who's excited

Sigur Ros, you bring me joy and sadness. One minute I am devastated at your New York show selling out instantly while the next I am bulgy-eyed at my computer as I read your new album is set to be released on June 23rd. You slay me with your slaps in the face and then your generous gifts. But I can't blame you...your new song, "Gobbledigook," is fucking awesome.

FURTHER: Sigur Ros has added a new show to their wild storming of North America (see ya in Guadalajara!), which will take place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Tickets are $18 and I am taking bets on how quickly they will sell out. If I manage to procure one myself, I'll be letting this blog know. Here are the important details:

June 17th, 7-11pm (tickets go on sale June 10th at noon)

Interestingly enough, Brooklyn Vegan has taken DOWN his post talking about this show. After reading the post and the subsequent comments, I've concluded the reasoning behind this was to have as few people as possible in the know, thus increasing the sell-out time from 15 seconds to 17 seconds. Oh and by the by, the show is 21+ so if you aren't old enough to get your drink on, you're not old enough to get your Gobbledigook on.

AND: Sigur Ros (just this morning!) has posted a link to stream their entire upcoming album right here.

I haven't and won't listen to it because I am a Sigur Ros purist. Or maybe I'm just a fool.

Sigur Ros - "Gobbledigook"
Continue reading...

four songs for summer so far

Damn right.

1. Okkervil River - "Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe"

Because what would summer be without terrible movies? I saw the new Indiana Jones a few nights ago, and it was suitably awful. Imagine Cate Blanchett slipping in and out of a bad Russian accent for two hours, and a climax that involves intra-dimensional space aliens. But as bad as it was, I enjoyed the hell out of it, because as Austin band Okkervil River point out in this song, if life's a movie, it's a boring, bland, and bad one. So for the summer we can put up with bombastic premises, silly plots, and laughable performances on the screen, because it's hard to find them anywhere else.

2. The Field - "Everday"

Because when my friend Alex and I were talking about ecstasy while driving in my car, he remarked, "I just associate doing drugs with this one moment in that song by The Field," and scrolled on my iPod to about the 2:30 mark on this track. He's absolutely right--this entire song sounds like doing interesting drugs. And what would summer be without interesting drugs?

3. The Magnetic Fields - "100,000 Fireflies"

Because I got a mandolin, and I play it all the time. I recorded a video of myself playing "Elephant Gun" on it and posted it on Fran's facebook wall. If you watch it, don't judge my singing too harshly--I had just woke up. Here's a picture of my friend Carl playing it in a park in my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. Not pictured: the stream by his feet, the mugginess of the air, the sixer of expensive beer with which we passed the afternoon. I chose this Mag Fields song for the opening and closing lines of the lyrics:

"I have a mandolin,
I play it all night long.
It makes me want to kill myself.

"Why do we still live here,
In this repulsive town?
All our friends are in New York.

Yeah.

4. Bun B [feat. Lil Wayne] - "Damn I'm Cold"

Because summer is the best time for dirty South hip-hop, and Weezy and Bun B both kill on this fabulous beat. If you listen to this a few times, don't be surprised if you find yourself mouthing the title lyrics after you roll out of bed past noon to greet another idle day.

Happy summer. Continue reading...

ok, ok, alright. ok.

So school is over and our burgeoning blogocrew has been busy settling into its summering ways.

And because of this the blog has begun to feel a little stagnant. I can't speak for everyone, but I know there have been a few causes for my own relative silence.

NUMBER ONE May 12th brought about the last episode of the radio show which Fran and I host, and with it went one of my main impetusi (that should be the plural of impetus) for hunting down new music, which usually consists of scouring the same gaggle of music blogs which are like this one but update much more often. That's not to say I feel no impetus to search out said music independent of the radio show's demands, but after months of running through that exhausting gamut week after week it's nice to be able to chill for a sec. Just the fifteen minutes I spent today catching up on the HRO posts I'd missed was enough to leave me in need of a nap and a good square meal.

NUMBER TWO I'm not going to any sexy fucking music festivals this summer because festivals suck and you're going to end up disappointed anyway because they're not worth the money and festivals always end up being less sploogerific than the sum of their splooge-tastic line-up parts and I don't want to hear about which ones everyone's going to so don't bother telling me. That said, I am going to the Roots Picnic but only because a) they decided to call it a picnic and not a festival and picnics have an infinitely better connotation in my mind than festivals and b) because Dan's getting me in +1.

NUMBER THREE The Islands album is pretty good but it's not great and I already clogged about them and I'm afraid of turning into a pogger that only Molly-flogs about KanYe, Islands, the Roots, and Vampire Weekend. Go listen for yourself or let Pitchfork tell you where it should be filed in your personal Dewey Decimal library of indie rock.

Enough about me. Here are three wonderful songs that I have been bumping these pasts weeks.

Television - Venus (buy)
Toumast - Kit Ayittma (buy)
Chairmen of the Board - Give Me Just a Little More Time (buy or just check out the album cover) Continue reading...

thank you and you're welcome

Thoughts on KanYe's Glow In The Dark Tour, which Dayna and I witnessed last Thursday night in Mansfield, MA to a capacity crowd of approximately 19,900 (note: I can admit when I make horrible estimates):

We got there at 8pm (EIGHT!) and missed two of the four acts (Lupe and N.E.R.D.).

Rihanna suuucks.

We have a hunch that one stipulation for coming on the GITDT was you had to let Yeezy choose at least one of your outfits. Because Rihanna looked like the red Power Ranger for a few songs.

By the looks of the one-long-sleeve-one-short-sleeve-hoodie-with-a-completely-useless-bulletproof-shoulder-padish -thing-over-a-t-shirt-tied-90s-style-around-the-waist ensemble Yeezy was sporting, he's been watching a few too many Mad Max movies lately.

No one but Mr. West set foot on the smoke-covered surface of undulating Moonscape craters during his entire set. Even his band, which he introduced during the encore, was somewhere backstage and only shown on the video screen.

The Mansfield, Mass crowd would've made you laugh if you weren't already crying and throwing up a little bit.

Things we already knew about Ye: he's a pretty big nerd; he's by no means adept at the craft of acting; he has a big ego. Despite all this, the space-travel story line which runs through the duration of the show was palatable and at times funny and endearing. Between songs KanYe exchanges lines of clicheed Star Wars-esque dialogue with his almost-human spaceship computer system "Jane," which are often laughable in their stiltedness. She provides him with video of two gilded vixens to help him fight his loneliness after crash-landing on a deserted planet, a plot twist which coincides with his performance of "Gold Digger." And, once Jane reminds Yeezy that he can single-handedly power himself back home because he "is the brightest star in the universe," the first few bars of "Homecoming" begin.

Music-wise, it was everything you would expect from His Brightness. For well over an hour the man ran, danced, and bounced his way around the stage with a seemingly infinite energy supply, something which isn't easy to find these days buh dum chsh. Even with the acoustics being what they are at a venue like the Tweeter Center, Ye and the 7-piece band created an impressively full and pleasing sound, and relied only minimally on canned samples. Highlights were "Flashing Lights," "Gold Digger," and "The Good Life," during which KanYe forgot to replace every city name in the song with the tour's current city, singing, and I'm not making this up, "It feel' like Philly--Boston...(chuckles)..."

The Times summed it up pretty well with their headline: "Kanye West's Ego-Fueled Hip-Hop Sci-Fi Space Odyssey."

An amazing number of copies of KanYe's book of "advice," Thank You and You're Welcome, were given out on the way out of the show. It is a fun keepsake to own but not worth the $10 he's selling it for on his website.

Anyone else see the show? Continue reading...

for four dollars a gallon, you can suck my cock

Could someone please tell me why Dizzee Rascal is wearing a Phillies hat and a Yankees bomber? OH right. HE'S BRITISH.

I know--I already posted about El-P. But came into my life again, this time with his British counterpart, the foul-mouthed and ugly-sticked Dizzee Rascal. So I will tell you about their performance at The First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia.

I hope I'm not the only one who has no idea what Dizzie is saying....EVER. If there is anyone out there who can understand him, please get in touch so that I can make sure he's not talking about how ugly I am and how stupid this blog is. What is really sad is that I'm British and his blabbering is still lost on me completely. But that's not all that makes Dizzee...well, Dizzee. He's energetic, thuggish and can really put on a show, with the help of his equally thuggish accessory rapper who will never have a name. Maths + English was just released off of Definitive Jux (pop quiz: who owns this label?) and it's not that great, to be honest, but it's got something that a lot of new rap/hiphop doesn't have and that's ingenuity--and no, it's not just because of his accent. The Streets were doing this far before this young buck hit the big time.

Though the album doesn't do much for me, I will tell you that his live shows are fun and interactive, and that is always hard to achieve at a rap show, and especially one on the night of an "important" Flyers game. His stage banter seemed witty, though don't hold me to that fact since I only picked up a few words here and there--those words ranging from "MAKE SOME NOISE" to "LONDON-TOWN" to "DA HOOD". Either way, his songs are genuinely funny and have a new, dance-y and playful sound. How could you resist that little smile he gives the crowd, which seems to be a smile of commiseration: "Hey, Dizzee, the hood is rough, you know?" "YEAH--blah blabh albhlabhlalbhalhblah nonsense."

Okay, I know a lot of this blabber sounds sarcastic but I will say seriously that if I could recommend one aspect of Dizzee Rascal's whole package (balls or dick?), I would say the live show is your best bet, especially if he's opening for El-P who can never be a disappointing performer and it's a fact.

Big ups to Jedd. Continue reading...

the field and !!! on pitchfork.tv

So I have this thing about The Field, the Swedish electro musician and sorta-flagship act of Kompakt Records. I absolutely love his album from last year, "From Here We Go Sublime", but I can't ever listen to it before midnight. It's my perpetual soundtrack to all-nighters spent staring at a word processor, or sometimes just my ceiling, because it's so easy to get lost in the repetitive motion of any of his samples. To see what I mean, listen to this, a remix of another up-and-coming electro-Swede, Familjen.

Familjen - "Hög Luft" [The Field Remix]

For comparison, here's the original "Hög Luft" track. It's pretty vastly different--The Field's aesthetic is entirely his own. Granted, there are occasional shades of the sampling style of El Guincho's "Alegranza" or Panda Bear's "Person Pitch", The Field is always decidedly electronic. Here's one of my favorite tracks from his album "From Here We Go Sublime":

The Field - "A Paw In My Face"

Browsing through pitchfork.tv tonight, I ran across this new addition that has The Field laying down one of his trademark endless grooves (itself a remix of a song by fellow Swedes The Honeydrips [Jesus and Mary Chain reference, I guess] according to pitchfork, but it's a Field remix so you'd never be able to tell otherwise) while the boys in !!! lay down some really amazing noise on top of it, all traditional-style and shit. If you're looking for a break from writing a term paper, or are just an insomniac, I'd highly recommend you give this clip some attention.



Here's the link, if you'd prefer to watch it there.

~ evan Continue reading...