My Morning Jacket

One of my most-clicked articles this year from SPIN.com listing some of Yim Yames' influencer tracks fueled the soul-fire and got my hands rubbing evilly. Eagerly. For the next release from Kentucky-reared My Morning Jacket. Circuital, dropping May 31 with Sauron-reminiscent album art, {...I may have just Middle Earth dorked myself outta here} continues to carry the soul torch back to rock n' roll. Start growing your hair out, because you're gonna want to wetdog shake your head to the majority of this album. There's moments of Pentecostal revival, Navajo war bellows, 50's doo-wop, shimmering waters of reverb and maybe even a little bit of a middle school social. Boys on one side, girls on the other.

FIRST pre-order THEN get the free release of title track "Circuital" here. NOW you can dig into the brassy wa-womp and gospel kindergarten growl of "black metal."

My Morning Jacket // Holdin On To Black Metal

Lucinda Black Bear

Lucinda Black Bear were gracious enough to come perform at the agency a few weeks back - not all places of work allow for lunchtime live performances. I know I'm lucky.
I know that till I'm here till 3:37am on a Friday night working on a deck to take with me to a consultant in Santa Monica.
And I now know to "save" said deck every five minutes so I don't lose the entire night's work before exporting that motherfather. goddamn server gremlins. Lucky indeed.


{performing in the Gallery space at The Martin Agency}

H'anyway - the plaintive, string-happy LBB {cello is mainstay with a frequenting violin} is fronted by curly-mopped Christian Gibbs, who's force of nature hair happened to be offset by a moustache at this particular setting. I appreciated it.
Surrounding himself with what initially appeared hypertrained studio musicians, the silo'd impression dropped off after they warmed into their set and Gibbs lobbed a joke or two. Opening with the featured track, any pessimism in the crowd dropped away as their intricately crafted, preternatural folk songs this side of rock established that they were the legit biz.

Lucinda Black Bear // Hand Bible

The Week's Once Over

Smack yo' mouth Ema
Bitterly soulicious Irma Thomas {Dustin Artz}
Oddbird Andrew Graham & Swarming Branch
Under the Covers: Rave on Buddy Holly tribute album

good luck and godspeed nursing your tequila hangovers.
xx, chirgo

Reading Rainbow - take a look, it's in a book

It's good, but a different kind of good. Not the kind of good stored on at least 9 VHS tapes in a familial basement. But it's close.

Philadelphia bf/gf songsters, Sarah Everton and Rob Garcia {green-leaning engineer by day}, throw their own sound of hollow garage psych into the beachcomber bucket. Their second release, Prism Eyes, has a couple rainbow glorious moments. With blastoff fast tracks and some catchy lyrics popped in, they make it easy. Granted - you're not going to do any soul-searching, and listening for too long might make you twist your finger in your ear. {read: caterwauling is not uncommon}. But if you're good with that, RR is full of reverb, skittles and sunshine - so you just feel good listening to it. And that's good. Bueno. Bien. Barf. Levar Burton.

Reading Rainbow // Wasting Time

Dominant Legs

A quickety-split trick to leave you with this Friday. SF native Ryan William Lynch leads with the right with his ramble-jangle reedy sound. Funky jazz with some carribean 80's flat-top, pop razor lines on the side over the ears. Slick it back with some melancholy LA Looks gel and head out the door. I could think of a handful of artists to relate him to, but the sound is oddly more of his own. How often does that happen? How often does a guy look far better with a flower over his ear than I do? Crap.

Dominant Legs // Just Silly Ones

To add fuel to my defeated flames, an old friend from ago turned me on to this bobo blog. It has stanky hepster written all over it. Maybe if I stop wearing babypowder fresh deodorant I can funk it up like them one day.

The Love Language

Really lovely album from The Love Language. I couldn't express my thoughts any more cleverly or eloquently than this post I found on their MySpace page taken from somewhere else:

"After three decades of sonic observation, you start to realize what really good music sounds like. You know what you like. You like the Beatles. You like Thin Lizzy. You like Stevie Wonder. The declaration, “You’ll love this band!” no longer arouses much excitement. You’ve heard thousands of bands, millions of songs, and find little incentive to embark on any audible adventure when “The Boys are Back In Town” has already been written. In terms of music, we download it, we burn it, but we rarely really listen to it. Perhaps I’m being selfish, but I listen to the Love Language because they write music I wish I’d written. I often picture myself playing these songs for some awkwardly shy, yet strikingly beautiful French girl on a jetty in Quebec, romantically duping her with my plagiarized sentiments. Dishonest, yet undeniably feasible. I could figure out those chords on guitar, and placidly convince some girl that these thoughts and feelings were my own. It’s not like trying to pass off “Blackbird” as an original composition. As you strum, you begin wishing that these poetically mundane moments were parts of your own past, until you realize that they are. That’s what the Love Language is to me: The modest declaration of the universal obvious. Songs written about apartments you’ve lived in and rotary phones that you’ve hung up. Although McLamb’s arrangements are typically overcast, each song reminds you of the towering trees that relish each falling drop. That there are winners and losers, but sometime tragedy makes the most beautiful story. After all, no one would remember the Titanic had it not sunk. That is the Love Language- the celebration of the sinking ship. Bon Voyage."

– Jon Kirby, Wax Poetics

Thanks Jon. I’ll give you credit this time, but next time it’s all me.

The Love Language // Nocturne

Forced Exposure

The IDM boat draweth nigh, along with a bunch of other stuff. For real, WRIR got this massive shipment in from my favorite music distributor of all time Forced Exposure.

I won't bore you with the details, but my love for Forced Exposure is so great that I as an audience member once made David Day, another audience member and at the time Forced Exposure's college radio contact, stand up in a room of maybe 200 at a CMJ panel discussion to talk about his company.

In the 80s and early 90s Forced Exposure was a zine published out of Boston (on newsprint), focusing on punk and obscure music as well as literature, with contributers like Lydia Lunch, Mission of Burma, and Sonic Youth.

Now they distribute music, ranging from rereleases of 1920s fiddle music from Baghdad to the entire Shitkatapult catalog to re-pressed Norwegian psychedelia from the 60s to free jazz and composers and ambient noise to English warehouse bangers. Look at their index of releases for March. Dazzling.

Basically half my career as a music director has been spent begging FE to send me stuff. Incidentally, they supply a lot of the electronic vinyl to Plan 9, too.

So anyway I am fulfilled, and guess what, I consider it both my job and my pleasure to share my musical joys with you. My next several entries will all draw from this boomshower of sweetness that arrived in the mail last week.

So there, too, music distro isn't dead after all, is it? Just shitty music distro. Thank you, Forced Exposure.

Mi Ami

Yes, I like this band for other reasons besides their name. Please.

More dirty freakouts.

But also, they have good taste in cities/locations. Yes, there is the choosing to name themselves after my favorite city of my entire life so far, but there's more.

They're hitting up Belfast on their European tour. And not only that, they're playing at the Menagerie, at the Ormeau Road on University Street. Shitty dive not without highly unprincipled paramilitary affiliations. They play Reggae and Soul and won't let you wear football colours inside, and it's the only bar I could reliably find Newcastle Brown, too. I have mad respect for a band who can manage to book the best seedy bar in a foreign city.
UPDATE: Belfast informant tells me that Menagerie was freed from paramilitary associations and is now owned by David Holmes. I guess that explains why the music got better. Informant assures that Menagerie is still way seedy.

But anyway, and perhaps even better, Mi Ami is coming to Richmond. (To the Triple.)

We are all travelling through space and time.



Pressure

Mi Ami plays with Thank You at the Triple on March 8th. Vaya con dios, dudes.

Hell

Hell has been active as a dj and producer for 30 years. He is also the founder and boss of the label International Deejay Gigolos (Miss Kittin & the Hacker, Dopplereffekt, Terence Fixmer, Fischerspooner, Tiga, Vitalic, Jeff Mills...).

This track I'm posting is from his new album Teufelswerk. He's divided it in two by the themes of Night and Day; Kruder of Kruder and Dorfmeister helped produce the Day half. Drops in late April and I completely cannot wait... there's a Hawkwind cover on it. Hell's last album, NY Muscle, is so so brilliant.

Hell is short for Helmut btw.


The Angst & The Angst Pt 2


Hell was German GQ's Man of the Year in 2003.

Bonus: In 2006 Hell also produced this track, which I love, for G Rizo.

Eye Wanna C U

tUnE-YaRdS

Eventually from Portland's Marriage Records. This chick, Merrill, was into anarchy puppets and Christmas music when she was younger. You can actually hear that in the music. She attended Smith and sang in a "brazen" all-female a capella group, too, and later went to Kenya, all of which you can also hear.

She recorded her whole album, BiRd-BrAiNs, on a hand-held voice recorder. She also booked her own tour all last year, which led to the thing with Marriage and this past month to opening for Beirut.



Sunlight

Titus Andronicus #2

McKay already posted about this band a couple of months ago, but I can't get this song out of my head. It's been there all week, the refrain, "all the pretty horses."


Brueghel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. 
Icarus is not the focal point of the image. Discuss.*


Upon Viewing Brueghel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

*Discussion topic courtesy of Paul Graham

Tobacco

Tobacco's myspace headline is, "Taking down PETA one member at a time." Yeah! But I think it might be because animal sacrifice is part of his religion. Leafy vines sprout from my brain and blossom into magenta fur. Backwoods Altar indeed.

Tobacco is one of the founding members of Black Moth Super Rainbow. His album Fucked Up Friends did very well on WRIR's charts this fall-- it's on the alt-hiphop label Anticon and includes a track with Aesop Rock.


He kind of looks like McKay.

Gross Magik

Palms

Palms is a duo-- the guy (Ryan Schaefer) lives in NY and the lady (Nadja Korinth) in Berlin. She also works as a correspondent for the BBC World News.

Their album It's Midnight in Honolulu came out on Rare Book Room this past fall. Ryan sings on some of the tracks, too, but I chose this one because Nadja's vocals make me think of Clov wanting to drown in Endgame by Samuel Beckett.



Das Lowenfell

Labradford

I just saw a copy of the newly published Vice Guide to Richmond and DC... Whoa. That's twice in one week that Richmond is recognized for its coolness by outsiders. First WFMU realizes it, and now this.

...Took em long enough. Hello, Vice-- Isn't the Richard Kern fanclub headquartered in Richmond? But onto my real reason for posting.

Labradford is probably The most totally unsung Richmond band.

Check out the catalog number of their 1993 Prazision LP... Krank 001. That's right, the first album released on Kranky was theirs.

Labradford also recorded a Peel Session in 1996.

Ah, what else. They toured all over the world and later one of the members developed the noisier experimental electronic project Pan•American, with releases on some other cool labels like Mille Plateaux and Fat Cat.

Oh yeah, and their music. Gorgeous. Hear for yourself.


The only decent-quality image I could find online, on the UK record store Boomkat-- the cover of Labradford's 1997 album Mi Media Naranja.

Accelerating on a Smoother Road

More info: http://www.brainwashed.com/labradford/

These New Puritans

These guys I think must be on the Freemasonry Tip. If not actual Masons. The album they put out last year on Domino is called Beat Pyramid. Yeah? If you listen to the whole thing, it's all basically about infinity and numerology, in a way that you kinda can't help but take seriously.

I've got my eyes open. If their next release mentions feathered serpents or Christopher Wren I will know for sure.

En Papier

Ponytail

Ponytail's album Ice Cream Spiritual reeks of mescaline and garage, but it’s a very modern smell after all. They're from Baltimore.


Sweaty, at Whartscape last year.

Celebrate the Body Electric (It Came from an Angel)

Ou Est Le Swimming Pool

I heard these guys on BBC's Rob Da Bank show last week. I think they might be in danger of blowing up on the alt-club scene this year: they have catfish moustaches and are rumored to be in the lineup for Barcelona's Sónar festival.


Dance the Way I Feel

Soulwax

London's Ether film fest premiered the Soulwax documentary, Part of the Weekend Never Dies, back in April. The DVD has just become available in the States.

Update: Pitchfork.tv is running an excerpt of the film this week.



Teachers


Tiga - Mind Dimension (Soulwax version)


Another Excuse (DFA Remix)

Crystal Stilts

Alight of Night

Joy Division on a surfboard.