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song of the week: wild ones ~ curse over me

May 22, 2013 in song of the week

WildOnes-cover

If 2012 was the year of the unexpected, with stellar albums that seemingly appeared out of nowhere, then 2013 is the year of the anticipated.  One of those highly anticipated albums was from Wild Ones.  Two bands, an EP, and a single later, Wild Ones is finally putting out their debut album.  Keep It Safe, will be released on July 9th, and though it took forever to get to us, we’re lucky it came together at all.

Nestled somewhere between tUnE-yArDs and Pure Bathing Culture, Keep It Safe is a milestone that brings together indie rock, synth pop, and a third intangible ingredient that forms a recipe to a delicious meal.  The albums first single Curse Over Me, is a perfect encapsulation of those elements and the album as a whole.

The result of a delicate collaboration that nearly destroyed the band, Curse Over Me is a unique apex of sounds that click once played together.  It’s the voice of lead singer Danielle Sullivan that provides the glue and the songs depth. From her days brushing the edge of space with soaring vocals in Eskimo and Sons and Congratulations, to a more matured tone in Wild Ones, it’s one of my favorite voices.  Just when I think she’s about to break, or take the easy way out Danielle stuns me with an incomparable vocal range.

Through all its bright airy pop, Curse Over Me has a strong emotional undercurrent.  There’s a weight to the music, emanating from Sullivan’s full vocals and the contrasting synthesizer, which makes the song one of the albums more beautiful cuts. Considering the emotional toll the creation of this album took on the band members, it’s only fitting that it would leak out in sharp medicated doses.

If Curse Over Me doesn’t get you excited for Keep it Safe, check out their video for the album’s opening track Golden Twin, or perhaps a demo version of It’s Real.  If none of that get’s you excited then you should probably check yourself into the hospital because you might have something wrong with you.

A free download of Curse Over Me is available below.  You can pre-order the album here, including a limited white vinyl pressing.

Wild Ones: website/facebook/twitter

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song of the week: har mar superstar ~ lady, you shot me

March 21, 2013 in song of the week


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When I saw Father John Misty for the first time last May, I managed to get to the show early enough to catch the opener, Har Mar Superstar (Sean Tillman).  I was unaware of him and pretty much everything about him.  I didn’t know his first album was released by Kill Rock Stars, I didn’t know that he had another indie-pop alter ego, Sean Na Na, and I didn’t know that he spends his set stripping down to his skivvies.  Half a second into his first song, the one thing I did know, was that Har Mar Superstar could sing.

He looks like Ron Jeremy’s younger, better looking, and slightly thinner? brother.  Conceivably he’s a better dancer, and undoubtedly a hell of a lot better singer.  To me he felt like the love child of Stevie Wonder and Justin Timberlake, a voice and set of moves to go along with his groovy R&B beats.  Though this all may have begun as a joke, Tillman is far from your typical sex symbol, his bloated bravado is backed by genuine talent at every turn.

Were he a young ripped hottie, he might be assaulting your ear drums with the same frequency as any of todays R&B favorites.  A quick scroll through Pitchfork confirms that, yes they hate him with a passion, but mainly because they think his act is little more than a joke.  There certainly is a note of satire to Tillman’s music, but it’s not as overt as Flight of the Conchords, it’s possible to listen to his music with genuine appreciation, songs like DUI (dialing under the influence) keep his act fun.

With a new album approaching in April (Bye Bye 17), Har Mar Superstar released his first single Lady, You Shot Me.  The song sounds like it was stolen from Stevie Wonder’s For Once In Your Life, the opening horns, Tillman’s impressive tenor, even the slightly lo-fi blown out quality of the whole song, give it that late 60’s appeal.  Just thinking about this song makes me tap my feet and want to get up and dance.

A song like this is just further proof that Har Mar Superstar may come off like a perverted parody of over-sexualized machismo, but when he hits, he hits oh so good.  Come on, if you were making up a party playlist, how could you not put this song on there?

As luck would have it, you can download Lady, You Shot Me, for free at harmarsuperstar.com.  Bye Bye 17 is set to be released April 23rd.  And to top it all off, you can see Har Mar, sing, dance, and strip down to his underwear next Monday March 25th at the El Corazon in Seattle.

har mar superstar: website/facebook/twitter

 

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song of the week: unknown mortal orchestra ~ so good at being in trouble

February 22, 2013 in columns, song of the week

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A couple weeks ago I came across this video while browsing the website of Jagjaguwar records.  At first I wasn’t entirely sold on the whole concept, a bouquet of cultish young ladies hocking their wares on the California beach side, Santa Monica, Venice, whatever.  The video prominently features Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who could star in a modern day Citizen Kane and would still forever be known to me as Fogell from Superbad.  His presence felt like a cheap trick and I wasn’t going to fall for it.

About the time I was going to stop the video and go about my mindless browsing, I noticed my feet tapping, my body grooving to the music.  I separated myself from my bias of the video and listened to the sounds, this was really good stuff.  Two weeks later I’m still obsessed, not only with So Good At Being In Trouble, but their entire album II.

The cradle of Unknown Mortal Orchestra is Portland, but since frontman Ruban Nielson hails from New Zealand they are often labeled as an NZ band. Ruban is the former guitarist of the Mint Chicks, a fast and colorful, neo-punk band, UMO is vastly different.  The songs have a Donovan (esque) quality to them, edgy yet soft, lo-fi but not to distraction, psychedelic but not like an acid trip.  They have the sonic qualities of bands from the 60’s and 70’s, with an added R&B Bassline and drum beat.

So Good At Being In Trouble is a simple song, it’s not cluttered with an overabundance of instruments or layered sounds.  The drum beat titters along, the bass is smooth and funky, the guitar peels off a series of cool and killer riffs.  All the while Ruban’s voice has the air of a 70’s soul singer, serenading you on dimly lit dance floor.

II is their second album, following their 2011 self titled debut.  I highly recommend checking it out, So Good At Being In Trouble, is the perfect encapsulation of what you’ll find.  You can try to ignore the addictive hooks of UMO, but resistance is futile, this music will seep in through your pours and slowly take over your body.

 

Unknown Mortal Orchestra: website/facebook/twitter

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song of the week: the the the thunder ~ it’s not the end of the world (it just feels that way)

January 3, 2013 in song of the week

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In an ideal world this would have been our song of the week back on the 21st of December, but this is not that ideal world.  But it is still here.  Despite the end of the Mayan calendar the world did not end, and it’s a good thing because now we’re all able to hear this amazing song from The The The Thunder.

The morning of December 21st, I woke up in a beach house on the Washington coast without internet, and very much still alive.  There was 4G though, and that was just enough to receive a facebook message from Jill Lubow, TTTT’s string section, informing me of a new song.  A new song written specifically for the end of the world.

The story goes that on December 20th in preparation for the world to meet it’s fiery conclusion the Seattle and the New York contingent of the band wrote and recorded this song in their living rooms.  There’s so much Amazing in that last sentence I feel like I need to repeat it.  In a single evening spanning the width of an entire continent, this band wrote and recorded this entire beautiful song, then delivered it to the collective ears of the information superhighway for the following morning.

I on the other hand couldn’t manage to publish a single article from my beach side house.

I don’t know if the band would feel a little disappointed by my saying this, especially considering how condensed it’s construction was, but this might be my favorite song of theirs.  It’s simple and repetitive without being boring.  It’s lo-fi recording keeps it from being over produced and overly thought through, yet the lo-fi(ness) is not distracting or really even very obvious.

When I reviewed their album, All At Once, I made note that TTTT is like the perfect marriage between the Talking Heads and Lou Reed.  This song feels like full throttle Lou Reed to me, the laid back guitars, jingling bells, the male and female vocals that have the sense that their just barely breaking into a singing voice, all give that Reed vibe.  This could easily be the closing number on Street Hassle.

Despite missing the optimal week for this to be our song of the week, I just felt that it was too good not to share with all of you.  And perhaps encourage TTTT to continue to make new music.  By the way you can and should buy their album over at bandcamp.

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song of the week: deep sea diver ~ have yourself a merry little christmas

December 24, 2012 in song of the week

09Deep Sea Diver

I love Holiday music, not in an obsessive listen to it in July way, but during the appropriate season… absolutely.  I listen to these Holiday tunes as a mood setter.  I rarely put on one of these albums and listen to them the way I listen to other music, with admiration, jealousy, and love.  I had long assumed that Holiday and seasonal music was for pop stars looking for an easy project to undertake, I made this assumption because I’d never seen any Holiday music from my favorite bands.  I now know that I just wasn’t looking hard enough, because there’s a fair amount if you know where to look.

Normally I would not expect a band with just an EP and a full length album (just an EP when Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas was released) to have a Christmas song available.  But Deep Sea Diver has two, thanks to this years release of an original Christmas song, It’s Christmas Time (and I’m Still Alive) which is a really delightful song, but DSD’s rendition of Merry Little Christmas is just magical.

Of all the Christmas songs that find regular rotation during the Holidays, this is probably the most somber, not in content but tone.  Typically it’s downbeat, it’s played at the end of your Christmas evening, just as everything is winding down, the floor strewn with wrapping paper, empty drink glasses on the coffee table.  In films it always seems to find itself playing under the scene where the cancer victim is simply glad to be alive at Christmas time.  Jingle Bells this song is not.

Having said all that I think that Jessica Dobson finds the perfect balance in her rendition between that somber tone and the upbeat festive cheer we crave.  The song begins with a peppy little riff on a loop that seems to resemble Christmas bells, from there it just grows laying guitar on top of guitar, the last third of the song interlays a spacey synthesizer.

Balancing out the scales is Dobson’s sultry and smokey voice which brings back that deeper quality to the song.  What I love about her voice in this song (as in all Deep Sea Diver songs) is how unpredictable it is, she never seems afraid to buck with tradition or fuck with your expectations and take her voice somewhere delightful and completely unexpected.  This could easily have been a humdrum Christmas standard performed by Seattle’s greatest indie rock band, but instead it’s fresh, beautiful, and all the festive splendor you look for in a Christmas song.

When considering Christmas music I generally place it in another category entirely and excuse it from critique.  I wouldn’t listen to even my favorite Christmas songs past December 25th, but with this song I’ve made an exception, I’ll listen to this song anytime of year.  Dobson opened DSD’s November show at Neumos with this song, she performed it solo with live loops, and it set the stage for my favorite show of 2012.

For those of you who are saying to yourself, holy shit I love this song, then you’re in luck.  Firstly, because this song is free on their bandcamp page, secondly because this years DSD released a brand new and completely original Christmas song, It’s Christmas Time (and I’m Still Alive) which is also completely free.  If you need to give a last minute gift to a music fan or just a person who enjoys the finer things, Deep Sea Diver’s History Speaks topped our list of 2012’s best albums.

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song of the week: wild belle ~ keep you

November 20, 2012 in song of the week

I told you this would happen.  As I prepare for tomorrows release of the podcast featuring She Keeps Bees, I appease you with a really incredible Song of the Week from Wild Belle.  If your temptation is to tune out our SOTW, give this one a try, there’s a good chance you’ll really like it.

I have a weak spot for Afrocentric beats and island music.  I don’t much care if it’s full on  folk traditional, inspired with all the bells and whistles, or a hybrid of the two.  Angelo Spencer does a fantastic job of blending the two, Karl Blau wrote an entire album dedicated to Africa and included a fair amount of Reggae flavors.  Before I saw the face of Amy Winehouse I assumed that she was some young Jamaican girl, not a white brit.  The point being, I love Peter Tosh, I love Amy Winehouse, I love Mulatu Astatke, and everything in between.

Then there’s Wild Belle, a band so fresh and new that the paint is hardly dry.  You can listen to all they have to offer in less than fifteen minutes, yet it will take you hours before you really feel like you’ve heard it.  Born from the collaboration of brother and sister Natalie and Elliot Bergman, WIld Belle is the pinnacle of modern electronic weaved with traditional Afrocentric music.

Elliot hails from Nomo which for all intents and purposes is Mulatu Astatke for the 21st century, Afro-funk and jazz all the way.  He brings that same sensibility with him to Wild Belle, albeit a much more pop sound.  Natalie provides the tasty slack-tongued vocals which just ask you to throw you hands behind your head and kick your feet up.  Why they didn’t collaborate before now is a tragedy.

Keep You, falls along the island variety…mostly.  The watery staccato Reggae chord bursts set the tone, with Natalie sustaining a very island cadence.  Elliot laces the low heavy rumble of his baritone saxophone throughout, which is straight out of the Mulatu Astatke or North African funk playbook.

Often I will sit and daydream about how best to enjoy my favorite music.  Is it best enjoyed on a lazy sunday afternoon?  Maybe on a candle lit evening with friends?  Or even blasting from the open windows of my car as it barrels down the freeway.  Keep You (and all of Wild Belle) evokes so many perfect playing situations, that I don’t think I can list them all here.

Next week Wild Belle will roll right through the PNW on tour with past guest Jessica Dobson and her band Deep Sea Diver, and Pretty Broken Things.  Catch them at Neumos on November 30th.  You can buy Keep you as a 12” single at wildbelle.bancamp.com, the full EP is available digitally through itunes.  Don’t be foolish, it’s worth every penny.

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deep sea diver on tour/ song of the week ~ NWO

November 16, 2012 in song of the week

Whew!  What a week.  It’s been pretty busy around here, putting the final touches on our upcoming interview with She Keeps Bees which will be dropping next week (probably Monday?) as well as conducting an interview this past Tuesday with LAKE, as in my personal obsession LAKE.  As a result besides this article the only other was my recap of Lovers Without Borders, Ever Ending Kicks, and Karl Blau at 20/20 Cycle, which also took some considerable time.  Next week things should be back on a more regular schedule, but for now I’m doing double duty for friend of the show Deep Sea Diver with tour information and a Song of the Week.

Because I’m an obsessive person who never tires of talking about the same things and people over and over again, I’m going to use this brief moment that I have your attention to talk about Deep Sea Diver and Jessica Dobson who previously appeared on the secretly-important podcast (one of my favorite episodes).  After traveling the country and world playing guitar for The Shins, Dobson and DSD are taking some of the best music the PNW has ever heard on tour.

That’s right West Coast, DSD is coming to you… well coming to you if you live in or can get to the following cities:

Nov 25th The Casbah San Diego CA
Nov 26th The Echo Los Angeles CA
Nov 27th Bottom of the Hill San Francisco CA
Nov 29th Doug Fir Portland OR
Nov 30th Neumos Seattle WA
Dec 1st Electric Owl Vancouver BC

They’ll be touring with Chicago’s Wild Belle who I just now found out about and I think you can definitely expect to hear more about in an upcoming article… like maybe next week as our Song of the Week.  The only show Wild Belle won’t be appearing in is San Francisco at Bottom of the Hill.  As much as I love Neumos, perhaps the best show of the tour will be at Doug Fir in Portland, as Deep Sea Diver and Wild Belle will be joined by another past guest and favorite, Lemolo.  Man, that is going to be un-fucking-believable!

 

NWO

NWO from matt wignall on Vimeo.

I could and have talked about Deep Sea Diver and their debut full length History Speaks at length.  If I was to be shallow about it I would simply say that it’s one of the best albums of the year.  If I was  to brave the ocean’s depths I would say that History Speaks is one of the years most complete albums, kicking your teeth in right off the bat with Ships and it’s wattery staccato guitar, and closes out by burring your casket with the epic titular track, it’s almost as if the album disintegrates as one by one the musical elements fall away leaving you all alone.

In between are highs and lows with fast paced danceable tracks and heartfelt ballads.  It has that classic rock feel of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust.  What’s guaranteed to melt your mind is Jessica Dobson’s voice which it seems can do everything and sound obsessively appealing.

I’ll be honest, History Speaks is nine songs long and anyone of them could have been the song of the week, I made my choice purely based on the fact that NWO comes with a pretty awesome video.  It also happens to be one of my favorite songs.  It begins softly with the light raptaptapping of the drums and is followed by a lonesome and emotional keyboard.  Dobson’s voice follows shortly after and if your heart hasn’t melted it will skip a beat and sync up with the drums.

My favorite artists are those that cut themselves open and leave everything right on the tape.  There’s no armor, no guarded sense of self-preservation, it’s quite literally Blood on the Tracks.  At times you can hear Dobson’s voice wavering ever so slightly, reaching a truly sincere and vulnerable place in time.

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song of the week: nico vega ~ we are the art

October 30, 2012 in song of the week

 

 

I was skimming through the archives here at the website and was appalled when I realized that I’ve never featured Nico Vega in any section of the website, let alone Song of the Week.  I’m here to correct this horrendous injustice.

I’ve been a fan of Nico Vega dating back to 2007, when their music was available only through myspace and it’s stroke inducing music player (seriously someone should take that horse to the glue factory.)  Their music interested me so much that it managed to penetrate the brass armor of the Jazz music that dominated my ipod.

It’s hard to pin Nico Vega down, though they began as a hard and fast heavy rock band, accentuated by front woman Aja Volkman’s sultry, soulful voice, they have some exceptionally beautiful soft and bluesy tunes, and then their are their songs with a definite electronic edge.  Their albums and EP’s are genuinely full of surprises as you never know what’s coming next.

An unintended consequence of all of the above is that each song can be so jarring in its unique tone that you skip by without giving the song a chance to develop and blossom.  That’s what these songs need more than anything, they need to be given a chance.  More often than not they’re full of addictive melodies, and Volkman’s vocals are like a rainbow.

This is the case with our song of the week, We Are The Art, which was just released yesterday, (we’re really on top of this one.)  At first listen I was terribly disappointed with what I heard from their first song in over a year and a half.  It begins with heavy synthesizer circa 1987, and Aja Volkman’s voice heavily overdubbed, which is a shame because it’s so enjoyable naked, flaws and all.  But after only the second listen, I was really enjoying it’s tonal qualities, reminiscent of Little Dragon.

We Are The Art, sounds very different from past releases like chooseyourwordspoorly or their self titled debut full length.  New listeners should be able to jump right in and enjoy its subtle hooks, if you’ve been a Nico Vega fan for a while it might take a listen or two or three, but I promise that We Art The Art is all the you would expect from Nico Vega.  Now for the best news of all, this song is available here totally free, and you can’t beat that.

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song of the week: wild ones ~ it’s real

October 19, 2012 in song of the week

Way back in the early days of the Song of the Week, we featured a song by the mysterious Congratulations.  Juice and Syrup was an unbelievable song, and I couldn’t believe that it was the only song I could find.  I became a modern day digital Sherlock Holmes scouring the internet looking for any evidence that would lead me to anything concerning Congratulations.  In the end all I could uncover was the previous incarnation of the band as Eskimo & Sons.

In the last few months my wife has rediscovered this song and contracted a mild to severe obsession with it.  Every time we get in the car and I shuffle through my music she quietly chirps, “play my song.”  And so I do.  This became so regular that I decided to open up the cold case files of Congratulations and see if any new evidence had been uncovered.  I’d adopted a wait and see attitude, expecting that sooner or later they would be putting out an album or at the very least an EP.

As it turns out Congratulations is dead, like a stillborn it was virtually lifeless by the time it was birthed.  But any mourning I felt was momentary as I quickly learned that the band members had moved on to a new band, this one called Wild Ones.  By this point all I had to do was follow the trail of bread crumbs right to the treasure chest.

Obviously with so many band members being carried over into Wild Ones, namely the unbelievably well honed voice of Danielle Sullivan, the band bears an audible similarity to Eskimo & Sons and Congratulations.  The clear difference is the absence of Dhani Rosa who left Congratulations to write and record in Mexico.  In 2008 the band released an EP titled You’re A Winner, which for those like me who were just looking for something more, devoured it as a beautiful handful of songs.

Then this past July the band released a single on bandcamp titled, It’s Real.  It might have been just another song title, or it might be alluding to the fact that by Summers end Wild Ones would begin recording their first full length album.  For those members who’d stuck it out since Eskimo & Sons, this would be the first studio album they’d recorded.

It’s Real, is a perfect mishmash of rock classics like Steely Dan or Fleetwood Mac, and indie greats like LAKE and Pure Bathing Culture.  The music is pop, it’s danceable, it’s moody, brooding, uplifting, and flat out beautiful.  It’s Real is the auditory maturation from You’re A Winner.  Sullivan’s distinct and harmonious voice begins the song unmatched, and it just keeps building upon it’s self, climaxing and purposely unraveling.

I cannot wait to hear their upcoming full length, all indications point to it being truly incredible.  For the time being you can quench your thirst with You’re A Winner available in itunes, or It’s Real available at wildones.bandcamp.com.

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song of the week: jenny o. ~ won’t let you leave

October 3, 2012 in song of the week

A couple weeks back I saw Father John Misty at Neumos, opening for him was the fabulous Jenny O.  She played solo and alternated between an acoustic and electric guitar.  She was a rockstar while weaving her songs, but mousey and timid between them, a lovely dichotomy made her somewhat enigmatic.  Prior to attending this show I was familiar with Jenny’s song Automechanic, a single from her upcoming album.

Of course the ultimate crime here is that Automechanic  is an awesome song that doesn’t come out until February!  A little doo-wop mingling with some Charlie Feathers.  So why isn’t Automechanic the song of the week?  Perhaps it should be, I chose instead to go back and highlight Won’t Let You Leave, from her debut EP Home.

Far be it for me to comment on an album with a sample size of one, but assuming that Automechanic is representative of the sound we’ll hear on her upcoming album, (this is a risky assumption ((probably false)) to make) it’s easy to see that she’s taking a slight turn from Home.

Home is far more folk inspired with a little soda fountain rock-n-roll thrown in like a whipped cream topping.  Well OK Honey is the obvious stand out, but something about Won’t Let You Leave, just conjures up the warm fuzzies.  It could be that were you to replace O’s voice for that of Pete Quirk, it could be a Cave Singers song.  Probably because it’s one of those songs that makes all the right moves, and does exactly what you want it to do, when you want it to do them.

 To really pull off a song like Won’t Let You Go, you have to have just the right voice, with just the right temperament and Jenny O. makes finding it seem easy.  Not too light and saccharine, not too dark and smokey, instead it finds some very thin middle ground and centers her music.

As I draw our song of the week to a close it occurs to me that if I chose Won’t Let You Leave over Automechanic, it’s only because you can buy that EP right now, which feels like some kind of consolation to the agony of having to wait four whole months for her debut album to drop.  You can buy Home at Bandcamp, or most other digital retailers.

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