listen

If you haven't heard the folksy yet rock-twinged sound of Destroyer yet, you should soon.


or you can right here.

what now?

Although I was not able to confirm this on any site, it seems Tapes 'n Tapes new song "Manitoba" was heard on the OC twice last nite. My information comes from iguessimfloating, so go there for more. The record is barely out and they're already on that horrible show. Either credit is due to the show's music director or something's fishy.

listen to Manitoba.

take the indie test (or don't because taking it wouldn't be indie).

worth buying

Now that you know how bad Lovedrug is, here are my current picks for the best of whats new-or at least new to me.



1. Tapes 'n tapes- gorillavsbear has been touting this great band for a while and their most recent release, the loon has recieved a Best New Music Distinction from pitchforkmedia, that's a pretty big deal. Samples available on their homepage.

2. The Research- this UK-based three piece play some really nice synth-based almost new wave pop. The two girls and one guy all take turns singing. These songs are just basic, easy going pop for everyday listening. You'll like it. I found them on saidthegrammaphone, but the band has an incredible site with a nice music player. listen to "Lonley hearts still beat the same" first.



3. Grizzly Bear- Although this album came out in 2004, it's still great. This Brookly group can be filed under almost freak-folk with a twinge of electronic. The 2004 release "Horn of Plenty" is full of flute, heavy drums, far away singing, experiemental sounds and antique guitar chords. I love this record. There is even a full remix disc. It's the disc everyone should be listening to, but I'd be so mad if they were. . .
4 tracks at their myspace page.

not so good

The band Lovedrug has been getting a bunch of press lately. Iguessi'mfloating has some free tracks today from them. They sound like Radiohead before they knew what they were doing, which I guess if a compliment, or like the Doves if they had only half the talent. They play the kind of songs, over-sung quasi emo ballads about the healing process and people being angels that I don't think are cool anymore, I did when I was 19 or 20. I can understand why Lovedrug is popular, but they aren't doing anything interesting. If you like Copeland, Mae (whom Lovedrug is touring a number of Christian colleges with . . .hmmmmmm?)then you'll like Love drug. At least check out the free songs and judge them for yourself.

free and nice

Prefix magazine has some some nice mp3s available right now. They may be those time sensitive ones which stop working after a while after downloading, but they're good.

If you haven't heard Mylo yet, you're really late to catch on and have been missing out. He's making what might be the best electronic music out right now-and it's Scottish, not French. . hard to believe, I know.

The song by The Joggers is really nice as well. It's sound like The Strokes forgot about melody and are a little drunk.

local talent

Nate Boylan, aka DJ Freddy Boylan, has been putting some serious work into his production and his mixes are really beginning to take shape. He's truly a breakbeat, trance, hardhouse addict. I really like to spastic and heavy nature of his mixes. Check out a whole bunch of his stuff here.

He also loves donkeys and donkey basketball.

mainstream credit

The incredible Appleseed Cast of Lawrence, Kansas finally recieved credit from mainstream media in a article on MSNBC. There are three songs available for streaming on the same page.

must read

Pitchforkmedia.com has an article describing Best Buy's new $7.99 sale of indie artists such as Arcade Fire and Danger Doom, it's cause and implications. A good read for those who want to keep local records shops afloat.

J Dilla/Jay Dee (updated)

listen to more samples here at NRP.org and listen to a podcast remembering him there as well.

I'm late to catch on here, but at least I did finally. The late producer/artist James Yancey created some of the most original and smoothest hip-hop to come out of not just Detroit, but anywhere. This post is much too short for the credit he is due and I'll add more later but for now check out his myspace page for 4 tracks and buy his last release "Donuts". The second track "Workinonit" is truly a work of musical art.

-His page on the great Stones Throw Records site.
-Pop Matters article
-massive free mp3 tribute on hiphopmusic.com

hot chip

Now that I've decided to focus the music section of Silverwagon on electronic and its many forms, the London-based, new wave, dance rock group Hot Chip seems like a good start. (As well as the fact that they're the top post on a bunch of other music blogs recently.)

Let's start with the name. As soon as I read it I thought of chip beef on toast. When I think of chip beef on toast and then think of British electronic music, I laugh. So then I checked them out on itunes and I laughed at them again, this time because the album cover art work made me think of a person with a emotionally devestating IQ attempting to build a keyboard and then I thought of chip beef on toast and kept laughing. So I played some samples. . .
Hot Chip makes really authentic electronic music. They don't make any really memorable music, it's just fun to listen to. As I'm listening to No Fit State, hearing one singer repeat "I'm in no fit state," while the other lists reasons why he's in no fit state in a sort of call and response thing, I keep thinking: I hope this song keep going for around an hour. This is all sung over a droaning synth-pop keyboard and drooping base line, but it makes sense. Hot Chips songs would make the perfect soundtrack to a dream about playing video games at a friend's house afterschool in fifth grade. Sitting there on the couch with a bag of doritos open, shoes off in dim light. The clicks and gliding pops of Hot Chip's songs and their joking lyrics are the right sounds for listening alone or with a few friends-this isn't really dance floor fare.
Joe Goddard and Alexis Taylor write this on their myspace page in an effort to explain their music. . .

"we started making music because we were bored with alot of other music. We loved the idea of 'pop' music but not the people who make 'pop' music now. We loved Phil Spector and the Beach Boys, Kraftwerk and Robert Wyatt, timbaland and Madlib, Brian Eno and Devo, Anti-Pop Consortium and Aphex Twin, Will Oldham and Royal Trux. We decided to make our band different from most electronic music by playing everything live- no backing tracks, no computers. We decided to make our music different from most indie music- 4 keyboards and a drum machine, not all guitars. We decided to write folk songs and record them on old synthesizers. We decided to sing honest words about food and love, and try to make people laugh the way you laugh at richard pryor in the same song too. We made one album in Joe's bedroom for Moshi Moshi records, then we made another album for EMI still in Joe's bedroom (this one is coming out next spring). We used a computer to make them but almost everything on them was played by us with a keyboard on our lap whilst sitting on the bed."

On their most promising song, Over and Over, Hot Chip sings "Over and over. . .like a monkey with a minature cymbal, the joy of repetition really is in you." That sums it up, but the repetition is infectious.

-4 tracks available on Hot Chip's myspace page
-2 more at Palmsout blog

"Hot chip will break your legs, snap off your head."

new tune

The Appleseed Cast has posted another new track on their myspace page.

live Jim White+Handsome Family

I've spent a little time in Florida and a little time in Tennessee-that's the extent of my experience with the South. (Unless you count the Roots reruns that I've been catching lately on PBS around 2am.) After seeing Florida native Jim White and New Mexico transplants, The Handsome Family play Sunday night at The Ark in Ann Arbor, I have a new appreciation for all the ghosts and history that make up the South's swampy, sticky back story. All of these musicians play truly, I mean really, stripped down county. When I use the word country I'm not referring to "put another nickel in the jukebox and we'll do another Kansas City Shuffle", I mean "let's sing about abandoned trailers and killing your lover because it's only human."

Jim White's music is simple. Basic 3/4 or 4/4 country drum beats back his very simple guitar lines and chords often affected with tremolo and deep reverb. He sings his past really. White grew up in the Pentecostal community of Pensacola, Florida, worked as both a surfer and a model in Italy for a short time and then began writing music. In a 2000 interview White shed some light on his background and why his lyrics all come from the place he calls home.

Well you see, it's a deeper culture for those viewing it on the outside, but to the people participating in it, it's simply living. That's different. You don't notice the gems as much I think when you're caught up in the midst of it. You can't notice how pretty a river is... if you're 6 feet under the water drifting along. If you’re flying in an airplane over it and you look down, you say 'what a magnificent river.' Well I never got a chance to say 'what a magnificent river' until I left home and traveled all over the world and then, from a great distance, looked at my home and thought
"God what a beautiful place, let me go back there." And now that I'm back there, I appreciate it. But I don't know that the people who are here really think about it much.

His live performance was an equal mix of music and storytelling. While watching White on stage I couldn't help but think of the VH1 program storytellers how the rather intimate concert would have made a perfect episode. Between songs White would drift into stories ranging from where he was when he wrote the last song or why other folk musicians might look down on him for using a "Japanese orchestra" to loop guitar lines and vocals instead of using a full band. Whenever a story would make its way into a song, the room would take on the feel of an abandoned car on a dusty southern highway with the radio still on and the driver's door open. As I have seen few folk musicians play, White's performance was a rich experience, leaving me with a sense that I'd visited his home for a short walk down a path he knew well, walking along behind him with everyone else in the room.

Imagine any bar south of the Indiana border. Imagine then someone dropping some coins in the jukebox and a few bars of twangy guitar pouring into the room . . . and then a male voice sings, "This is why people OD on pills and jump from the Golden Gate Bridge. Anything to feel weightless again. Those poor, lost indians-when the white men found them, most died of TB; the rest went insane. In our motel room you're drinking Slice and gin, reading Moby Dick on the other bed." Imagine that and you're thinking of The Handsome Family. Husband and wife duo Brett and Rennie Sparks formed in Chicago and have been releasing some of the most basic yet deeply disturbing and comical country music since 1995. In honesty, there's really noting interesting about the music, it could be created rather easily with an old guitar and drum machine. Many of the songs do include a steel pedal guitar which when added to the live performance gave the room the feeling of old cabin with a kerosene lamp lightly burning.

The Handsome Family's talent shines in their lyrics, written mainly by Rennie, a former fiction writer. Most of the songs revolve around the common themes of death, murder, drug overdose, excessive drinking and dead animals. These off themes, when set to basic country western music create such a strange feeling that I couldn't help but stare at the musicians as they played and sang thinking, "they travel around the country singing this stuff and what the hell does their house look like?" I have a feeling I was not the only wondering these things. It's as though being drunk and evicted at the same time would be a perfect few hours spent prior to seeing The Handsome Family play live-and I guess that's why I enjoyed it as much as I did. Looking over the tops of ten or so beer bottles in a cold dark room in February next to some good company watching a grown man sing, "I had nothing to say on Christmas day when you threw all your clothes in the snow. When you burnt your hair, knocked over chairs, I just tried to stay out of your way. But when you fell asleep with blood on your teeth, I got in my car and drove away," was truly a good cap to a winter weekend. Yeah, their jokes got old and I could play songs just as well, but dog-gone-it, they're just such interesting people.

Music is often more about a musician's personality, history and a specific place, whether that place is where you fall in love or get sick on too much wine. The back story the concert told was well-worth the long drive and the $7.50.

I haven't posted any free samples because you should really buy music from these two truly original artists.

In These Times

Kurt Vonnegut's newest collection of essays, A Man Without a Country, published in September is also available through the In These Times magazine website. Vonnegut is also the Senior Editor of the magazine. His articles are a biting criticism of modern America and only traces of optimism are evident. Written by a man who has critically observed the past 60 years, he essays are engaging though worth a look. . .here's an excerpt.

Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn’t the gold standard that they want to put us back on. They want something even more basic. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard.
-Blues For America

A larger excerpt from the Sunday Herald.

The Knife

When a Swedish electronic group puts out a record with song titles such as High School Poem and Vegetarian Restaurant, you can bet they'll either be horrible or next week's soundtrack. The Knife will be my soundtrack.

As is the usual case here, thanks to better music blogs (gorillavsbear/saidthegramophone) than this floundering mess I've got one of the best free mp3s I found in a while. This Swedish group is making electronic that music touches a nerve a lot of other groups don't know exists. Imagine Xiu Xiu collaberating with Styrofoam to write songs people could dance to, then throw in some soft trance sounds and lulling swedish voice and that's The Knife.

Give Heartbeats a listen and see what I mean. A link to the Jose Gonzalez cover of the track is here.
Then head over to the Rabid Records site and check out a bunch of samples from other albums including the already sold out Silent Shout record.

Banksy

British grafitti artist Banksy has done some cool stuff.


I've also just discovered Coke machine glow. . .a not so pretentious Pitchfork.

Free Ted Leo + the Pharmacists

I realize they have been releasing material since 1999 and I'm just now discovering them. Yeah, that's pretty sad. They're pretty great though. There able to mix a rough punk sound with some great melody.



Pitchfork's Robert Mitchum had this to say regarding the band's 2003 Hearts of Oak album. . .
"Eschewing pretentious unpretentiousness for unguarded passion, strict '77-'82 influences for the classic rock stop on the FM dial, calculated instrumental inadequacy for guitar solos that are less technical flaunting (looking at you, Malkmus) than skillful, noisy exorcisms, Ted Leo makes a sound filled with so much authentic abandon that the British mags probably can't handle it."

check out a bunch of free mp3s here and and the current tour stops here.

Live

American Analog Set

I've stumbled across Bradley's Almanac and his great collection of live mp3s. He records everything right in the crowd with a Sony minidisc recorder-he even takes some pretty nice pictures.

I highly reccomend the Explosions in the Sky set and the American Analog Set set.
click on the names to go right to the download page.

Each set is only available for short time though. . .

No mowers

Read this Fast Company article describing why a CEO told Wal-Mart not to sell his products.

The man who said no to Wal-Mart.

Like music. . .?

checkout the great concert poster selection at The Poster List.
real cheap too.

The wait begins

The Appleseed Cast (myspace page) is set to release their newest album in March, but thanks to I Guess I'm Floating we've got a preview and it sounds great. Head over to the blog to hear two new tracks as well as an amazing array of free indie mp3s. .

Also, you've got to watch the preview for this new documentary by Eugene Jarecki title Why We Fight.
It's scheduled for relase tomorrow likely in NY and LA.
It looks incredible.
Read the interview with the film maker on the offical website as well-very insightful.