Even if you're already getting a bit tired of listening to "Two Weeks" off of Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest(though I, for one, am not), I'd still strongly encourage you to watch this GORGEOUS animated fan video made by some fella named Gabe Askew. I've watched it so many times today I'm surprised I didn't break the Internet. Someone had the time, will, and ability to make this for free and in his spare time, and to that I say, "YES." Love, lurve, squee...!
Ugh. So. I had a fairly lengthy post in mind for today, but then I went and waaaay overdid it at the gym; consequently, I haven't been able to do much more than laze around my house, whining like a little punk. I blame Beth Ditto. Working out while listening to "2012" gave me the very false notion that my abs could handle the most terrible trial I put them through today. Lessons were learned, friends. Lessons were most certainly, most painfully, most nauseatingly learned...
(Please note that this video is the best of what was available to me, and although the sound quality is surprisingly good for a bootleg, I really wish it zoomed in closer on the band. If you haven't seen it, then trust that watching Beth Ditto work a stage is a marvelous thing.)
I simply cannot get enough of Iron and Wine's cover of New Order's "Love Vigilantes." You can find it on Around the Bend - a brilliant collection of previously unreleased singles and b-sides that came out a few months ago. The whole album is lovely, but this song in particular is the bee's knees. Oh, la.
Although I wasn't so much sold on Bowerbirds' newest album, Upper Air, when I first heard it, I did peg it for a grower album. (Meaning, if I listened to it enough, I'd realize how good it really is.) And after many, many hours in the air, on a bus, and waiting in airports, I was allowed the time to realize that my initial speculations were correct. I listened to Upper Air almost exclusively during my recent travels, and now I like it quite a little bit, "Northern Lights" in particular. Enjoy:
I've been enjoying It's Frightening - White Rabbits' sophomore album - quite a bit recently, so when my husband discovered they were playing a teeny tiny venue, that my buddy's band was opening, and that the cover charge was negligible, you can understand that we jumped at the chance. I wasn't really sure what to expect of them live so my expectations were slightly tempered, however, they rawked and I was exceedingly pleased.
You don't get a full appreciation for how percussively raucous this band is until you see them perform. Most of the time they play with two drummers and at one point they use as many as three, lending them this pulsing, vaguely tribal sound that I really dig. You'll get the general idea of this from watching their performance on David Letterman, however, imagine listening to this in a space only slightly larger than my living room. My ears! They ring!
Know why these people are so happy? Because they got help making a fancy fresh mixtape for their 4th of July party from the brilliant bloggers over at Don't Forget to Dance!
If you too want to be happy, then I suggest you drop on by. We'll be celebrating Independence Day all week long with some block-rockin' beats, eloquent eloquence and patriotic zeal. And remember - freedom isn't free. It takes bravery, firm resolve, a minimum of seven American flags, and a shit-ton of dancing.
Too many people will probably remember him for the hot mess he became, but I have one very fond memory of learning to moonwalk in my friend's driveway, another of listening to a vinyl copy of Thriller in my cousins' basement, and countless of dancing to his songs at weddings, parties, in bars, and while cleaning my house, and those are the moments I recalled upon hearing of Michael Jackson's passing.
Above everything else, he was a phenomenal entertainer and I'm really going to miss his crazy/talented ass. And so, in remembrance, moonwalk with me:
Recently, it seems as if there's a constant stream of '90s bands releasing new albums: Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth, and now Sunny Day Real Estate. Personally, I really don't need another Dinosaur Jr album and although I've always appreciated Sonic Youth I've never really been much of a fan, but I must admit that the prospect of another Sunny Day Real Estate album makes my 20-year-old emo heart do a little flip. The Rising Tide was practically the soundtrack of my early 20's; that is, until some heartless bastard broke into my car and absconded with it. And far be it from me to begrudge a man his 'music to sit and be sullen to,' but I would have happily burned him a copy if he needed it so badly.
Consequently, if I know anything it is this: when a girl's emo music is stolen, the days ahead loom quiet, long and dark...
Besides being a more consistent blogger, I've spent much of my first week of summer vacation giving my house a deep and thorough cleaning - tackling nooks and crannies that haven't been cleaned in at least a year, if not much longer. And in the words of Captain Walter E. Kurtz, "I've seen horrors..."
So maybe it hasn't been too terribly pleasant, but wadding in the muck and the grime has given me a chance to catch up on some new music I've been saving but haven't had the time to give a close listen to. In fact, I've sampled so many new things that I'm thinking about making this a weekly event (though we'll see how that goes...).
Anyway, one of my favorite new bands is Slow Club. I've already written about them once over here, but I think they're so nice I've decided to post on them twice. They're British, fun, a touch quirky, and sound a little like Tilly and the Wall. So, really - what's not to love?
The thing about growing up listening to Detroit radio is that you manage to grow up listening to Canadian radio as well. They're pretty much interchangeable. And since my favorite local station beamed out from both Detroit and Windsor, at sixteen I counted The Tragically Hip - a Canadian band 75% of America has never even heard of - as one of my favorites. Like many rock bands I enjoyed in my youth, I sort of forgot about them once I discovered Radiohead, but I had cause to dust off my copy of Day for Night when my husband came home with a free pair of tickets to see The Hip tonight.
Unfortunately, we can't go - Nate's heading out of town and I fear I'm not self-actualized enough to go to a rock concert by myself - so in lieu of seeing them live in 2009, I started digging through some old videos of them live in 1995. John's got a good one of them performing "A Nautical Disaster," and here's them performing another one of my favorites, "Grace, Too." Honestly, I didn't expect these songs to hold up so well fifteen years later, but they do. Damn it.
I don't know about you, but all this beautiful weather puts me in a mood for singing, and this song is my perfect storm: one of my all-time favorite songs sung by one of my all-time favorite voices. As far as I'm concerned, "Feeling Good" is one of those sacred things only a precious few people should ever even consider attempting, and Shara Worden does more than do it justice. She annihilates it.
Word is that Worden likes to end her shows with this song but had never recorded it, so when Aaron and Bruce Dessner of The National were collecting songs for their Dark Was the Night compilation - the proceeds of which are going towards AIDS awareness - this song was one of the ones they knew they had to get. Thankfully, she agreed to donate it, which means that I can now listen to it whenever I want and often on a loop. (Sorry, husband.)
Hi, doves. Allow me to be honest with you. For the past few weeks I have been positively SLAMMED at work, hence the blog has suffered. (Of course, so have my eating habits, sleep, commitment to physical fitness and ability to read for pleasure, but you don't really care about those things, I fear.) I'm beginning to see the light at the tunnel but a true reprieve is still a few days away, so trust that while I may remain a bit distant for the time being that it is merely temporary.
In the meantime, here's the prettiest thing I've heard all week (and no, it ain't Susan Boyle). I'd never heard of Other Lives prior to this video, but I'm glad they're on my radar now because, lo, they are lovely. Enjoy.
Last night I saw Andrew Bird perform at the Michigan Theater, and thus I got to cross another thing off of my "things I must see before I die" list. I had heard that he was amazing live and so had prepared myself to be impressed, but I ended up being BLOWN AWAY by his live show. I took Mom and Dad with me, and Dad remarked that it was one of the more interesting shows he had been to (a complement) and that Bird was "Dylanesque" in the way that he reworked and rebuilt some of his standard songs - performing something that sounded like, at best, a close cousin to the original album track. (And since, unlike me, dad has actually seen Dylan in his heyday, I will trust that the comparison is apt.)
But besides the way he rearranged his own songs (which, to me, sounded pretty good to begin with, but transcendent after they were rebuilt), his performance technique of making live recordings of violin runs or snatches of whistling which he would then play on a loop while layering vocals and guitars and glockenspiel runs and different violin runs and more whistling on top of if all was what made the experience so exciting. Watching Bird perform live is like watching a painter make art from a blank canvas - one can't help but feel as if you're watching a truly gifted artist at work.
Anyway, although his performance of "Tables and Chairs" is uncharacteristically simple and straightforward, and thus not really the best song to illustrate anything I've just said, it was one of the highlights of the evening for me. It's an older song but has always been one of my favorites, and the way he sings so earnestly about Heaven - describing it as a place with pony rides and dancing bears and a wide assortment of snacks - never fails to make me break out into a big, goofy grin. I like it. I hope you like it too.
Someone named "iri5" has a photo set up on Flickr of these awesome pieces of art that s/he has created from old cassette tapes, and even if they weren't portraits of some of my favorite musicians of all time, I'd probably still think they're pretty rad.
From top to bottom, we have cassette tape portraits of The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Ian Curtis (from Joy Division) and, my personal favorite, Robert Smith. Aren't they crazy awesome? I want one for my house!
Now, if s/he would just do Morrissey's portrait....
Since I'm still neck-deep in painfully poorly written rough drafts, I don't really have the finger mobility required to type very much at all. Thus, today you're getting get a song. Alright? Alright...
Fanfarlo is one of my favorite new bands, and I think you might like them too. They're London-based and sound a bit like David Byrne channeling Arcade Fire, so if that's the sort of thing that sounds interesting to you, then you might want to check them out. The album's called Reservoir, and it's fast become one of my favorite LPs to come out this year. It's too cool for school, kids. Observe:
Seeing as Hymns for a Dark Horse was released way back in 2007, I am embarrassingly late to jump on the Bowerbirds train, but after one of my fellow DFTD bloggers posted on them I promptly grabbed the album and haven't really wanted to listen to much of anything else since. They sound a bit like the love child of Andrew Bird and The Decemberists, conceived while Danny Elfman's score for Beetlejuice played in the background. So, yes, they're absolutely my bag...
I've always been more aware of Ben Kweller than I've ever been much of a fan; however, his newest album, Changing Horses, has changed all that around. He hails from Texas, so I suppose it's not too much of a surprise that he'd eventually try his hand at making a country album. The surprising thing is that I LOVE it. ...Me. The girl who hates most anything even remotely twangy. Who ever would have thunk it?
Anyway, Gram Parsons would be proud is my larger point.
One of my fellow bloggers over at Don't Forget to Dance pointed me in the direction of the video for Oren Lavie's "Her Morning Elegance," and it's just too fun to not spread it around a bit more. Enjoy.
