And this is part 2 in my December mixtape farewell disco roadshow extravaganza: Spirits. The first mix concentrated on the forgotten songs of the years 2000-2009, this one is just all the hit songs from 2009... well, the hits from my small, deformed world. Put it on, throw a party and dance 'til your dead as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs would say.
1 Junior Boys - Parallel Lines
2 Animal Collective - My Girls
3 Florence And The Machine - Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)
4 Golden Filter - Solid Gold
5 The Horrors - Primary Colours
6 Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Heads Will Roll
7 Duchess Says - Black Flag
8 Rainbow Arabia - Kabukimono
9 Fischerspooner - Fascinating
10 Patrick Wolf - Hard Times
11 Little Boots - Stuck On Repeat
12 YACHT - Summer Song
13 Miike Snow - Cult Logic
14 La Roux - Reflections Are Protection
15 Health - Nice Girls (Tommie Sunshine Pandemic Pandemonium Re-Touch)
16 The Detachments - Fear No Fear
Presenting this month's mixtape in two parts, the first one is up for download right here. It's a best of the years 2000-2009, or to be more precise, not exactly a best of. There's no Radiohead, Interpol or Antony & The Johnsons here, no names that end up on Top Of The Year lists... but the songs and bands that kind of fell through. That meant i had to dig a little deeper into my memory to actually come up with those songs, and i'll probably remember more of them the next few days... but for now, this is it. Tracklist is as follows:
1 Kent - Music Non Stop
2 Rogue Wave - Publish My Love
3 She Wants Revenge - Out Of Control
4 A Perfect Circle - Magdalena
5 On! Air! Library! - Bread
6 Tilly and the Wall - Beat Control
7 Radio 4 - Absolute Affirmation
8 Georgie James - Hard Feelings
9 The Airfields - Leaps And Bounds
10 Architecture In Helsinki - Do The Whirlwind
11 Of Montreal - Gallery Piece
12 Neon Neon - I Lust U
13 Mobius Band - City vs. Country
14 Band Of Horses - Wicked Gil
15 The Notwist - Pick Up The Phone
16 Glasvegas - It's My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry
17 I-am-X - Your Joy Is My Low
18 Spektrum - Kinda New (Tiefschwarz Vocal)
Here's this month's mix... it's an imaginary soundtrack to an imaginary relationship that's a bit abusive... somehow that's how it all fell together. The Billie Holiday song is there because it's referenced in the Magnetic Fields song, and it mixes surprisingly well with the Coco Rosie track. The Philip Glass piece and Underworld song gel together in the same, awkward way. Well, i'm quite happy with it. Hear for yourself!
tracklist is like this:
01:00 The Magnetic Fields - How Fucking Romantic
02:00 Florence And The Machine - Kiss With A Fist
03:00 Billie Holiday - You Took Advantage of Me
04:00 Coco Rosie - Tekno Love Song
05:00 The Dears - You And I Are A Gang Of Losers
06:00 Philip Glass - Floe
07:00 Underworld - Mo Move
08:00 M83 - Couleurs
09:00 Sonic Youth - Washing Machine
10:00 Morrissey - Southpaw
This month just begged for a Halloween theme... and ofcourse i gladly obeyed. I created a 13 track monster guaranteed to make your ears bleed...
1. Girls - Ghost Mouth
2. Siouxsie And The Banshees - Carcass
3. The Horrors - Jack The Ripper
4. Girls Against Boys - Disco Six Six Six
5. The Mae Shi - Leech And Locust
6. Jimmy Scott - Sycamore Trees
7. Rainbow Arabia - Haunted Hall
8. Byron Lee - Frankenstein
9. Daft Punk - The Brainwasher (Erol Alkan's Horrorhouse Dub)
10. Wavves - California Goth
11. Helium - I'm A Witch
12. Diamanda Galas - Gloomy Sunday
13. Type O Negative - Love You to Death
Over the course of the last 6 months of this decade, i’ll be putting together my favorite twelve albums of the years 2000 up to and 2009. Why twelve? It was too hard to actually cut it down to ten, and reviewing two albums a month seems like a good pace. Expect some safe choices, some incomprehensible ones, but most of all a record-collector having a go at recollecting an eclectic decade.
One thing that separated the Zeroes from the Nineties, like i mentioned in the Bloc Party piece, was the creation of the niche. Debutants like Interpol or The Strokes or indeed Bloc Party seemed to have carved out their own corner in popmusic before they even first set foot in a studio. Every album that follows after the first confirms the route, but never strays from it.
How different the path of Goldfrapp. Felt Mountain was their unworldly debut in 2000, the soundtrack to Snow White would it have been a soft porn film-noir. It took three years to complete the follow-up Black Cherry, and what a shock it was to hear Train, the first single, for the first time... like a long lost collaboration between Gary Glitter and Marlene Dietrich.
If the term "difficult" second album means an album that scares off most of the fans you gained with your first, then Black Cherry was a very very difficult one. It doesn't deliver on Felt Mountain's promise, which in my opinion was a dead-end anyway, a beautiful one, but a cul-de-sac nonetheless. What is so great about Black Cherry, knowing that Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory deliberately chose to make this kind of record after such a stellar one like Felt Mountain, is that it sends a message: Expect change, and expect challenges. With Black Cherry, it became apparent that Goldfrapp had a creative agenda more complex and less accessible than most people expected, and in the long run that proved to be a good thing.
Perhaps at first it seemed a little arrogant - as if Alison assumed that the thing listeners loved most about her debut was her voice, and we can do without the rest. Personally, i think that's the sort of stylistic leap more artists should’ve made the past few years. Opener Crystalline Green shuts the door good and proper on Felt Mountain from the start, with its dry beats, throbbing synths and Vanity 6-style harmonies, and Alison singing “Try to forget who you are now”. Sexual, almost to the point of caricature, which was probably the point all along.
Black Cherry doesn’t entirely abandon Felt Mountain’s aesthetic, proof for that is in the mid-section of the album with the wonderfully lush and erotic Deep Honey and Hairy Trees. After those two songs, the build up from the first part of the record continues with Twist and comes to a glittering sonic climax on Stric Machine - in more than one way a modern day answer to Donna Summer’s I Feel Love. Where the classic disco track was clearly about two people enjoying each other, Strict Machine sings of the wonders of accessorized masturbation. After that, the album gently slips away with Forever and Slippage - basically Strict Machine but a bit slower and lower.
In hindsight, Black Cherry was a transitional record, as they say. You could summarize the record with the word Erotic, on the next record Supernature, the word was Sex. Train got a proper hit single reworking in the shape of Ooh La La, and where Strict Machine was the glittering peak on Black Cherry, on Supernature the glitter was in every corner, wrinkle and hole. It proved the notion that every Goldfrapp album is an adventure on it’s own, and there’s no way of telling which way they’re going. Wonderful electric!
Over the course of the last 6 months of this decade, i’ll be putting together my favorite twelve albums of the years 2000 up to and 2009. Why twelve? It was too hard to actually cut it down to ten, and reviewing two albums a month seems like a good pace. Expect some safe choices, some incomprehensible ones, but most of all a record-collector having a go at recollecting an eclectic decade.
Dance-punk. Perhaps that word sums up best what happened in alternative music in the past ten years. Dance, because there wasn’t much room for subtleties. Whatever music you made, it had to appeal to the body instead of the mind, it had to make you move before it made you think. And punk, well, file-sharing and the immediacy of internet prompted any musician to a more do-it-yourself approach of making and distributing songs.
The genre that was called dance-punk was at its height around 2005, with LCD Soundsystem as the centre of gravity. But by the time James Murphy’s band released their debut album that year, dance-punk had already crystallized, all the ingredients of the concoction were in the right balance. The hard work had been done a few years earlier, by The Rapture, who made danceable music and sounded like punks on some occasions... and Radio 4, who did both full-time.
Radio 4 formed in Brooklyn, 1999, and claimed that their sound is "made in New York, is about New York, and sounds like New York". With a little help from James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy they recorded their second album Gotham, and set a sonic template that bands like Bloc Party and The Dead 60s would happily adopt .
Even though Gotham was released in 2002, hitting the spot with its militant, call-to-arms message and sound in a post 9/11 world, in fact it was recorded in July 2001. The record is a commentary on New York and its people before the Twin Towers fell down, to make them dance, and then think. Songs about the need to discuss AIDS more constructively ("Who'd have thought disease could turn out passe?” from Start A Fire), the neglect of the arts (the self-explanatory Save Your City) and ubiquitously, about the injustice of former Mayor Giuliani's banning of dancing in many of the city's clubs.
The album is a full-speed subway ride, with stops only slowing down slightly in Speaking In Codes and Pipe Bombs. The funk comes from the rhythm section, the bass always at the front, and the drums sounds like Radio 4 nicked every dustbin lid in Brooklyn to bang on, to underline the statements they’re making. The punk is provided by the jagged guitars, most impressively on Our Town, and the impassioned vocals. You won’t find soppy love songs here, The Movies is the one that comes to something that resembles a traditional popsong at all.
After Gotham, Radio 4 returned in 2004 with Stealing Of A Nation, and while it showed some progression to a more electronic sound and traditional song structures, it rubbed me the wrong way completely with the overtly political message. On Gotham, their saving grace is that the lyrics are drowned out by the music. When the bass is turned up and the feet are dancing, the mind is open for anything.
WIth a website that looks like a 3-year old designed it with a Microsoft product, you could say The Detachments are a beginning band. Barely any listeners on last.fm, only a few tour-dates on MySpace and a debut album to be released as far as somewhere well into 2010. Well, you and i can say we were here first. The following track is mesmerizing, but if it's very representative of their sound, God knows. They're a beginning band, right?
The summer breeze is still blowing in the Netherlands, that helped a lot whilst creating this mix. And yes, while testing it driving the car on a sunny Saturday afternoon, it was qualified '100% summer proof'! My favourite new band, YACHT, is on it twice, because i like 'em that much, and nothing spells M.I.X.T.A.P.E. more than including two songs by the same band, right?
No more stories, this is the tracklist:
1 YACHT - Psychic City (Classixx Remix)
2 Taken By Trees - Greyest Love of All
3 Junior Boys - Hazel
4 The Chemical Brothers - Asleep from Day
5 Neon Neon - Steel Your Girl
6 Imperial Teen - Captain
7 Martha and the Muffins - Echo Beach
8 The Virgins - Rich Girls
9 Ladyhawke - Dusk Till Dawn
10 R.E .M. - Parakeet
11 The Soundtrack of Our Lives - Legend In His Own Mind
12 YACHT - The Afterlife
From Portland, Oregon comes YACHT, just as much art project as pop group. On their own website teamyacht.com you can find an instrumental version of their current album See Mystery Lights. The real thing is just out, and available in your local record store.
New Jersey duo Glass Candy are not new, but i just stumbled upon this great track accompanied by a great video. The song is called Digital Versicolor, it's from 2007, and apparently they're on a label called Italians Do It Better. Hotdamn, that's something a shirt Tony Danza wears could say. Timeless discolectro!
Over the course of the last 6 months of this decade, i’ll be putting together my favorite twelve albums of the years 2000 up to and 2009. Why twelve? It was too hard to actually cut it down to ten, and reviewing two albums a month seems like a good pace. Expect some safe choices, some incomprehensible ones, but most of all a record-collector having a go at recollecting an eclectic decade.
The further i proceed on this list of lists of lists, the more frantic i get whenever i have to write a bit about the next album on it. I start doubting my common sense while skipping through the tracks of aforementioned album, realizing how bloody good it is, and deciding it should be higher up. So as i’ve rearranged the entire order of the list, i start skipping through the tracks of the album that became number 9 instead of Maxïmo Park’s A Certain Trigger. And then i realize how bloody useless it is. From now on, all you’re going to see here are modern day classics, and perhaps, apart from the top two, they’re all equal to sit at number 9 just as well as number 3.
Maxïmo Park is in this list, and as i’m researching and re-listening their debut album, i see a lot of similarities between them and the previous entry on the Zeroes Heroes’ list, Bloc Party. Part of the post-punk/new wave revival of the mid Zeroes, a debut album produced by Paul Epworth and nominated for the Mercury Prize, to name a few. However, wether you had read about them, saw them or heard them even around that time, it would have been impossible from the start to dismiss them as ‘just a band’.
Beneath only that most superficial surface, there are a lot of oddities going on with Maxïmo Park. They were the first ‘conventional’ pop band to sign to Warp Records - known for their progressive electronic music like Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. Lead singer Paul Smith looked like an extra from A Clockwork Orange who easily could have had his own spin-off movie. His lyrics stay far away from the usual angst of bands like Bloc Party, but instead center around the intense frustation that comes from boredom, echoing The Smiths instead of Joy Division, quoting Albert Einstein instead of Kurt Cobain. And where Bloc Party was a band that stuffed a great idea in every track on Silent Alarm, Maxïmo Park start their songs with a great idea, have another one during the first chorus, and discard that one too by the time they get to the bridge.
The best thing about all that, and A Certain Trigger to be specific, is that it left a weak first impression. The music was unfathomable at first glance, the only songs that hit home almost straight away were Apply Some Pressure and Once, A Glimpse. Serving as a catalyst for the rest of the album, those tracks softened my ears for the next step, where for instance Postcard Of A Painting, Going Missing and The Coast Is Always Changing revealed their true identity. By the time i had listened to the album quite a few times and agreed it was OK despite Graffiti, Limassol and Acrobat, BANG!, it hit me right in the face that those were actually among the best of the whole album.
The twitch comes partly from their deceptively complicated song structures. Their songs seem to slide from verse to chorus to bridge and it’s over, but in the mean time you get 16 bars of pure genius like the ecstatic, whirling bridge on Graffiti. Their melodies can be lightheartedly catchy, but get obscured oft and again by rhythmical curiosities, like the drum-roll that doesn’t fit in Apply Some Pressure.
When i’d peeled off all those layers of A Certain Trigger, its heart lays bare, and it was bittersweet, smart, sexual, frustated, angry, bored, romantic, stupid, spiteful, yearning and witty. The time it took me to learn to know and appreciate it made it feel like a old friend. Music that achieves that, never fails to touch you everytime you listen to it, adding to the friendship. Well, more of that for every album coming up next.
Whilst preparing for tonight's VJ show at Cruise Control, i stumbled upon this: Antony & The Johnsons cover Beyoncé's Crazy In Love. I've heard of the cover before, he performed it at the Carré show in Amsterdam a few months ago, but i didn't know an official video was made for it. Besides the beautiful rendition of the song, the video shows what a mystery Antony still is.
I have instantly become a fan of Grizzly Bear after watching these two videos for their song Two Weeks. The first is the official one directed by Patrick Daughters (remember that name people), and the second one is done by animator Gabe Askew, purely because he is a fan of the band and the song. I can't decide yet which one i like better, but making a video just because you want to, and creating something so gorgeous is a huge plus.
Go on, watch them both... the song is so nice you won't stop listening to it after hearing it just two times.
Over the course of the last 6 months of this decade, i'll be putting together my favorite twelve albums of the years 2000 up to and 2009. Why twelve? It was too hard to actually cut it down to ten, and reviewing two albums a month seems like a good pace. Expect some safe choices, some incomprehensible ones, but most of all a record-collector having a go at recollecting an eclectic decade.
If i could give out an award for Most Promising Debut Of The Decade, without a doubt i'd give it to Bloc Party's Silent Alarm. Their mix of Joy Division-style drum & bass combined with Radiohead-like soundscapes and lyrics made them the most likely ones of their generation to gain the status of Rock Gods like R.E.M. and U2. But something went wrong after that.
A better title for this piece would be Me Trying To Unravel The Mystery Of Bloc Party. How could any band debut with a sound so distinctively their own, balanced but still with all the youthfull head-over-heals-enthusiasm you'd expect on a first album? And more important, a collection of songs most bands can only hope to compile on a Best Of.
The Mystery sort of unravelled itself every time Bloc Party released a new album, because a strange phenomenon seemed to connect all those bands with fabulous debuts in the 00s, like The Strokes, Interpol, Vampire Weekend etc. As soon as a follow-up appeared on the horizon, you realized that what made these bands stand out was more a carefully constructed function and form, instead of the romantic notion that it only takes a stroke of pure genius and a bit of luck to hit upon a unique sound. What that means to all music that comes after the initial introduction, is that there's not a lot of diversion to be discovered, just a continuation of the course set.
Bloc Party are really the prime example of that trend to me. Their following albums A Weekend In The City and Intimacy didn't add much to their sound, which downsized their remarkability in a way - if they can't come up with anything different from what they've done before, what's the difference between them and their copycats?
Now, about the album. Because i'm not here writing about what Bloc Party meant, but more about what they did ofcourse. The reason this album is not in the upper regions of my list, is The Curse Of Silent Alarm. Apart from all the good stuff i mentioned two paragraphs before, there are some things that can be held against it.
Most important, the album has always felt and still feels oversized to me. Thirteen tracks in a bit more than 50 minutes time doesn't seem much oversized on paper, but in the case of Silent Alarm it really is. That probably has a lot to do with the dense production and too similar sounding songs - after four years i still can't remember which title goes with which song.
The time that passed since its release has also helped picking out the weak songs on the album, although i can only choose two - Blue Light, Luno - that could've been left off the album to bring it down to more comprehensable proportions.
Enough bitchforking though... After seeing them live just a few weeks ago, finally something clicked between me and Bloc Party. Perhaps it was perfect timing, dancing in the light of a setting sun to This Modern Love - if only one song of them should be passed over to next generations, it should be that one - but no matter what, i saw a band that had a great bunch of songs to play, and played them well and with the same vigour with which they were recorded. A band that was one of the trendsetters during these past ten years.
This month was Crash Course month at the Monthly Mixtape group. You're supposed to make an introduction to an artist your mixpartner doesn't know much about, but is interested in. The theme was on repeat from August 2008, when i made a Nine Inch Nails mix. Since my mixbuddy didn't really respond to any of my suggestions, i went with my own infatuation, and made an old-school Simple Minds compilation. That means i picked my favourite songs from the studio albums they recorded between 1979 and 1984, when they released Sparkle In The Rain.
The Simple Minds are one of those rare bands that made a drastic change in their sound, and thus have a 'good' and 'bad' period in their career, no matter which period one would deem bad. They emerged in the late Seventies post-punk slipstream, and evolved from Sparks sound-a-likes to a band who explored repetitive patterns and trance-like rhythms before house music was even invented, and then moved on to a bigger than life rock-sound... which for me is the point where they went bad. Sparkle In The Rain is the album that devides those two periods. It hugely differs from their previous album New Gold Dream from 1982, it's the first with the Simple Minds signature 'big' rock sound, but still echoes the esoteric nuances that marked their previous albums.
Like i said, the songs i picked are personal favourites, and a bunch of them have been singles, so perhaps you'll recognize some of them. In any way, this collection clearly showcases the progress Simple Minds made from an underground band to the mainstream which made them rock superstars in the late Eighties. Tracklist is as follows:
1 Life In A Day
2 Factory
3 Premonition
4 Changeling
5 Travel
6 Thirty Frames a Second
7 Sweat In Bullet
8 Love Song
9 Theme For Great Cities
10 The American
11 Promised You a Miracle
12 Someone Somewhere in Summertime
13 New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84)
14 Up On the Catwalk
15 Speed Your Love to Me
This must be the most creative and elaborate video i've seen in a very long time. It's hard to tell where animation, live projection and actual footage meet, but that's the whole beauty of it. Very impressive!
Over the course of the last 6 months of this decade, i'll be putting together my favorite twelve albums of the years 2000 up to and 2009. Why twelve? It was too hard to actually cut it down to ten, and reviewing two albums a month seems like a good pace. Expect some safe choices, some incomprehensible ones, but most of all a record-collector having a go at recollecting an eclectic decade.
In 2002, the world looked up when LCD Soundsystem released their first single Losing My Edge - the story of a DJ who's afraid of losing touch with the times while bragging about his impeccable and infinite music collection. It reintroduced a sense of humor in music that somehow disappeared with the Talking Heads, and really was the starting point of the Zeroes' typical post-eclectic, cross-referencing popmusic that acts like Franz Ferdinand took to other levels.
LCD Soundsystem is James Murphy is DFA Records. Mr. Murphy started DJing in 1993 under the nickname Death From Above, and co-founded DFA Records six years later.
After Losing My Edge, LCD Soundsystem continued with a string of strong, heck even classic singles (like Yeah) before there were even the faintest hints of an actual album release. It finally happened though in January 2005, and it's because the physical album consists of two discs - one the official album, the second the first three singles and their b-sides - that i'm putting this record on number 11.
Because, to be honest, the actual album doesn't really have the weight to justify a spot on this list. Pieces Of The People We Love by The Rapture or Gotham by Radio 4 would have had just as much, if not far more, reason to be included here.
Tracks like Daft Punk Is Playing At My House, Tribulations and Great Release are the strong points of this record, but the overall feel of the album is that every trick and reference known in James Murphy's book is on display here. It tries a bit too hard to weld all their influences together, like AC/DC paying tribute to Daft Punk, The Beatles covering Pink Floyd, Kraftwerk reforming as The Fall. The follow-up to their debut, Sound Of Silver, was a much better paced and evocative record. Well, you might ask, why isn't that one in this list? Good question, simply because the raw energy from just a couple of tracks on the first album changed the landscape of dance music in this decade. But as you might have guessed, they're not on the first disc of the package.
No. Losing My Edge, it's original b-side Beat Connection and the two versions of Yeah on that bonus disc defined a new standard for dance music. Taking out the impeccable sequencing and sounds, and putting back blood, sweat and suburban tears, moved it all to another level. In that way, a cycle was finally completed, or at least my ultimate fantasy was indulged: the dance-rock hybrid, started by New Order (clumsy because they probably didn't know how to operate their gear), which got more and more hi-tech as years passed, returned to its roots because of James Murhpy. He approached it as music made by people, trying to be machines, creating a sloppy-neat/neat-sloppy sound.
So those first few singles emphasize LCD Soundsystem's strong points: the typical drum-machine-with-added-human-error, the dynamics which go off the charts at times - like in Yeah (Crass Version) - and all the cowbell you wished for in the nineties.
In fact, if i were to compile a Best Zeroes' Singles list next to this parade of albums, Losing My Edge/Beat Connection could very well be the number one. Losing My Edge comprises all that is LCD Soundsystem (and most of the bands who followed in their slipstream), and Beat Connection really is this decade's Blue Monday in my opinion. Since the single was sort of officially declared dead somewhere during these past ten years, it'd be foolish to do that.
OK... it takes 1 minute and 45 seconds for the music to start, but when it does, it's a great tune. And the fun part, you never get to find out what the title In The NA means. I'm guessing Nuclear Aftermath, but i'm an optimistic kind of guy.
It's officially the summer of the synth babes, with both Little Boots and La Roux shooting to international stardom with their pop smart dance ditties. So far, i'm far more fond of La Roux, even though at times her falsetto voice make my ears bleed. The tunes are just much better.
Now there's a new girl in town doing the same trick, and she's called Sally Shapiro. Actually, like La Roux, Sally Shapiro is two people... in this case producer Johan Agebjrn and a so far anonymous Swedish singer. Very appropriately, here's their track called Love In July.
This month, in the Monthly Mixtape Group, the theme was Questions And Answers. What better way to make an actual story out of it, right? My initial idea was to answer every question with an exclamation mark, but i abandoned that idea soon enough. It certainly helped me on my way, eventhough that doesn't explain why i actually put a Barry Manilow song on a mixtape. Surprisingly, it fits really well with its Answer. That's all that counts.
Tracklist is as follows:
1 Soft Cell - What?
2 Gossip - Listen Up!
3 Pet Shop Boys - Why Don't We Live Together?
4 The Smiths - You Just Haven't Earned It Yet Baby
5 Barry Manilow - Who's Been Sleeping In My Bed?
6 Taken By Cars - Uh Oh!
7 The Horrors - Who Can Say?
8 Zoot Woman - Nobody Knows (Part Two)
9 Bjrk - Who Is It? (C2n Dattasette Mix)
10 Neon Neon - Raquel
11 Cristina - What's A Girl To Do?
12 Black Affair - Tak! Attack!
13 Nine Inch Nails - You Know What You Are?
14 Mansun - Disgusting
15 Gus Gus - Why?
16 James Dean Bradfield - That's No Way To Tell A Lie
All i know from the band Metal On Metal is that they're from Lithuania, play a lot of gigs in Vilnius, and that's about it. So i'm imaging they are dance/rock superstars in the Baltic area. Or just a bunch of poor kids who scraped all their cash together to make this one video. Or the product of a Russian producer in search for world domination. Probably neither three of these options. I'd like to see them sometime in the Netherlands though (so if you're reading this...)
What's this? I thought Martha And The Muffins was my own little unknown indie band from the early 80s, and now their Echo Beach is being used as the backbone of this crystalline popsong by MPHO (wah? M-fo? Miles Per HOur?). Oh well, the underground is still a good place to pick great ideas from... she better come up with something good herself next time though.
Over the course of the last 6 months of this decade, i’ll be putting together my favorite twelve albums of the years 2000 up to and 2009. Why twelve? It was too hard to actually cut it down to ten, and reviewing two albums a month seems like a good pace. Expect some safe choices, some incomprehensible ones, but most of all a record-collector having a go at recollecting an eclectic decade.
And the toughest thing was picking the number 12 in this list. Because the last one slams the door in the face of every album hovering around the entrance, anxious to get in. Sorry Silent Alarm, sorry Gotham. Above that, the difficulty with including such a recent album in this kind of list is that you are very probably going to be embarrased by it sooner than you can imagine. That's why you won’t find any MBMT, Cut Copy or Vampire Weekend in this list, there’s that much that i’m willing to reveal in advance. The rest however, will remain a surprise until the end.
So The Horrors are kicking off this list. A little reminder of who they are: founded in 2005 in Southend, England. Only a year later, they were that week’s hype in the NME. Their debut album Strange House, release Spring 2007 didn’t live up to the hype as usual. And all that despite their poofy haircuts or the grave-themed garage-rock, which seems like an excellent niche, right?
In two years time though, The Horrors did what so few overhyped British bands have never been able to do, but which seems only so natural. They’ve grown, improved themselves and done so in an intelligent and stylish manner. The album is rare in the way that it’s veering off in different directions, but still sounds very homogenous, and demands to be listened to from head to start, reaching it’s ecstatic climax with Sea Within A Sea. Even though Primary Colours echoes many influences that are easy to pinpoint - Brian Eno/Kid A atmospheres, everything that happened on 4AD in the early 80s, The Cure, early Suede, Joy Division, this is one of those albums where these sources react with each other. And like Frankenstein’s monster, the sum of the parts is blessed with a heartbeat and a soul.
And in this way, Primary Colours, although very much products of its times, stands out from so many other albums. Where bands like Editors, White Lies and blah blah blah mimic the antics and sounds of their influences, The Horrors seem to dig deeper. Because like Ian Curtis and friends, they are displaying the fact they are too music fans, that refuse to merely copy but instead express their love of their influences. Which sometimes means you build upon, and sometimes tear down what came before you. In that way it reminds me much of the first few listening turns i had of albums like Turn On The Bright Lights or Funeral, where even before the initial excitement of new strangeness/strange newness wears off, you get the idea there’s much more brilliance and craftmanship to be discovered in this solid recording in the coming years.
So, this album is probably cursed that it was released this year. Were it a few years older perhaps it would have ended quite a bit higher on this list. So its position on number twelve is me being the precautious one really, and not the short-term thinker that includes only stuff here not older than two or three years. In the coming months, you’ll see what i mean by that.
Vitalic is releasing a new album at the end of September... luckily enough, the first single is here, just in time to become a hot summer disco hit, splendid... with a shiny haircut like that.
It's been such a busy month, i had zero time for anything, let alone making a mixtape with the impossible theme the mixtape group chose this month... Officially it was called SONGS FOR WHEN YOU ORDER A HOT CHOCOLATE IN A CAFE AND THE GUY ASKS IF YOU WANT WHIPPED CREAM AND YOU SAY NO THANKS AND THE GUY LOOKS YOU UP AND DOWN AND NODS A LITTLE TO HIMSELF.
Well... last Monday i sat myself down and did it. And i couldn't help myself and mixed/mashed/cross-faded the whole lot. And it was done in 3 hours time. I can't believe it myself, but it's true. If i'd had more time, it probably would have been longer, the humor would've been of better taste and all the sex references would have been removed... but a theme like this asks for some crude in return.
So this is it:
Death In Vegas - Lever Street
Forbidden Ensemble - Please Come In
Aeroc - Idiom
Dexter - Mr. Blunt
Telefon Tel Aviv - My Week Beats Your Year
AFX - Crying In Your Face
Animal Collective - Guys Eyes
Whore's Mascara - All I Want
Radiohead - Gagging Order
Eurythmics vs. Chicks On Speed - Sex Cream Song
Deerhoof - Choco Fight
Tiefschwarz - Severed Heads/Dead Eyes Opened (Joakim Edit)
The whole mix is 26 minutes long... the shortest i ever made, but it's because i wanted to catch some kind of speed in the mix.
With a little help from Yeasayer's Chris Keating, Simian Mobile Disco are releasing the first single of their upcoming album Temporary Pleasure. Nice colours, and you wonder which idea was there first, the crazy lyrics, or the visual references to the lyrics in the video... like the Damien Hirst telephone. Would like one for myself!
update: It seems Patrick Wolf's sister produced this video. Totally useless pop trivia, but who knows when it comes in handy...
If you're coming to Cruise Control tonight, expect this song to come along at least once. Canadian electro punks Duchess Says, who have been making music since 2003, perform at golf courses, shop windows, vacant buildings and what more. Not at Cruise Control though. But we recreate their presence by playing a recorded copy of their song Black Flag. You can download it here.
If you invested in Patrick Wolf's new album The Bachelor, like i have, you probably have downloaded it officially by now. The album is in stores as well, all i'm waiting for now is the physical copy, numbered and autographed, to arrive by mail. In the mean time, i watch the video for Hard Times non stop.
Matt & Kim started some sort of video meme, i suppose? After they ran the streets of New York naked someone must have thought: 'We can do zis better and wiz good looking French Gurls'. And perhaps these people were right... at least they are not wearing flesh colored underwear, for sure.
I'm quick with this month's mixtape, but my two week holiday to the Czech Republic starts next week, so i should be. Theme was The Shopping List, and although that sort of implies only groceries, i thought luxury shopping was a much more interesting starting point, lots of dramatic angles. So this mix goes from black leather rock to coked up dance to cold turkey ballads to end with a happy tune by the boys from Blur.
Tracklist is as follows:
1 Ladytron - Blue Jeans 2.0
2 Mando Diao - High Heels
3 Death In Vegas - Leather
4 dEUS - Nightshopping
5 Tiga - Shoes
6 Le Le - International Pants
7 From Namibia With Love - I Need Drugs
8 ケン・イシイ - Cocoa Mousse
9 School of Seven Bells - White Elephant Coat
10 Lou Reed - Make Up
11 Tom McRae - Got A Suitcase Got Regrets
12 Blur - Supa Shoppa
The next feat in this year's wave of electro discoveries is La Roux's new single Bulletproof. Trust me, songs can't get any poppier than this, i was singing the chorus out loud by the end of the song. Currently, La Roux is in the UK top 10 with their current single In For The Kill, which doesn't do much for me, so this must be a number 1 hit.
I've heard a few remixes from Filthy Dukes lately, but music from their own hand is completely new to me. This is from their album Nonsense In The Dark, and features Tommy Sparks on vocals. Remember him?
On the 19th of June, we're having a bowling party at Bison Bowling in Utrecht. If you're around at the time, and you are queer-minded, please join us for a great night with balls, sleazy music and spectacular visuals. For more info, check cruisecontrol.nu!
She's starting to sing properly, what's that? The queen of electro has gone all rock chick, but if you had a proper listen to her previous album Impeach My Bush, you'd already know that. Her new album is out now, i saw it in the record store for real.
The official title for this mixtape is "This morning, instead of my cat waking me to feed him via his usual method (pushing on my bladder or digging his claws into sensitive areas), i just sat up in bed, fully awake, and he was sitting on the floor next to the bed staring at me (creepy). i went to feed him, and then tried to get back to sleep. usually my insomnia works by me having trouble getting to sleep at night- it's odd that i would wake up like that and not be able to fall asleep again. anyway, i went to the store and picked up some oj and made breakfast.", which must be the longest Mixtape title ever.
The theme for this month was The Picture Show, where you pick a random photo off flickr, and make a mixtape out of it. I found this picture, actually not so much at random, but more while searching for 'interesting' pictures tagged with morning and stuff like that, because i wanted to make a morning mix. Is that cheating? Nah, just a flexible adaption of the rules right?
I guess the topless body sort of caught my attention first but there's so much going on in there, together with the text this guy typed underneath it (which turned out to be the title to my mix), that i had no trouble putting together a mix, like i said.
The tracklist is like this:
1 Underworld - Good Morning Cockerel
2 The New Year - The Door Opens
3 On! Air! Library! - Bread
4 Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Upon Encountering The Crippled Elephant
5 Crystal Castles - Magic Spells
6 The Dandy Warhols - Green
7 R.E.M. - I Don't Sleep, I Dream
8 Best Fwends - I'm Gonna Bake You
9 6ths - All Dressed Up In Dreams
10 Rogue Wave - Catform
11 Aphex Twin - Milkman
12 The Broken Beats - Apictureofaworldinaframe
Basically, it's a mix for waking up in the morning, but most of what i saw and what was in the story come back in the mix. Then again, some songs in the mix are there because of the things i imagined might be NOT visible in the photograph, like those incoherent dreamy thoughts one has when waking up, or what was going on in this house before and after this snapshot.
Wave Machines was formed two years ago in Liverpool, and they probably spent those years making this video... i'm always really impressed by stop-motion clips, and this one doesn't pretend to be fancy or clever, just pieces of paper cut out, lying on books and keyboards. Must've been a hell of a lot of work. The video comes with a sweet song as well, i'll bet we'll hear more from them in the future.
Matt & Kim used to charm you with their untight drumming and one-note melodies. For their new album Grand they still charm you with untight drumming and one-note melodies, but it's done on better drums and more expensive keyboards. And if they don't charm you with their music, they will probably irritate the hell out of you with this video, which is definitely Not Safe For Work. Don't think this was Kim's idea though.
What's that, wanna-be popstars are allowed to go under names like Dan? Well, as long as they fit the current fashion - colourlessly clothed in a tight fit, black mop of hair slung to one side - they don't need a name, it's all good. Circlesquare/Sam Sparro/Dan Black. Whatever.
They define themselves as a Copenhagen based lesbian ghetto-funk, pop-slamming MC/DJ duo. Fagget Fairys is indeed Copenhaged based, they are a lesbian couple consisting of DJ Sensimilla and MC Ena... and their music is typical of what you would hear at a Cruise Control night, so i would call it porntastic electro sleaze. But that's just me.
Let's just call 'em Trail Of Dead here. The latest video from their album The Century Of Self sees them return to their old form, sonicwise. Nice, that.
I talked about Daedelus before, and he has continued to create sweet sounding electro pounding dance ditties... LA Nocturn is his latest. Great effects in this one, but it's a bit of a mystery to me why the last two minutes is just black screen and occasional mumbling.
And is it just me, or does it seem to you too that Smashing Pumpkins' Tonight Tonight was an inspiration for this song?
A little belated, but our trip to Berlin got in the way of it, the video to Patrick Wolf's new single Vulture. Something quite different from the bright colors and tunes of The Magic Position, but not entirely strange to people who are familiar with his first album. Patrick singing about his d-d-d-d-d-d-dead meat in an S&M outfit, that should get most people's attention.
Too bad though it's kind of obvious from the look of this clip that the budgets for Patrick are a tad lower than before. I just hope it doesn't apply to the rest of his upcoming album The Bachelor.
What do you get when you put three Axl Rose look-a-likes, the Sugababes' moms, the people inside the Teletubbies and the cast of Xena: Warrior Princess in one video? Uh, right, Tommy Sparks' clip for his song She's Got Me Dancing! Hilarious! And a nice song too.
Eventhough this isn't the official video for My Girls (if there even is one), this one looks as brilliant and original as the song itself. Reminds me a wee bit of Ed Holdsworth's videos, but only in the driving parts.
This month's theme was called The Year Mix. Purpose was to compile some songs all from different years.
Since that seemed like an invitation to do an 'anthology' kind of mix, i got the idea to dive in to the popmusic subgenre called Shoegaze. Officially, shoegaze was born in the late 80s and went extinct somewhere mid 90s, but the songs from that area always had a classic, timeless appeal to me. I suppose more people feel that way since it's experiencing some kind of revival the last few years, so what would be a better idea than to explore the influences, the classics and contemporary examples of shoegaze.
What better title than, than Heads Down. Tracklisting is as follows:
1 Velvet Underground - Venus In Furs (1967)
2 Cocteau Twins - Lorelei (1984)
3 The Jesus & Mary Chain - April Skies (1987)
4 Sonic Youth - Candle (1988)
5 Ride - Vapour Trail (1990)
6 Lush - For Love (1991)
7 Catherine Wheel - I Want To Touch You (1992)
8 Bailter Space - Collider (1997)
9 Ladytron - All The Way... (2005)
10 Asobi Seksu - New Years (2006)
11 Crystal Stilts - Departure (2008
12 Imaginary Gun - Up The Stairs (2009)
A short explanation about the songs... The Velvet Underground has been an inspiration for almost any alternative music since the 60s, but their loud distorted guitars combined with poppy vocals were the main ingredients for all things Shoegaze.
The Cocteau Twins, The Jesus & Mary Chain and Sonic Youth were never really called Shoegaze, but it's obvious when you compare the sound of Lush to The Cocteau Twins who listened to who. They were more direct catalysts for bands of the Shoegaze period to form their own sounds. Like Ride, Lush, Catherine Wheel and Bailter Space. I didn't include My Bloody Valentine here because it seemed so obvious... i wanted some of the more forgotten bands.
For me, my interest in Shoegaze was fired when Ladytron released Witching Hour in 2005. Despite the usual electronics, the album echoed the timeless guitar-based pop from the early 90s, which seemed a logical addition to their sound. Asobi Seksu and School Of Seven Bells are doing pretty much the same, but since i discovered Crystal Stilts a few weeks ago, i decided to include them instead of SOSB.
And last, my own Imaginary Gun song... partly inspired by all preceding music on this mix.
The third installment in the Imaginary Gun song cycle is called Up The Stairs. It has been a bit of a struggle to be honest, because the initial idea of building a song around this particular bass line that i had seemed easy, but somewhere i lost track a bit of where i wanted to get to. It all came back together when i started on the lyrics. In the end, i'm still quite surprised and pleased with the end result. Though the real reason i'm publishing this right now, is that my own rules - one song each month - force me to move on. I feel there's still some work to be done on this song, but perhaps that will happen somewhere in the future. For now, it's yours.
Spring is creeping upon us, and brought the perfect song to accompany it... The Golden Filter is a guy and a girl from New York who bought some keyboards and turned on the arpeggiator and thought it was a good idea. It was.
Apparently, this is the new single from Franz Ferdinand, and the video proves they're as much trend forecasters as they are musicians. Triangular hats and NO spewing amplifiers really are the gadgets of the future.
In one week time, i'll be in Berlin with Cruise Control VJ-ing at our own party in Schnarup. For anyone who's never been there, it's filthy queer-electro all night long, 'til your feet bleed from dancing. One song that would totally blend in with the usual playlist would be the remix of Crystal Castles of White Lies' Death. So here it is.
Natasha Khan aka Bat For Lashes has a new album out in a couple of weeks, and Daniel is the first single from it... displaying her instantly recognizable vocals and chord progressions. Good to see she has created a niche for herself with her second album, she really is an original talent.
Can you believe the bandname Datarock hasn't been used before? What a brilliant name, and two Norwegian dudes beat you to it, just in case you were speeding over to myspace to register. Their music fits the name perfectly too. This is a track from them in a Kissy Sell Out remix.
This might look like a fifties magic show, but it really is the video to a new song by Final Fantasy aka Owen Pallett. He's kind of busy lately, working with all the big popstars in the world. But i suppose this new video means there's a new album on the way as well. Even though i can't find any news about it.
With the risk of smothering them to death, here's another video from School Of Seven Bells. I'm seeing them live at the Paradiso this Tuesday. The video above is a live performance of White Elephant Coat, currently my favourite track on their album Alpinisms. This promises something good.
I'll be honest, i've softened my opinion on the new Depeche Mode single... after a few listens i don't think it's bad anymore, could've been a decent b-side to a proper single really. The video is clearly the best they've ever done besides all of the Corbijn directed clips.
I was right when i spotted a sort of Bjrk factor in Emiliana Torrini when i first saw and heard this video... although her name suggests otherwise, she is native Icelandic. Not really a newcomer, she already recorded three albums, co-wrote Kylie's Slow, worked with Gus Gus and Thievery Corporation amongst others. From her latest album comes this song that kick-starts spring really.
Until now, 2009 proved to be a good year for electropop already. I love that new Pet Shop Boys single, and though i was a bit harsh on that new Depeche Mode song, perhaps it's not that bad after all. But those are old farts, good to see that new artists like Little Boots, Ladyhawke and Lady Gaga are putting the snap and crackle back in pop. And look what happened? Lady Gaga got the remix treatment by the Pet Shop Boys. I couldn't keep that from you, could i?
I always like my mixtapes to add a twist to the monthly theme. This time it was all about your personal musical 'inheritance' - what was passed on to you and what do you want to pass on?
I thought it would fun to draw parallels between my influences and the music i would pick to store in a time-capsule to be opened in a hundred years. And by influence i mean music from my youth, that led me the way to discover other music, so the influence is not necessarily older than the influenced. Like Sonic Youth learned me to appreciate music that doesn't conform to orthodox structures, which opened the door to get to know a band like On! Air! Library!.
The mix is divided in two parts, the first is the origins part, the second part is the influenced part. The sequence in both parts is the same, so Neil Young for instance influenced me to listen to Devendra Banhart. And there's a little part in the middle, that's my own song, which ofcourse is something that i want to pass on to future generations :)
It's called Cause And Effect.
Cause:
1 Fleetwood Mac - Dreams
2 U2 - Two Hearts Beat As One
3 ABBA - S.O.S.
4 Queen - Somebody To Love
5 The Beatles - Savoy Truffle
6 Sonic Youth - Star Power
7 Pixies - Alec Eiffel
8 Neil Young - When You Dance You Can Really Love
9 Evelyn Thomas - High Energy
- - - - -
10 Imaginary Gun - Jack Of Hearts
- - - - -
Effect:
11 Cut Copy - Strangers In The Wind
12 Pet Shop Boys - Love Comes Quickly (Album Version)
13 Radio 4 - Dance to the underground
14 Smashing Pumpkins - Annie-Dog
15 Nirvana - Serve The Servants
16 On! Air! Library! - Bread
17 Manic Street Preachers - 4st 7 Lbs.
18 Devendra Banhart - Heard Somebody Say
19 Donna Summer - I Feel Love (12" Version)
To finish this story, a little explanation on the 'Effect' tracks... the influences in most songs are quite obvious, some are not. For instance, that Smashing Pumpkins track is not necessarily Queen oriented, but it's undeniable that the Pumpkins themselves, especially their earlier work, was very Queen influenced. Annie-Dog is just a very very beautiful song, one of their hidden gems. And the Nirvana song to me is just a Beatles song with lots of distortion.
Depeche Mode premiered (lipsynced?) the first single from their new Album Sounds Of The Universe on a German television show. Where else would they be bothered to do that, other than in the country where leather bondage is folklore? Judge for yourself, but i'm not getting excited at all by this song. Wrong seems an painfully appropriate title in that sense. Damn.
Here is the second song in this series of twelve, and quite a contrast to the instrumental track i shared with you last month. A full blooded dance track, complete with vocals. I kind of poured every trick i knew on my laptop into it, and i'm really pleased with it, especially the ending... which in itself, makes me want to write another song around those four chords. But i'm sure i'll come up with something completely new for March.
And for the first in quite a long time, i think they nailed it once again. A great pop single, it's official release date is somewhere in March, and this is all there is for now to listen to it.
The Fever Ray album doesn't sound radically different from the stuff Karin Dreijer makes with her brother in The Knife, but who would say that's a bad thing? The second single from her solo album is When I Grow Up, and another interesting video.
Some people have tried me to convince what a great band The Presets are, but to no effect until i saw the video for If I Know You... i suddenly got it. Very Pet Shop Boys this one. Like a zombie epidemic, young kids start dancing through the sunlit streets of LA. When cinematography is gorgeous, you don't need much more for a video.
This video for the first proper single of the new Doves record got me quite excited. A bit more laidback at first hearing than the stuff from Some Cities, but still as elaborate and full of sounds, plus... it's a nice song.
The nineties is the goddamn latest and hopefully last revival we'll be having in a long long time, so The Prodigy must have thought it was a good idea to make ugly, irritating as hell, high-pitched music once more. And they're quite right... at least their new album sounds a lot fresher than anything they've done for the past ehm... let's say... 15 years.
My favourite band-that-nobody-ever-heard-of are become more and more well known. Pitchfork posted the video for their new single Half Asleep, and in a few weeks time me and some similar minds will gather at the Paradiso in Amsterdam to watch the Deheza twins and that other guy live.
Ladytron have released a new single from their latest album Velocifero, and it's called Tomorrow. What's even more stunning than the video is the news that they're in talks of working with Christina Aguilera on her new album. Yes, i'm not kidding.
Last night, Radiohead in the shape of Thom and Jonny performed at the Grammy's ceremony. They were nominated in the category best album, lost that, but won the award for best alternative album. Big high-light of their appearance there was them performing 15 Step with the USC Marching Band. The sound on the video above is quite brutal, so i'm hoping for a clip with better audio quality. For now this will do though.
Update: Google published a video with better audio quality, and they cut off the sucking up that Gwyneth Paltrow did at the start. Probably she was forced to do that by Chris Martin.
I've been absolutely smitten with the new Junior Boys album called Begone Dull Care. It isn't due for release until the end of March, but somehow found it's way into my hands. Their previous album So This Is Goodbye is a bit more frigid and closed compared to this one, which i like a lot... i used to find it hard to really get in to their music. Those days are gone. If you like your electronic music really subtle poppy and distilled, this is the one.
Clockwork Orange meets the miracle of strip lights and rotating floors. To be honest, i've watched this video several times but never with the sound on. Let me know if it's any good.
The new Franz Ferdinand album has been playing almost non-stop today. So i decided to have a look at what the video for Ulysses, the first single, looked like. Well, quite nice. Here it is for you.
Patrick Wolf is planning to release his fourth album this year, and supposedly it's all been finished and turned out to be a double disc. It's called Battle.
Since The Magic Position - one of my dearest pieces of music of the last ten year - he has left his big budget record company and set up his own label. Along with that he has asked his fans to fund the costs of making and marketing the album through a system called Bandstocks. This is kind of old news i guess, but until now you only were able to participate if you were a UK resident.
But i suppose he realised there is probably more money up for grabs outside the UK. So, there's a part of his website were all is explained for international Patrick Wolf fans. Ofcourse, i immediately joined. And i urge anyone who is touched by Patrick's music, to think about investing in this project, where a little amount of dough gives you something much larger in return... not just all the exclusive privileges but also music that will last forever.
Last Friday, Of Montreal performed in Utrecht, and gave a show that i suppose lived up to their standards. All their well-known songs passed, except Disconnect The Dots, but that one's perhaps a bit outdated. The encore was entirely made up of covers - Smells Like Teen Spirit, Take Me Out and Suffragette City amongst others. Quite the entertainment, and it shed some light on what the Universe of Of Montreal is made of. For anyone who wasn't there, here's a remix of a track of Skeletal Lamping, An Eluardian Instance.
Thanks Erwin, for sending me the link to this YouTube page: New Order performs Blue Monday live in a studio in 1984. This was recorded somewhere during their North American tour of that year, according to the comments on the video. There's no band that can fuck up a song like that, and still make it seem like magic... in my universe anyway.
It's a strange thing with The Killers. I like their new album quite a bit, but there's something about it that's weird. I think it was the Pitchfork review that complained that Brandon Flowers was never singing about any real emotion... and that sums it up best. The same thing with this video for their new single Spaceman. Elaborate, luscious, in your face, extravagant, but never are you invited inside the Skull Tower that is Brandon's mind.
As mentioned in the previous post, i'm doing something special this year. I've had the idea of making an album of my own music for a few years now, and i always thought i'd realize that idea by taking a month off and locking myself up in a room with a guitar. How naive am i, right?
A couple of weeks before the end of 2008 the idea occurred to me i'd probably had a better chance of finishing that album, or any song at all, if i took this project on one song at once, with a limited amount of time to finish it. That way i'd be forced to make decisions and be satisfied with the end result before i'd get bored with it. And if i wouldn't overthink the music too much, there might be a chance i'd actually consider the end result finished at all. In the end, the worst idea is a good idea unused.
The means were at my hand already, i have a MIDI synthesizer and an electric guitar that i'm able to hook up to my MacBook through GarageBand. The mixtape group i'm managing at last.fm would be the perfect reason to create these songs for, since i'm supposed to deliver a mix once a month. What better way to package my music to a variety of listeners than using my songs on these mixes, right?
Well, i'm giving away every thought behind the project, but now it's time to let you hear some music. The track that was included on the January Mixtape is called Boy Delusion, it's an instrumental, and hovers somewhere between a really old New Order track and Nine Inch Nails mid 90's.
I've managed to wrap up this month's mixtape despite all the renewed blogging, music making, gaming, working, skiing and stuff. This month's theme was Darkness vs. Light. In short, that means your most depressing and most cheering music combined in one mix.
One of the more imaginative themes in a long time, i actually had little trouble compiling this. I picked some dark songs, some light songs and some songs about the state inbetween, the ghosts, the grey matter, dusk. Then sequenced them in a repeating grey/dark/light order. That was done in a couple of minutes really. The most work however, went in to the first track, which is a special project i'll be talking about a little later here.
Tracklist is like this:
Imaginary Gun - Boy Delusion
Suede - The 2 Of Us
Ladyhawke - Dusk Till Dawn
Kate Bush - Watching You Without Me
Julian Lawrence Gargiulo - Rachmaninoff's Prelude Opus 3 No. 2 in C-Sharp Minor
Army Of Lovers - Flying High
Kristin Hersh - Your Ghost
Christoph De Babalon - Dead (Too)
Pet Shop Boys - Delusions of Grandeur
I'm From Barcelona - Chicken Pox
Atari Teenage Riot - Death Star
The Human League - Love Action (I Believe in Love)
Really nice to see an extremely aggressive track like Death Star next to one of the most brilliant popsongs of The Human League. And i finally managed to fit in an Army Of Lovers song in a mixtape, hurrah for that!
Over at Stereogum, the cover of Joy Division's Transmission by Hot Chip is available for preview. The band recorded this very Kraftwerky version for WarChild's Heroes compilation. Ian Curtis must be dancing in his grave.
I've talked about her before, and my last.fm profile says enough, i'm quite infatuated with Ladyhawke lately. One of the boppiest song on her album is Dusk Till Dawn, which seems the perfect soundtrack to a sunny Spring day... so i'll have to hang on to that thought for a bit more.
Rex The Dog has a new video out. Instead of making you believe in some stop-motion animation, this video has a different take on that... quite refreshing! It seems so easy, but i'm not likely to try this at home.
The video above is the official promo, not an ironic parody, for Songsmith. It's a piece of software by Microsoft that automatically creates a musical accompaniment to a singer's voice. Unbelievable how only Microsoft can create such monstrosities in software. How it doesn't work is displayed in the following link: David Lee Roth's vocal for Running With The Devil is put through Songsmith.
Update: The world is watching in horror, luckily the people with the vocal tracks to classics such as Creep and I Heard It Through The Grapevine have tried out Songsmith on these songs. The result: all over YouTube. This is the music that plays in hell.
Ladyhawke is an artist that had to grow on me. The first thing i heard was Paris Is Burning, which sounded too easy and simple to be true, but proved to be the kind of song that sticks in your head. So i recently took notice of the album which became my latest infatuation. Her new video for My Delirium looks nice, i used in my last VJ gig anyway.
Since i revived this blog, i wondered if it would be a good idea to post more videos here. I'm always looking out for VJ material, and aren't the visually attractive bands usually making the most interesting music as well? At least it shows these groups have a. an original view on art and/or b. a load of money.
This Finnish girl band, Le Corps Mince De Franoise, which i find very confusing to even try to translate to English so i won't, has the music that works it's way into your mind like a icepick. In a positive way. They're performing in Utrecht next Saturday, the 17th, but i'm not in town. I'll be able to see them on the 10th of April at the Rauw Weekend in Tivoli.
Fever Ray is the solo-project that Karin Dreijer of The Knife finished recently, and a first single was digitally released last month. The music and video above inhabit the same dark corner of pop-music where her and her brother's band The Knife tend to stay. Something to keep myself patient until they finish their opera about Darwin (yes, you read that correctly).
Yes, i'm also continuing with the Infatuation series... to shine a spotlight on new and exciting music.
To kick off, Howling Bells are an Australian band who released their debut album in 2005, and since then moved to the UK. Their second album will be released in March, and is as yet untitled. There's also no serious touring schedule available yet, but i bet they'll perform at a club near you soon. Into The Chaos is the first single of that new album, and if you are familiar with names like Elastica, Nine Black Alps and the Long Blondes, you know if you'll like them or not.
In order of appearance:
Antony and the Johnsons - The Crying Light
Matt and Kim - Grand
Thom Yorke - The Eraser Rmxs
Franz Ferdinand - Tonight: Franz Ferdinand
Morrissey - Years of Refusal
PJ Harvey and John Parish - A Woman A Man Walked By
The Juan Maclean - The Future Will Come
Art Brut - Art Brut Versus Satan
And further more: those Depeche Mode, Chicks on Speed, Doves, Patrick Wolf and Placebo albums. And ever since Blur announced their reunition, rumors about a new album are floating around, but nothing is confirmed yet.
For anyone who missed it, i made a 2008 mix for the last.fm mixtape group. A proper mix, with all kinds of cross-fading, mashing up and stuff. I'm pretty pleased with it, especially the Crystal Castles/Portishead/Radiohead/Justice part, so check it out!
According to bestweekever.tv, the nicest music videos of last year. I just love the number one, Chris Dane Owens... Never heard of him, but i got to have all his records.
