Archive for music
February 25, 2008 at 3:34 pm · tag/s : film, mp3, music, stuff
I haven’t seen Juno but according to wikipedia Anyone Else But You, the first track on the first album by The Moldy Peaches (which was released on September 11, 2001), is central to the film and a version is performed by the two main characters. The song was also used in a mobile phone TV-ad in France featuring Zinedine Zidane during the World Cup in 2006 (which Italy shouldn’t have won because they didn’t deserve to beat Australia) and in an Academy Award-nominated documentary about quadriplegics who play wheelchair rugby, called Murderball. I can see the first connection, but the other two have me stumped.
Anyway, it’s a good song. Listen to it.
November 3, 2007 at 11:11 am · tag/s : australia, melbourne, music
oh great! sonic youth performing daydream nation in its entirety at the metro as part of the don’t look back series on the same night that pj harvey plays melbourne’s hamer hall on her australian tour. that’s sensible planning. don’t concert promoters talk to each other?
but polly jean will win. why? because she is not a boring old has-been just going through the motions for money. don’t look back indeed.
on the other hand low playing everything we lost in the fire in east brunswick will be very tempting…
October 3, 2007 at 4:48 pm · tag/s : blog, loss, mp3, music
elsewhere i am writing on loss and i have started a list there of all the things i’ve lost - at three thirty this morning i woke up remembering another item to add to the list : the patti smith piss factory single on the original mer label (and the stanley single by snatch!) were in that box of singles i sold for $100 at newtown markets when i was a desperate student in the late eighties … damn! i wonder how much that would be worth now … and also : i love that song … i lie there for about half an hour thinking about it in the dark night … the original piss factory single on the mer label … bought by me in 1976 … in the rough trade shop in london …
:( …
i no longer have it … damn damn damn!!
ah well … but i was there … priceless … as the credit card ads say
and i can listen to the song anytime i want
and there are the lyrics
(elsewhere i have written - as have others - about why patti smith mattered)
September 11, 2007 at 4:41 pm · tag/s : mp3, music
tarry not will oldham fans young and old for this free 192kbps download
Bonnie Prince Billy Live with Harem Scarem, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, Scotland, April 12, 2006
At this show, Oldham performs with Harem Scarem (not to be confused with the Canadian rockers), a group of fine vocalists with an array of instruments that easily compliments the songs.
featuring : a minor place, i see a darkness, master and everyone and other immortal classics.
April 23, 2007 at 8:17 pm · tag/s : beauty, blog, mp3, music
what! another walkmen post? i just can’t help myself. the blogosphere is wildly excited about a new walkmen song red river (which is on the spiderman 3 soundtrack - you can hear it on the very annoying spiderman3 myspace site which i am not going to link to). but the saftmasheen song of the week is a different walkmen track : from their most recent and much maligned third album another hundred miles off. this classic slice of postpop is called another one goes by, and in keeping with its title had escaped my attention.
go here to hear it - if you listen to it three times in a row, you’ll be completely addicted.
warning : some seriously dylanesque hamilton leithauser vocal stylings are evident from time to time. but hey … you’ll be singing it in the shower, you’ll be whistling it on the way to the supermarket, and you’ll curse the fact that you have gone out with out syncing your ipod and now you can’t listen to it until you get home.
March 8, 2007 at 8:51 am · tag/s : music
Hamilton Leithauser can’t sing. Not that that’s a problem in today’s modern world if you want to make and record music. Look at Britney Spears. And it certainly doesn’t stop Hamilton Leithauser.
Hamilton Leithauser doesn’t play guitar very well either. Fortunately for Hamilton Leithauser, Paul Maroon, who is the principal guitarist in The Walkmen is a very, very good guitarist.
Hamiton Leithauser is not good looking. He has awful mousy brown hair. Milkman’s dog hair my father used to call it. And he should know : He had mousy brown hair himself.
So what is it that makes The Walkmen such an interesting and exciting band? This is the question I keep asking myself as I listen for the first time to their almost unlistenable third album A Hundred Miles Off. A relentless wall of impenetrable sound. Hamilton Leithauser screaming at the top of his voice. A thick soup of sound and half songs with mostly unintelligible lyrics and halting, stop-and-start-again rhythms.
And yet. And yet.
When I saw them play live at the Corner Hotel a few weeks ago, I had a similar experience.
Hamiton Leithauser has no stage presence. He just stands there in his jeans and his daggy brown jacket. Occasionally he takes his hand out of his pocket, and then puts it back in. Sometimes he takes a swig from one of the many bottles of beer on the stage. Sometimes he straps on a battered old Fender and plays a few chords on it. He looks extremely uncomfortable. And he keeps screaming into the microphone. Sometimes his voice becomes less forceful and Hamilton Leithauser half-talks half-sings, albeit in quite an atonal way. But he still looks as if he is shouting. His voice still sounds strained. He approaches the microphone as if he is worried it’s going to bite him.
And yet.
There are melodies there. Almost completely buried in the wall of sound. But they are there. You have to work to hear them, and when you think you’ve grabbed one, it slips away again, and or the song ends.
Hamilton Leithauser is going to lose his voice. There is no way human vocal cords can keep taking the kind of punishment Hamilton Leithauser is meting out to them. But I hope they hang in there for a while yet because there is something that keeps me coming back to those records again and again. The music of The Walkmen is not for the feint of heart. It is risky, edgy music, at the edge that is, of what is possible in rock music.
February 5, 2007 at 8:26 pm · tag/s : music, people
bought an interesting cd on ebay, well two cds : action time vision which collects the early music of mark p, him of sniffin glue - mostly under the moniker alternative tv and atv
oddly it is missing from the discography on his web site but this be the tracklisting - it includes the first single love lies limp which was given away as a flexidisc as part of an issue of sniffin glue
CD1 Love Lies Limp How Much Longer You Bastard Life Life After Life Action Time Vision Another Coke Good Times Still Life Nasty Little Lonely Splitting in Two Fellow Sufferer Release the Natives The Good Missionary The Force Is Blind Lost in Room The Ancient Rebels My Hand Is Still Wet Cold Rain CD2 Victory You Never Know Let’s Sleep Now Boy Eats Girl Dragon Love Company of Lies The Big Ugly One Child Star Reflections of a Strange Existence Magic in Full Flight Punk Life Apollo Communication Failure Just a Memory Unlikely Star Stockhausen in Space In Control On Your Knees Total Switch Off
in my punk days my band played on the bill with alternative tv at a daytime festival in deptford - they were good : much better, and infinitely cooler than us - and they all had girlfriends that hung around them - later he wrote something nasty in his zine about us being from the suburbs
he he he … just imagine : back then it wasn’t cool to be from the suburbs
November 16, 2006 at 1:05 pm · tag/s : beauty, blog, music, pain
two songs from jennifer o’connor’s new album Over The Mountain, Across The Valley, and Back To The Stars : Exeter, Rhode Island and the sublime Today, and four songs recorded solo for daytrotter including the amazingly wonderful tonight we ride - my song of the year … goddammit!
October 31, 2006 at 5:15 am · tag/s : blog, music, travel
i was thinking when i am in the usa and europe i will only go and see musicians i have never heard of before … so there is a thing in the netherlands where you go and watch people play in someone’s house : you book online and then you show up there and pay 10 euros and you get a drink and a snack and somewhere to sit. it’s called live in your living room and in december the following gigs by complete unknowns (to me) are on in utrecht, the city where i was born and lived for the first fourteen years of my so called life :
Aestrid Pondertone Mr Love and the Stallions : 15 12 2006 : Mark Roos : Markstraat 11
Taxi to the Ocean Pien Feith Lushus Excon : 16 12 2006 : Werend & Kitty Grifioen : Admiraal van Gentstraat 13
Harold K : 17 12 2006 : Han Orsel : Hofpoort 2
there was some considerable excitement amongst the population when i last visited my hometown in 1945
utrecht speelt uit : utrecht music website
gun : utrecht music magazine
fc utrecht : utrecht voetbal
October 3, 2006 at 5:18 pm · tag/s : beauty, music
While it may sound like an entire Balkan orchestra playing modern songs as mournful ballads and upbeat marches, Beirut’s first album, Gulag Orkestar, is largely the work of one 19-year-old Albuquerque native, Zach Condon, and was almost completely recorded at home. Horns, violins, cellos, ukuleles, mandolins, glockenspiels, drums, tambourines, congas, organs, pianos, clarinets and accordions (no guitars on this album!) all build and break the melodies under Condon’s deep-voiced crooner vocals, swaying to the Eastern European beats that sound like they’re being brought to you by a 12-member ensemble.
Condon was a straight-A student until he dropped out of high school at the age of 16 to travel Europe in a drunken haze, cavorting and partying with the locals wherever he ended up. It was during one of these evenings that he was first exposed to Balkan gypsy music (notably including the Boban Markovic Orchestra), blasting from the upstairs apartment. Condon went upstairs to see what exactly he was hearing, and ended up staying up all night with the Serbian artists, going through albums country by country, note for note. The Gulag Orkestar is the direct result of what he learned that night.
Most of the tracks on Gulag Orkestar were recorded on Pro Tools while skipping school in Albuquerque.
so i don’t have a flash player on this site yet which i think means that you will have to download my song of the year idle days by beirut by control clicking or right clicking - isn’t that what those from the dark side have to do? - and saving to disk…
in other news the new sparklehorse album Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain is out - the grauniad said : “It is like drinking one too many port and lemons in the afternoon and then drifting off, slightly dazed, in a sun-filled bedroom.” (hope i don’t wake up with a headache!) here is an mp3 of a track from it (Knives of Summertime)
meanwhile if you grok joanna newsom and can’t wait for her new album ys which is out in november, it was inadvertently left on a publicly accessible server by pitchfork and downloaded by squillions of people - so those who know who to ask will have no trouble finding it - the 55 minute album has only five tracks with one of them going for nearly seventeen minutes…
lots more free download links on this mp3 blog aggregator
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