
Audion (aka suave song-and-dance-music man Matthew Dear of Ghostly International/Spectral Sound) has a new track available for free download, "Instant in You." It's a creepy yet sensual stealth weapon for DJs. Hear it here.
Audion performs Mon. Nov. 16 at Triple Door with Pezzner (live) and the Knightriders DJ crew supporting. It's going to be an audio-visual spectacle unprecedented in the hallowed confines of that downtown dinner theater. (See video below for a brief taste.)
Don't ever die, Christopher Walken:
This track by BrokenHomes (aka Greedkid and Ray Juss), "Unicron's Toothache," sounds like it's taking giant, menacing yet sparkly steps into a disorienting, rave new world. I feel as if I need to upgrade my nervous system to fully appreciate it.
(Recommended by @GASLAMPKILLER via Twitter, so you know it's a thriller.)
Posted by Intern Ashley Massmann
I moved away from Vancouver six months ago, and find myself pining for most things Canadian as the season changes and homesickness takes hold. That said, I don't think it's pure Canadian lust fueling my excessive love for the video below. I'm pretty certain it'll inspire some serious heart-pangs regardless of how you may feel about those people up north.
If you feel like signing up for Fan Death's mailing list, they'll reward you by giving a free-but-strings-attached mp3 version of the song.
So the Foo Fighters are releasing a greatest hits record. That's fine. I thought they did years ago but turns out that was just their self-titled album. Ba dum bum ching! Anyway, as most bands do, the Foos are also including a couple new tracks on this greatest hits collection and one of them is called "Word Forward."
And for the first 40 seconds, all it does it echo the first 40 seconds of "A Day In the Life." Check out the evidence, my friends, and then join me in slapping Dave Grohl for being so lazy.
Thankfully (or not, in this case) the rest of the song does NOT sound exactly like any Beatles songs. It's just very mediocre.
Pitchfork reports today that Norwegian disco auteur Lindstrøm will be releasing a 40 minute long version of "Little Drummer Boy" to be sold as a bonus disc via Rough Trade for his forthcoming collaboration with singer Christabelle, Real Life is No Cool. Lindstrøm's longest track previously was the title cut of his Where You Go I Go Too EP, which clocked in at just shy of 29 minutes.
On first glance at its headline, I totally thought this post was going to be about this song (also a fine soundtrack for your soggy, gray late October day):
One more for these guys:
...now I've got Robbie Fulks on my mind. Autumn brings out the twang.
"Cigarette State":
"Alabama's grand/(the state, not the band)."
And "At The Corner Of Eyelove And Ewe":
"There will be moonlit rides by coach and horse/a fine hotel, some intercourse/and later on, a big divorce/oh how badly it shall end!"
Fulks also wrote the stinging "Roots Rock Weirdos" (a short preview here) which, somebody once pointed out, could be effectively converted to "Math Rock Beardos" by changing just 19 words ("1951" for "1991," etc.).
The new These Arms Are Snakes record Tail Swallower and Dove is still lodging itself into my head, and I'm enjoying every minute of it. Here's a track for your listening pleasure.
"Red Line Season"
These Arms Are Snakes play Vera tomorrow night with DD-MM-YYYY and Constant Lovers. What an excellent bill.
Presented simply because it's fantastic and unknown to 99.9 percent of the population (although Christopher DeLaurenti probably has this on flexidisc). Sometimes that's enough.
More on the extraordinary composer Warner Jepson here.
ht: @imprec via Twitter
Charles Mudede to thread, please!
Earlier this year, FlyLo posted the mysterious track on his MySpace page, then removed it. Thankfully, it is on YouTube, and you can hear it below, via Gorilla vs. Bear. It's a particularly murky bit of downbeat electronic heaviness with, of all things, a bit of V.I.C.'s dance-rap goof "Get Silly" thrown in at the end.It has been confirmed that this untitled track is indeed a collaboration between the two downbeat sound scientists. Unfortunately, there are no plans to release the song or for the two to work together again.

(ht: Matt Hickey)

If Chris Walla + J. Robbins doesn't brighten your morning, then perhaps we can interest you in some Ben Gibbard + Jay Farrar x Jack Kerouac? Gibbard and Farrar have written a suite of songs to soundtrack a documentary, called One Fast Move Or I'm Gone, about the time Kerouac spent at Big Sur, in San Francisco, and in New York writing Big Sur—the lyrics are cribbed from Kerouac's writing, arranged by Farrar, and sung by Gibbard. You can hear "These Roads Don't Move at NPR and "The Void" via Stereogum.
If your week has gotten off to a rough start, here's something that might save it... over a year ago, Chris Walla and J. Robbins wrote and recorded a song together (!) in one day (!!) for NPR's Project Song, and it has finally made it up onto the interwebz.
The two used an image taken by Tom Chambers as their inspiration, then worked together to create sonic magic. You can see a video of the process and hear the song, "Mercury," here.
I love it and I think these two, who never met before this project, should work together more often. (Please?)
Totally loving the new Vampire Weekend song stuck in my head, and had some further thoughts on the matter. First of all, someone pointed out that the band—who are smart guys, and who have just spent the past two years dealing with countless critics dissecting their art and aesthetics—are clearly just trolling the haters (who get dutifully apoplectic at any perceived notion of class or privilege) at this point with lyrics about their Mexican winter vacation and such. Second, it occurred to me that these lyrics ("in December, drinking horchata/I'd look psychotic in a balaclava") didn't just have a general precedent in the VW song "Campus" ("spilled keffir on your keffiyeh") but that in fact "Horchata" is a direct, probably conscious echo of that song's winning "exotic" drink/apparel formula—like so:
horchata:balaclava::keffir:keffiyeh
See what they did there?
Finally, I think people are getting caught on the obvious lyrical snags of this song and missing some really fun lyrical play happening deeper in the track—the way the lines repeat with small substitutions to come up with new meanings; the weirdly intimate imagery and dramatic tension of the couplet "With lips and teeth to ask how my day went/boots and fists to pound on the pavement"; the way all that organic matter comes pushing through the pavements and tool sheds of the workaday world just as the song hits its instrumentally overgrown climax (and, really, the whole song is about the tension between the workaday world—yes, even Vampire Weekends get the blues—and the dream of paradisaical escape...or at least it's about trying to choose between skiing and the beach for your winter break).
Also, I think the marimbas are cute.
This music video is so firmly lodged in my head, I can almost feel the bulge in my skull.
It's lodged in my head because it comically and elegantly demonstrates that being a thug is politically radical (in its way) and that all political radicalism has an element of thuggery.
Watch this video while thinking about how much we love Camano Island kid. (And I love the Camano Island kid. I recognize that I'm romanticizing what will probably become a flesh-and-blood tragedy—but I can't help it. I love him.)
You've probably heard the phrase, "he sang the shit out of that song!" Well my friends, in the following video Daniel Ewens sings the shit out of Cat Stevens' "Wild World"—and refuses to clean up after himself. I'm not sure if I mean that in a good or bad way. (Nice shirt, btw.)
Vampire Weekend have released the first single from their forthcoming sophomore album, Contra, and it's called "Horchata," like the Mexican rice drink. Some poor folks are seizing on the "exoticism" of the track's title* to put on their 2000-and-late cultural appropriation po-face, but, c'mon, we've been through this before (and it was an arguable look even then). Yes, the lyrics on the verse (and especially the cultural touchstones) are kind of daft—but when has that not been part of Vampire Weekend's charm? ("Balaclava" here has its precedent in the "keffiyeh" of the previous album's "Campus"; the phenomenon of great, catchy, emotionally resonant songwriting with just occasionally wincing lyrics has its precedent in New Order.) The track's tumbling kalimba, marimba, and keyboards are certainly convincing enough (credit Rostam Batmanglij's sharpened skills as an arranger), as is Ezra Koenig's high-reaching voice on the chorus, signing, "here comes a feeling you thought you'd forgotten." No doubt all the usual sticks in the mud and would-be early backlash adopters will be hating on Vampire Weekend for this song, just like they have been since the band's first positive record review—it will continue to be their loss.
It's called "Some Buildings are Listed," it's way more upbeat and explosive than the pensive, recently released single "The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future," and you can listen to it at the band's website. I think it's just ace.
Why is it, exactly — besides the recent return of Shaun Ryder and last week's gallop down mid-'90s situationist memory lane — that when we hear "Splitting The Atom," the first proper single in six years from Massive Attack:
We think of "Bob's Yer Uncle" by the Happy Mondays?
Spotted just moments ago on Broadway (a full four or five blocks from the Stranger offices!): Totally regular looking guy driving a totally regular looking gray car stopped at a red light, a steady bass pulse and disco beat is emanating from his car (it takes a moment to come into focus but it's "Summer Song" by YACHT, one of the outstanding gems from the act's newest album See Mystery Lights*). Even though it's totally gray and overcast out, unlike yesterday, and summer feels definitively and irrevocably over, Jona Bechtolt and Claire Evans are singing, "Summer came up and sang a song/summer came up, we sang along." The guy in the car claps his hands along two times, fast (clapclap). Totally made my morning.
I know I'm extremely late to this party, but I awoke this morning to KEXP airing Flaming Lips' cover of Madonna's "Borderline" and couldn't believe how fucking great it sounded (I was like a virgin to this version). This song was perfect "first sensory experience of the day" material. Flaming Lips blow out Madonna's sugary dance-pop nugget into something monumentally euphoric and moving. They also somehow expose the melody's latent poignancy much more so than Madge did. Respect to everyone involved with this creation.
(The recorded "Borderline" trumps the live videos of it, but Warner Bros. doesn't allow its artists' recordings on YouTube, so this clip will have to suffice.)
Battles guitarist/keyboardist Tyondai Braxton released a new album this week titled Central Market on Warp Records. It's a bizarre, brash collection of avant-garde classical compositions that he cut with Wordless Music Orchestra.
Below is the disc's epic magnum opus, "Platinum Rows," a piece so flamboyantly rococo and at points disturbingly ebullient that it conjures images of asylum inmates taking over the symphony. To these ears, it's more admirable than lovable, but give Ty credit for going out on a limb with this thornily difficult solo effort.