The Myspace Shuffle vol. !!

HYPO is Anthony Keyeux from Paris. He runs with the O.Lamm kids (who you should check out as well). I seriously can't find much about HYPO, mostly because I can't read Fraaansh. but check out HYPO's split album with Emmanuelle de Héricourt (another one of them Frenchies) called The Correct Use of Pets. The two collaborated on a majority of the music including my favorite track on the album:

Naughty Place begins with an electronic war beat; some real jock-strap thunder that actually didn't catch my attention at first. but then HYPO introduces the hook, which is so simple and so obvious and so damn near perfect that I have absolutely no idea why I haven't heard anything like it before.

The song is an engine in cold weather. constantly starting and stopping. but you keep turning the key. because each time you start it up again you hear a new rattle or a new bassline. It starts and stops and starts and stops. and finally the M83 vocals and synth intervals kick in and you've got the wheels turning. Unfortunately, it only moves a few verses and then burns up. You've gotta get out and push it started again.

HYPO - Naughty Place

On the same record EDH has a metallurgic song that starts as a harsh solid clang and eventually melts into a resonating tuba-blast driven pot of molten T-1000.

EDH - Lament

Here is the video for Naughty Place that is good in concept but doesn't really work with the movement of the song.


HYPO's moospace.
EDH's moospace.
buy the record

me on the internet? no way!!
also six degrees #13 (14) is going up soon if you'd like to hear my voice

oh yeah. oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah.

Ahh the internet. Its good for a few things, you know. have you been on it? I like to googles. and I like to use emails. I just heard about this thing called intent messenger: its like emails except faster!

Its gonna be the next big thing I bet. If you ever surf well you're gonna love surfing on the internet because its like riding waves that are made out of computers. and if you like surfing on the internet you should watch this video by this band Figurines because this is what it looks like when you're surfing the internet: Way fast! and catchy! and nothing makes sense!



This is from their album from 2006 called skeleton, a handsome likkle album of music.

Also this: Have you ever stood on the beach doing that heiroglyphics dance? Legs akimbo, arms in front and back shaped like a "Z" and you shoot those hands back and forth across your body, you shoot em back and forth across your body, and you're watching them big blue waves crashing and crashing and you just keep going even though you know everyones watching you and probably thinks you're a dork. but you don't care because you've got Hey Girl by the Figurines playing in your head.

Figurines - Hey Girl

and then the song cracks open at the end and you just start kicking sand around and jumping up and down yelling Come on Come on come on come on come on Come on Come on come on come on come on Come on Come on come on come on come on Come on Come on come on come on come on Come on Come on come on come on come on.

thats what surfing the internet is like.

you should buy their album maybe.

or maybe get ready to buy their new album which is coming out in the U.S. on September, eleventh (maybe its a topical album?).

moospace

good old panda bear

Panda Bear - A Musician and A Filmmaker

My saliva glands run overactive when I hear about something Noah Panda Lennox Bear has done in the past. I met one of his ex-girlfriends once (so she claimed) and I was immediately in awe of this beauty that could climb such a tower and topple such a mind. (Harpy's clawing at her back, tearing flesh from bone. Raw fingers gripping the shallow rock inlets searching for the next rough pull towards the top.)

perhaps I give Panda Lennox too much credit.

Digging through my computer files yesterday I came across an overlooked cache of music that confounded and enticed me, making my saliva glands, once again, work overtime so that I was a drooling, foaming fool. Buried betwixt the fatigue-green files on the insides of my Mac were countless musics that I had overlooked or tried to delete at one time or another: 'twas like finding a Jackson ($20) in the pocket of jeans I hadn't worn for three years.

It was also like finding three year old blue cheese salad dressing nestled squishily in the other pocket. why i would have put blue cheese dressing in there in the first place is beyond me, it may have been a fad at the time. Regardless!! I found some old old old old Panda Bear from Panda Noah Lennox Bear's first self titled album on Deakin's (of AC) Soccer Stars label that has since become Paw Tracks.

Some of it sucks! Some of it makes Noah Bear seem like a normal dude with a keyboard and a guitar who is just starting to write songs. It's also easy to hear some of his genius that would later firework from his mouth and fingers and rain down upon the hungering crowd like manna.

Panda Bear - We Built A Robot

Particularly the eleventh track "We Built A Robot" a synthy, bass pumpy, chiming song that is a very very distant cousin to Hot Chip's earlier work. Panda Noah sounds as though he built a robot out of Erector Sets with the kid from next door and when they turned it on it crashed through the front door and blinked in and out of vision beneath the lamppost lit streets as it fled off to god knows where.

Maybe I shouldn't post this. Don't worry Lennox Bear, if you want I can post some of my highschool poetry.

eeeughh, maybe not.

I don't even know if you can buy this anymore but I'm sure if you bought one of his other albums he'd appreciate it.

and now for something completely different:



Thanks to Joe's Pub ROFL and John Tofu Seroff Hut for a good time last friday. (thats where I saw this amazing video)

booty booty double dancer

my, my, my, meg baird

Sometimes, I realize, I come across albums that both myself and my mother would listen to if we had found the same thing independently. It hurts to admit that, but sometimes things are so transcendently beautiful that it clearly works under any circumstances for anyone.

Meg Baird - Waltz of the Tennis Players

I save the best for last. Meg Baird is a member of the folky freaky band "espers" and recently (may 22) dropped her solo album called "Dear Companion."

Did I say dropped? Thats wrong because this album floats back and forth like a feather in a light breeze or falling leaves in warm rain or Joni Mitchell from an open white curtained window overhead or Nick Drake from a crackly record on a porch or someone humming a Dolly Parton tune in an empty subway station. If those sound like things you're interested in I'd pretty much say go ahead and buy the album from Drag City.


Meg Baird - Maiden in the Moor Lay

This one runs its fingers through overgrown yellow mustard plants exploding across an open field. Shadows of clouds drift somnambulant; dark islands amidst the sunlight.

I can't recommend it enough.

go to her myspace page to hear moar.

buy it from her label: drag city.

don't look for her on youtube, you get only one terrifying result.

Happiness is a solid, Joy is a liquid

"...the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid" J.D. Salinger in "Nine Stories"

My body is a locus of infinite possibilities, my ears very much the same. My brain floats in a pool of inequalities. at times I will have the silicon fjords of Efterklang, glaciering around in there. at other times I'll listen to the hit-your-face-with-a-hammer sounds of bands like Black Eyes.

lately I've been taking in the sounds of "1 2 3 4" by Ms. Feist. now I'm not that big on the album but if you're not sold by watching this amazing video then I don't know what will sell you on this song.



right? I like the one guy in the striped red sweater that probably arrived late to the shoot and was all like "oh shit, I was supposed to wear solid red? well, I can't get back to my house now! My Dad dropped me off on his way to work."

anyhoo, theres all that going into my head these days and then theres this L.A. band Silver Daggers an amalgam of LA post hardcore and free jazz. They sound like "Cough" era Black Eyes but something about them allows for a much more accessible sound. They sound excited and youthful and joyous to be making the racket they're making whereas Black Eyes sounded tattered and haggard and defeated.

Silver Daggers - Joy

"Joy" is one of those rare riots that occurs not from anger or despair but sheer, unadulterated joy. Like when you and your buddies are all back together and wasted and you all just want to get into trouble and smash down walls and break windows and set shit on fire. The unstoppable bassline kicks in like a cinder block and the cacophonous brass section is fists thrashing the air.

Check out Silver Dagger's myspace page.

and buy their record at Load Records.

Brass Construction

Brass Construction - Changin'

I had been listening to Map Of Africa all morning. If you haven't listened to Map Of Africa you're missing out on some amazing DJ butt-funk (otherwise named Beardo-Disco by some jerks with a better wit than I). Friends were visiting and we dropped into the thrift store foolishly positioned around the block from hundreds of upper-middle class white art school kids with expensive lofts. I thought I'd help them out a bit since they obviously weren't about to get any money selling vintage rainbow-suspenders and Kenny Roger's amazing line of cowboy shirts (everything that man touches is gold). lo and behold there were two records that I espied. one, a yardbirds LP, a dandy record, the other: Brass Construction (inset).

What a funky day it would turn out to be. Brooklyn's Brass Construction, as I am told by allmusic.company, released their first LP in 1975 amidst the rising tide of Hop-Hop and disco. DJ Kool Herc most likely played them at his house parties where he invented the continuous break later to be known as hip-hop.

Changin' is my favorite track on the album simply because of that bass that bass that bass that bass. Good god it struts down the street through the admiring string strikes under open fire hydrants, the choppy keys leaning out their windows, the guitar jingles like hot asphalt, and the brass juts along like drivers watching from inside their steamy car pileups, pulling along trying to keep up with that bass that bass that bass.

You can get the full album here at this fucking!!! awesome blog Headfonehaus.

SOUL TRAIN: dancing to the groove.

Lol, Wut?

New-Rave is probably the worst title for any type of music known to man. Spurred by a wanton Klaxon tongue and disemenated by NME's wandering jizz shots, new-rave has become synonymous with the colorful eye-hurt spitting out of pants and shirts in Vice's "Do's" section and hitting you at full force in vagina, mouth and ass. I'm not really into tights, thanks, but the music is definitely a force worth listening to, en mi opinion.

I'm totally into crystal castles right now partially because they seem to be doing the new-rave thing in a darker, less cloyingly unicorny way than The Klaxons or compatriots in day-glo: Hadouken!

I mean, this is electro-hipster distilled in a lab, vocodered, and jerked into a small slim-jim package. Don't say I didn't warn you when you snap into it's snot nosed 8-bit nintendo clicks and twees. If you're not a fan of MSTRKRFT do not open. Fortunately they cut the crap to a short enough length that nothing ever really gets tedious.

I'm a particular fan of Air War on their myspace page (complete with downloads so I'll refrain from putting some here) which is a stroll through a circuitboard, unintelligible vocals bouncing about and hissing like electricity, a nice steady thump making sure people's booties participate.

Crystal Castles - Myspace page #1

crystal castles - myspace page #2

Overall, though, Crystal Castles remix of It Fit When I Was A Kid by Liars is a great example of their potential. Though it relies upon the simple octave keyboard strokes heard in just about every lazy electro dance number, the song still manages to take the spacious, haunting Liars song, make it danceable and even retain the darkness of the original as a great remix should do every time.

Its here: XLR8R

Googly goo

So remember how I was telling you about that new Animal Collective song that they played at the show I saw last weekend? WELL!! I've tracked down a bootleg version that was posted on the Animal Collective message board. They people on Collected Animals (isn't that a clever name?) are calling it "Will To Joy" suspiciously similar to the title the people on youtube were calling it. hmmmmmmm.... its almost as if it were the same people.

Animal Collective - Will To Joy (?)

Sooooo this track is from their performance in Austin (I believe the first video I posted before was from Austin). Its quite pretty iddnit? I can't wait to hear the album version of it or, hell, I can't wait to see them again.

Also!!! Flight of the Conchords, the new HBO show, is FUCKING hilarious! I feel like a dirty whore for posting this but its seriously that good. Two bits to the man, woman or child that finds a full version of the robot song.

Antelope

I'm a big proponent of the DC punk scene simply because it doesn't really get enough attention.

Whats that?
Bad Brains?
Dismemberment Plan?
Fugazi?

pish-posh, not enough attention.

There are so many good bands from DC that fly under the radar simply because people are butts and only care about what craaaaazy Ian Mackaye will do next. Seriously its unfortunate that the tastemakers have deemed Antelope to be unworthy of more than a mediocre rating. Oh well, so much for listening to Antelope, right? Not to feed the ol' blog-o-sphere versus Pitchfork flame here but I find the review of Reflector to be more of a review of the DC scene than a record review. I think its one of the best releases of early 2007 and simply writing it off as post-punk thats not "anthemic" is fucking retarded. but every man to his own opinion.

anyhoo. Antelope writes guitar and drum licks that pop and snap together like k-nex. Listening to an Antelope song sounds like looking at schematics, which, if you know anything about me at all, you'd know that schematics are my newest pleasure. I love how everything just makes sense regardless of whether I understand what that triangle and squiggle line represent.

Antelope - Mirroring

Mirroring, the fourth track on Reflector, comes in with a little plucky raindrop guitar lick. The drums kick in with an unexpected subtle punch. The second guitar winds in. Vocals come in. Its like watching a basket weave itself, and when the song is over you've got a nice little carry-all for picnics.

Antelope - The Demon

The Demon starts similarly. You've got to give Antelope credit for understanding their aesthetic, also for writing lyrics that are thankfully non-sensical. I mean if you're a DC connoisseur you'll have already made yourself well acquainted with Q And Not U's wordplay, or lack thereof. Its not about what they're saying (ok, you could try and make sense of it if you're stoned) its about rythm.

Check them out if you're in Japan cause they're touring you now. otherwise: buy the record here.

What's in a gnome?

(The scene: Late at night. Two men are seated at a long dimly lit mahogany table in expensive business suits. They are listening to the song "Priest, Poet, & The Pig")

Suit 1: "Wow, these guys are great. Long Hair. Thick Riffs. huge beards. kids like the beards these days."

suit 2: "Yeah, beards equal legitimacy and authenticity, always have, always will. Just look at ZZ Top. Who even owns any of their albums post-Eliminator? Nobody! but they're still fucking sweet! anyway, we've got to do something about that name!"

suit 1: "What? Band of My Morning Foghat? I like that name, its...its so distinct"

suit 2: "Nonsense. Distinct band names are going to be the death of this industry. We need band names now that are un-googleable. Back in the Sixties we used to glue adverbs and pronouns to maps of the U.S. and throw darts to figure out a band's name."

suit 1: "but google didn't exist back then"

suit 2: "You ever been on Acid? I wouldn'tve even known my own momma's titties if they were jiggling right in front of my nose back then, son.

suit 1: "Oh... thats...uh..."

suit 2: "we needed band names that were short and easy to remember. Naming a band "Yes" was a stroke of genius, I mean how many times do people say "Yes" in a day? It was free advertisement. We knew we had lost that spirit in the late Nineties when Godspeed You Black Emperor! came out. The only people who say their name in its entirety are dicks or kids that just found out about them and are on the verge of becoming dicks because of it."

suit 1: "so what do we rename these guys?"

suit 2: "We need something ubiquitous yet with neutered meaning to kids today. I know, Vietnam!

suit 1: "and we can capitalize the N so that it seems distinct without actually being different at all! Fuck you Soulseek!"

suit 2: "Welcome to the team, son. We'll need someone sharp like you to market the accessible, radio-friendly music we have here at Kemado Records."

(end scene)


Actually VietNam is one of my favorite new bands I've heard this year.

check out some more Dad-rock, foghat glory in their song Welcome To My Room. Before you listen to it you have to either get on a "hog" of some sort or be swinging around one of those oversized wrenches like Joanne here:



You can do it, Joanne.

Sad pretty music

Hula - As For Hell

I have no idea why these guys aren't getting any press at all. It just goes to show that there is an important factor to getting your band noticed and its this: Marketing. MARKETING! When I think marketing I think of guys named Zack with bleach blonde gel-spiked hair who just want to "shoot the shit" with you in their office. Don't worry Hula! This tiny corner of the Blogosphere is here to help.

Hula just recently emerged with a new album for 2007 called The Cloud That Eats Hands and it is a gorgeous gorgeous album. Hula sounds like finally throwing out the coffee grounds from the coffee the two of you made the day before you broke up: Bittersweet. It's so easy to get bogged down by the "emo" or worse "boring" moniker when you make sad, pretty music and only a few other artists like Elliot Smith and Low capture this sound as crystal clear as Hula can.

The whole album shimmers with deep deep space, guitars that waltz in and out of each other's steps, gorgeous melodies and lyrics, and then of course the pastoral steel guitar that fastens all of the pieces together like glitter sprinkled over glue. The surprising thing is, every song is painted with the same palate and yet I never tire of the songs.

Hula - Helena

Helena is the first song on the album. Like a roller coaster chain it pulls you up to the top over and over and then breaks the tension not with a steep descent but with an unexpected slow motion plummet into a pool of water. Its a gorgeous windswept, mountainous song about "solar powered washing machines" and running away to live in a friend's cabin.

check out their website for more Mp3s and some music videos. Check out their live performance of Fallout, a drony dark monster lumbering through the forest. and buy their album so that they start marketing this shit more, more people need to hear from them!

BONEFISH!!

Well, before the big blogs start lumbering their way to the leaks I'll point you fools in the direction of some muthafuckin' new Animal Collective tracks from Strawberry Jam. Takes a bit to load exactly because of people like me linking to these mofos. Pick yr poison bitches.

ARR MATEYS

SHIVER ME TIMBERS

is it just me or does peacebone sound like a merry go round broke down?

strawberry jam is out in September and I already have a massive erection.

The Myspace Shuffle

I came across Katrine Ottosen opening for some crappity crap band whose name I don't even remember. Actually the most likely weren't that crappity crap but following this beaooooooteeful tiny waif of a Copenhagian...Copenhagonian...Denmarkian...Dutch? lady was a stupid thing.

Most North European music I hear these days (The Fonal Records kids, Efterklang) capture the pastoral beauty of their snowy dark countries but most hedge the cities, burrowing below them or soaring above them but never walking through them at night. Ottosen's voice is a wisp that shivers down nighttime brick alleyways in the snow, alone, on the way to a dimly lit bar with a baby grand piano in the corner for a drink.

Do Your Trick drifts on sparse keyboard strokes, tiptoe percussive samples and lots of open space. You'll listen but when the song finishes you'll blink, look at the time and wonder where the past four minutes went. Thats not a bad thing, its like watching snow fall outside your window.

Katrine Ottosen - Do Your Trick

Flower in The Night on her myspace is a slowed down spy movie peering around corners and clutching the bottom of moving trucks. and right in the middle an Air-ish arpeggio rolls in a beat and the song escapes through the city. Listen up:

Katrine Ottosen's Myspace


Unfortunately she doesn't play in the US, let alone New York, very often but according to her myspace she will be playing Rockwood Music Hall in the Lower East Side in New York City on the Seventeenth. Check it.

Around and Around Again

Welcome to Simian Mobile Disco's world. An amalgam of Scottish countryside, Iraq and the set of ROOTS. Apparently everyone in this world is a pedophile, even the thirteen year olds. Seriously: if you can't grow a mustache then just don't. However! if you look like you should have a wispy pencil thin mustache comprised entirely of your big brother's pube shavings (like everyone in this video) then rock that shit dawg. Its one or the other. And also, SMD, don't make everyone look so depressed! The only person having a good time in this video is that sixteen year old in the track suit spitting down his slutty older sister's throat.
(To quote a line from El Topo: "we are deformed because of the many years of incest")

Yes Yes! This song, I Believe, has the best hook I've heard in the synth-heavy euro-trash disco scene since Da Funk. Its got the kind of beat that is made for guys who pretend to ironically dance like they're constantly in STOMP! and wear trashcan lids on their feet except thats just a cover up because they're just bad-dancing white-ass dumps. ALSO! it is prime for the awkward How-low-can-you-go?! crab walk grind that some dudes still think is cool outside of eighth grade dances and bar mitzvah's. Those aside, this song is prime for the I'll-take-you-home-tonight deal sealing make out sesh on the dance floor. I'm down with that.

Simian Mobile Disco is comprised of James Ford, the producer for the latest Arctic Monkey's album and The Klaxons, and Jas Shaw who, um, is in Simian Mobile Disco. This is from their new album Attack Decay Sustain Release due out June 18 which, by the by, is being streamed on the SMD website.

anyhoo: the first single from the album is a song called 'It's The Beat' featuring Ninja from The Go! Team who consistently tells the listener that the beat is the part of the song that one must vigorously shake one's body to. R2D2, fresh from being repeatedly beaten onstage and recorded for Excepter's live streaming project, generously provides his hip-hop stylings as the hook to most of the song.



oh, Pitchfork beat me to the punch? fancy that.

BONUS: listen to the excepter streams at the same time as SMD's album stream on their website if you want to add a little Tapatio to your euro-techno. It works surprisingly well, kinda like apples and cigarettes.

the only state's name that wasn't taken by a band

When I think of certain decades I have a sort of synaesthetic response. Its not so much that the 80's makes me think of gloworms, popples, Care Bears and/or unchecked AIDS epidemics. Rather, I think of various shapes and colors and sounds, each falling into place like colors on a Rubik's cube.

The early ninties were neons, Cherokee brand acid washed daisy dukes for boys and of course Big Dogs clothing: ergonomically designed to conceal FUPAs and forcefully exhume the most decayed cultural memes, print their corpses across mainsail sized t-shirts, and then piss in your eyeballs with whatever Dog pun pus they happened to concoct. Maybe this was a southern thing. that and Big Johnson T-shirts.

Anyhoo: I've been trying to determine what this decade, the aughts, will be remembered for? It seems the i-pod computer solids is the number one contender. All the dayglo klaxons tawdry-kaka thats coming into fashion now seems to be walking down that road. but there's a folk-art thing going too. a kind of earthy-tone, sea-foam green crayon running parallel to the Devendras and Newsoms. The very same seed that the "Dad beard explosion" has germinated from in the last few years. In other words it's cool to like The Band and CCR again so raid your attic for crackly old vinyl with your Dad's name written on the liner notes.

And thats where bands like Arizona are coming from these days. Arizona is an NYC band that likes to wear flannel and when you ask them why, they go "What?" and look around going "Get a-load of this guy" thumbs a-jabbin' at you. Their songs are catchy and lovely and carry around hatchets and corn-cob pipes. Check oot their myspace page because they are very very unsigned but if they stick around I bet they'll be puttin out some good stuff.

Te Amo Tanto sounds like Neil Young singing on a Grateful Dead track with a little help from Derek and The Dominoes. Check it.

Arizona's myspace page.

A Not So Brief Hiatus

Alright don't be jerks now. I'm sorry. bloggy and I just had to be apart for a little while. I'll take you to a baseball game and buy you a hot dog to prove that I still love you.

anyhoo: I saw Animal Collective (just to prove how much I love them I come out of hibernation because of them) last Friday at the South Street seaport where the whole set was gorgeous and wonderful yada yada yada. Then they played this incredibly blissed out gem that even got the tiny little baby hipsters all around me moving their hips a little more than the alloted one inch diameter that separates disinterest from actual bona-fide dancing.

I have found, however, that this song will not be on Strawberry Jam and was apparently written several weeks before the show!!! DAMN DAMN YOU FATES!!! also apparently everyone on youtube is a dummy because no one got the whole song. It sounds like it was penned by Panda Bear on account of the harmonies and melody is so fucking strong but I could be wrong about that. let us piece it together, together, like a family again.

as soon as Avey Tare stops screaming and the samba egg starts coming in get ready to click the next one. They're not quite perfect but you'll get the idea of how it felt to be in the audience for this song.



aaaaaaand click!



AMIRITE AMIRITE!!!!! HOLY MOTHER OF GOD I'VE GOT TO INVENT A TIME MACHINE!!!

fans are dubbing this song You Got The Will To Joy which doesn't make any damn sense, but hell if I care what Panda and Avey are saying. they're not really that kind of band now are they? I'd call it Bliss Conniption. or maybe Grandeurysm. oh god. and thats the ball game.

Dan Deacon

Browsing Brooklyn Vegan yesterday led me to a young chap by the name of Dan Deacon, as you can see from the video above he's out of his fucking mind and writes music that is the soundtrack to tea parties on the ceiling. He hangs out with the dudes of Ecstatic Sunshine in that Baltimore crowd.

He has a new album coming out this year on May 8 called Spiderman of the Rings. It's like Tamborello from Dntel decided to eat a bunch of crazy berries off the awesome bush. The lyrics make less sense than a meat loaf sandwich.

here's "Wham City" which is indeed long but worth the listen at least for the absurdly catchy middle part.



and here's Crystal Cat the closest thing to a dance track on the album.


gonna get my pants suit on?

Backpedaling

Let me say this and let me say this real fast so that all you stupid people with pipes through your Broca's area will get it: I hated The Arcade fire. *GASP* what? How could anyone hate The Arcade Fire? Thats like hating America. or *GULP* loving terrorism!

Cool your rocket-skates there, Ashcroft, and look at me with both eyes. I will now, readers, stoop to all of your vomitous, poor tastes at tell you that, yes, I am a convert to the church of the Neon Bible. Now, before you pull out the bathing suits and streamers and Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil filled kiddie pools, I must tell you that I still dislike The Arcade Fire's first album Funeral and wish it were dead.

I'm not one of those assholes who dislikes something based on overhype. If anything I'd be the first to jump into that pit of rabid Tyra Bankses if someone told me it was cool. But the first Arcade Fire album, to me, sounds like a very very fat man blocking one of those moving sidewalks in an airport. Multiply that by ten songs and add Win Butler's stupid warble and you've got something that I find exceedingly more mediocre that people give it credit for.

Actually, that I find the songs mediocre even though I find them overbearing really attests to the arrangements themselves. I must give AF my commendations on penning songs whose forefingers are all pointing in the same direction. Truly, though, the new album changes directions ever so slightly enough, that I find myself enjoying their sounds.

The songs on Neon Bible sound either like a flick of the wrist or a full bombardment but never, in my opinion, sound like they're slapping me in the face with their "indyness." Neon Bible sounds more like they're juggling on a unicyle on a tightrope to me, a good thing. Theres a tautness about it that I find more appealing that Funeral's un-tautness. and a dark, monastic, cloistered feel to it. Theres more storm. The windows are a little more tinted this time around. and Win Butler's voice is lower in the mix, less'n he sings like Springsteen. Thats just fine with me:


Theres more uncertainty here I feel, because each song is more timid in approaching an answer than their last album. The cathartic and sublime (and predictable) endings in Funeral are replaced in Neon Bible by an obscuring deepness of sound most visible, I think, in (Antichrist Television Blues).



and of course intervention, the single, punches you in the face first thing with a fucking full organ. This song fulfills every tenet I've laid down for this album. It really couldn't possibly be a member of Funeral's repertoire, its far too tinted to allow us any sort of relief from it's bombardment, which I find much more appealing than the heart-on-the-coffee-table sounds of Funeral.

unfortunately this crapfest comes after it:


yes, I dislike the first half of this song, but get through the first two minutes of the festival of crap and the end finds itself as the darkest and most revealing Butler allows himself to get on Neon Bible.

"Theres a great black wave in the middle of the sea."

No Brakes on Life

Its so funny how easy it is to forget about certain things.

This week has been The Dismemberment Plan in all of their iterations. Yesterday consisted of me listening to a couple D Plan albums on repeat. D Plan is not a huge thing in NYC which is so strange coming from Virginia because, well, if you don't like D Plan in Virginia you're pretty much banished.

Truth is it took me a while to get used to the idiosyncrasies in The D Plan's music. Its funny to watch those idiosyncrasies through D Plan's career, from "!" through "Is Terrified" and "Emergency and I" one can really hear each individual member's personal style coagulating from the hit you with a frying pan sound of "!" into the subtle weirdness of Emergency and I. Seriously check it out:

"!" is a pretty mediocre album that is telling of what the D Plan would become. but upon first listen its easy to notice how low the vocals are in the mix and how much the bass sounds like a fucking howitzer. Mixing must have been such a difficult task for D Plan througout their career since each member is fighting each other member for singularity of style but thats what makes the sound work so well. They're a unit that consistently sounds about to explode and the more subtle they were able to make that explosion sound, the better their albums were.

so anyhow here's the first song off of D Plan's first album called Survey Says:


now check out Is Terrified when they started to figure something out about their DC roots or something, and Travis Morrison found out about falsetto. Actually the song is pretty standard guitar rock during the chorus, but check out the synth and drums verses and post chorus.


And then of course Emergency and I when they managed to hone their sound to as sharp as it would ever be. I suppose The City is a bad example but its just such a great song that I can't pass up putting it on here.


and then maybe a little after that comes the Juno/D Plan split where the D plan released their biggest booty shakin' song, "The D ismemberment Plan Gets Rich" that I feel magnificently condenses their raucous premergency and I sound with the sharpness but ultimately too condensed sounds of Change.


god that song is so fucking great. shook my ass to that song on stage w/ D Plan at their last show (not their post-breakup last shows).