Ugly Music for Beautiful People

Voice of the Seven Woods is UK guitarist/sitarist/anything-with-a-string-ist Richard Tomlinson. This is his debut LP (on Twisted Nerve/B-Music). He’s going for a psych-folk thing here, but takes that genre and reads it very broadly. There is a lot of middle eastern & Indian influence and his guitarwork reminds me a lot of Pentangle, particularly the John Redbourn side. He also throws in some storming electric guitar just so you don’t get to comfortable. It’s largely instrumental, but he does sing on a few tracks. And he has a delightful voice. Despite touching on a lot of styles, Tomlinson doesn’t genre hop. They are all pulled together into a cohesive album. And an album that sounds entirely modern even as it reaches into the past. This is one of my favorite albums to come out so far in 2007.

He’s also going out on tour with Prefuse 73 and will be hitting my turf (Detroit’s Magic Stick) on November 30th. I’m already there.

Voice of the Seven Woods - Sand and Flames
Voice of the Seven Woods - The Fire in My Head

Buy It

Nico Muhly is a young composer from Providence, Rhode Island. He went to Columbia and Julliard and has worked with Philip Glass, Bjork, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Antony. Speaks Volumes is his debut release and is a delight. Like indie-classical peers Jóhann Jóhannsson and Max Richter, Muhly is influenced by 20th century classical titans like Philip Glass, Steve Reich and John Adams, but has a sense of melodicism that makes his work more accessible than his forbears but without losing any of its intellectual heft.

“Clear Music” is the first track from Speaks Volumes and is for cello, celeste and harp.
Nico Muhly - Clear Music

The Future of the Left are the 2nd band to rise from the corpse of McLusky. For those not in the know, Mclusky are the best band ever. Or at least the best Welsh punk band ever. Or somewhere between those two statements. Shooting at Unarmed Men was the band bassist Jonathan Chapple of Mclusky started. They were pretty good. Future of the Left is guitarist Andy “Falco” Falkous, drummer Jack Egglestone, and Kelson Mathias, who comes from the also-defunct band Jarcrew (who I have never heard of). And they are fucking awesome. They aren’t too far from Mclusky, ‘natch. But Malthias adds a noisier more aggressive sound and the band is also writing tighter catchier songs.

There are so many good songs that I really had trouble picking one to post. Seriously, this album might be as good as anything Mclusky ever did. The one I’m feeling the most right now is called “Manchasm”. It has the line “Mark Foley was right” repeated many times, but I’m not sure if that is a reference to Republican U.S. representative and star of page-fucker-gate Mark Foley.

Future of the Left - Manchasm

Curses is their debut album and will come out digitally on 9/25 and will be in stores via Too Pure on 10/9.

Neil Young and Willie Nelson

Apologies to Luminfire

One of my favorite things about Art Brut is how they were simultaneously a parody of an indie rock band and an incredibly great indie rock band. Well, Los Campesinos have just done that for indie pop.

Some dude named Dan Meth has just done our generations version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”.

Holy shit, the Hood Internet may have just dropped their best mashup to date. “Bros Before Whoas” takes Black Rob’s classic “Whoa” and mashes it with Panda Bear’s “Bros”. What ABX of the Hood Internet did with the owl hoot… My god, he has single handedly justified the entire history of the mashup.

I’ve had many arguments about the Hood Internet with my friends. They produce a lot of content, and I don’t always like their mashes, but I feel they have brought the mashup back to life. They do exactly what I, and a lot of the internet, want to hear: indie rock with rap on top. They’ve taken the mashup completely away from the dance music culture that spawned it and taken it out of the club and put it where it belongs, the computer speakers and headphones of people slacking off at work.

I love you Hood Internet!

Some other Hood Internet classics:
R. Kelly vs. Jens Lekman
Rick Ross vs. Ghosthustler
Petey Pablo vs. Paris Hilton
And, of course, their breakout mashup R. Kelly vs. Broken Social Scene

So those two most recent New Pornographers albums just didn’t hit the spot, did they? You want pop perfection for the now generation, not something that merely goes along nicely with a Volvo and an issue of Paste magazine. Let me tell you about a band named Giantess.

Giantess used to be known as The Battles. Stephen Wood of Vancouver was the main dude in the band, but members of Destroyer, Black Mountain and (yes) the New Pornographers were members at some point. They put out an amazing album called Tomorrow’s Eager Hands in 2006 that gets my vote for Most Slept On Classic of 2006. All the songs are flawless pop gems that are given room to breathe and develop. The hand you hook; they don’t hit you over the head with it. This is like what the Shins would sound like if they were really into Soft Machine.

But then math-rock band Battles got really big, so they changed their name to Giantess. They have a self-titled album coming out soon on Soft Abuse. “Saturday Night” is the track Soft Abuse has on their website right now and the band did more than just change their name. It’s less restrained than the Battles and has a strong glam rock influence. It’s really nice, and still has that spacey goodness that filled Battles songs. What’s not nice is the album cover.

Barf. Looks like the album cover of some shitty local band that just threw their artwork together in photoshop. I don’t know what they’re thinking as Tomorrow’s Eager Hands had an awesome cover.

The Battles - Omega Man (from Tomorrow’s Eager Hands)

Giantess - Saturday Night (from Giantess)

The Silver Apples live show on Sunday was as good as I could have hoped for. Simeon played solo. He has limited movement due to a broken neck in ‘99, but still pulled off a marvelous set. His live gear was some homemade noisemakers, a sampler, and something that was probably a sequencer. He had a video camera trained on his hands that projected on a screen so you could see what he was doing. And, of course, he sang. His voice has aged, but still taps into the childlike emotion of songs like “I Have Known Love” and the playfulness of “Oscillations”. Here’s a short video of him doing “I Have Known Love” and some photos.

This video is win. I don’t care who you are, you put Peter North in a video and you are win.