and emotion-filled cassettes on his four-track to a hugely successful songwriter and bandleader, is one of the more surprising in indie music. Rather than relying on a sweeping vocal presentation or a groundbreaking instrumental sound, the Mountain Goats' songs are built around his intimate stories and offbeat character studies that seem to highlight the larger sadness and joy in life's little moments. Joined here by Superchunk's Jon Wurster on drums and bassist Peter Hughes, All Eternals Deck is his finest record of the current "rock band" phase of his career, and surely a high-water mark by any standard.
Best remembered for 1997's classic When I Was Born for the 7th Time, Cornershop practically offered the blueprint for the global fusion that we now find so prevalent in today's music. Following up on last year's criminally slept-on Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast, Tjinder Singh, Ben Ayres and Co. are back with Cornershop and the Double 'O' Groove of, delivering another dose of deep, sunny funk and dusty collusionist grooves, with the heavenly Punjabi vocals of Bubbley Kaur taking center stage. Where many artists are keen to push their broad-ranging influences and obsessions in your face, Cornershop just want you to take them at face value -- it's all music, it's all valid, and what results is one of the most infectious, joyful, and straight-up funky records that you'll hear all year. Check out this free download of "United Provinces of India," and you'll be hooked.
Rounding out our Free Song Download Trifecta comes "Businessline" a great beguiling track from Hype Williams off their new album One Nation. Naming themselves after the heavily stylized music video and film director, this mysterious duo offer up a delicious mix of druggy synth washes, chopped and screwed vocals, hypnotically minimal beats, and a perverse arty playfulness perhaps not seen since the days of the Residents. Full album review below. This Week's Featured Downloads
The quick rise of the European duo Hype Williams could just be due to the fact that the word "hype" is their first name, or that they are art world ingénues who take a very "now" kitchen sink philosophy to music making -- or maybe it's something more; whatever the reason, Hype Williams are here, and bringing the subterranean noise. Their debut for De Stijl was a dissonant journey in pop deconstruction (which included a bonkers cover of Sade's "Sweetest Taboo"), and it drummed up a lot of interest in this aggressively mysterious young group. Also available in LP format on our mail order site (and in our NYC store) for $21.99. The conceptual artwork is white vinyl in a plain white sleeve, each hand numbered; designed to look like a white label test pressing, this only adds more weight to Hype Williams self-created obscurity. -Daniel Givens
One of the best reissues I've heard yet this year, being a remarkable Finnish folk/jazz fusion originally released in 1971. Loose and rollicking, with tautly strummed acoustic guitars, roiling stand-up bass lines, syncopated percussion, abandoned humming, breathy flute accents, combined with the pre-recorded nature sounds framing many of the track, makes for a pretty groovin' listen. Most of the pillars of the Finnish jazz scene at that time are present, and the wonderful communal vibe and sense of friendship these guys must have been experiencing is absolutely palpable in the playing. Cool stuff. -Michael Klausman
Last year, UK electronic conjurers Demdike Stare released three limited edition, vinyl-only records which formed a trilogy of hauntingly rich, thematically dark soundworlds. With their music touching upon dub, deep ambient drones, sampled plunderphonia, classic techno and psychedelic Krautrock, and their visual and thematic content referencing Ouija boards, witchcraft, runes and pagan symbolism, not to mention an overall love of horror films, low-tech sci-fi, and British folklore, it wasn't too long before they joined artists like Broadcast and the Ghost Box label roster as prime examples of the hauntology genre. Those three albums, Forest of Evil, Liberation Through Hearing, and Voices of Dust, are now collected together in this package entitled Triptych, with each of the discs augmented and even improved upon by what totals out to be around 40 minutes of bonus material, playing like a director's cut of the original trilogy. Coming in at two-and-a-half hours altogether, the records aren't necessarily meant to be listened to in one sitting, but rather as small seances of their own. Demdike Stare's deep, sub-bass fogs, spectral flickers of Middle Eastern melodies, clanging, bump-in-the-night beats, and overall hypnotic but unsettling ambiences make for one of the year's most rewarding, rich, and exciting releases. Imagine a bubbling cauldron combining Basic Channel, Philip Jeck, Muslimgauze, the sort of British jazz and library music currently lauded by the Trunk label, and a bit of the international psychedelia championed by the Finders Keepers label (for whom one of Demdike's members currently works) all mixed together into a terrifying musical beast that draws you into the shadows and feasts upon your sensory organs once you've gone too far into the abyss. Forest of Evil features three 10-minute-plus suites, and these library-music-inspired ceremonies open up the portals through which the rest of their universe can travel. Liberation Through Hearing ushers in more dubstep sub-bass and beat texture, then suddenly mutates it for dark, arid drones. Voices of Dust is a perfect combination of all that's come before it, taking the rich soundscapes of Popul Vuh's soundtrack work and picking its skeleton dry, and then playing some heavy voodoo ritual music with its bones. No one does this stuff better, I kid you not. Anyone with any interest in records by the likes of Salem, Forest Swords, Balam Acab, or any of the aforementioned artists should do themselves a favor and check this out. Most highly recommended, play it loudly in the darkest room in your house... you'll never be the same again. -Mikey IQ Jones Soft, delicate, and utterly heartbreaking soundtrack to Ken Loach's devastating 1969 feature film Kes, about a young boy and the bird of prey he befriends. Composed by British musician and arranger John Cameron, who has had an acclaimed career scoring soundtracks (of which Kes was the first), composing sound library music, and doing a stint in the kick-ass early '70s rock band CCS. The music here is really as deeply sensitive as the film itself, with restrained and vaguely jazzy string arrangements subtly offsetting lone passages of melancholic flute and gently plucked acoustic guitars and harps. It's a brief soundtrack, but even a track like "Looking for Kes," which clocks in at a mere fifty-nine seconds, practically had me tearing up by the end of it. That Cameron could channel those feeling without being in the least bit schmaltzy (again, just as in the film) is nothing less than amazing. PS - If you've never seen the film, it's been recently reissued by Criterion and is streaming on Netflix till the middle of the month, catch it if you can. -Michael Klausman
I'm pleasantly surprised at how radical much of this album is; Chancha Via Circuito is the project of Argentinean producer Pedro Canale, who for the last several years has been spearheading a form of digital cumbia in the clubs of Buenos Aires. Cumbia has been getting some well deserved recognition in record collecting circles the last few years via artists like Quantic and labels like Soundway issuing comps and creating updated takes on the form. Cumbia at its best can be really stripped down and raw, and while I wouldn't say the word raw can really be applied to what Canale is doing here, I would say that the best tracks manage to totally capture that insistent rhythmic minimalism that occasionally has me listening to older cumbia for literally hours straight at home. Tracks like "Cumbion de las Aves" build through a steady accretion of new sound elements, mixing folkloric samples with a crisp, digital production. In my mind I feel like this should be a terrible idea, but the results are rather shockingly great. A few tunes veer a little too close to downtempo for my personal taste, but the tracks that click are amongst the best new music I've heard all year. -Michael Klausman |
|
|||||
| Recommended New Arrivals | |||||||
|
|||||||
|
|||||||
