Video: Cranking indie tunes over the phone never actually swoons a room full of ladies lying in their undies. Trust me, it doesn’t. It creeps them out.

Okay, sure, it’s a bit easy. Take a good indie song, or a well known classic rock jam that everyone loves, and add some reverby effects and beat the hell out of a bass drum on Garage Band. Repeat eighteen times, release the tracks on an album and get more famous than half the artists you mixed.

At any rate, Flagrant Foul’s Cousin Cole & Pocketknife are an eardrum’s sick little fetish, perverting innocent songs like Iron & Wine’s “Each Coming Night,” Panda Bear’s “Bros,” and even John Lennon’s “Oh Yoko!,” into twisted predatory dance-clubby versions of themselves. While it does get difficult to wade through the whole album and its everlasting entirety of obnoxious bass drum on every single beat, picking and choosing favorites to blast through your car’s woofers never really tires.

The promo video up above is exactly what you’d expect. They ripped a clip from a major motion picture (The Virgin Suicides) and put their own music into it. I can’t say it’s not great though. Check out the full track list for Tambourine Dream here, and click below to listen to Pocketknife’s Scowling Owl Remix of Joanna Newsom’s “The Book of Right On.”

Cousin Cole & Pocketknife - The Book of Right On

Video: Two men and a Holly Hansen. The best show not on cable television.

Holly Hansen has been a local favorite of ours for quite a while now. Her solo album, “Buildings,” full of Kimya Dawson/Shelby Sifers-esque minimalist indie-lullabies, was a great introduction to her quaint musicianship and blessed, angel-like voice. We were pretty upset when we heard news that she gave this act up and started a three piece band, fearing that the outcome of involving other members would somehow fail the unreasonably high expectations we hold for Ms. Hansen.

It didn’t, and thank the heavens for the album we got out of it. Zoo Animal’s debut, titled Young Blood, is a very well constructed mix of moody indie-pop and socially conscious messages, or, if you’re not into that, you can still get to down to its high levels of ants-in-the-pants sap-danciness.

Please click on the video above, or here, to go to the actual YouTube page where you can opt to view the action in high quality. I promise, the difference is worth it. Also, be sure to listen to the song My Lord below!

Zoo Animal - My Lord

Video: Just The Small Cities being The Small Cities.

As previously posted, these doods are pretty durn good. “They sound like David Bazan and Low blowing apart your hollow construct of reality,” said we. The Small Cities deliver the full experience live, making epic narrations look easier and more flawless each time they play. The footage can only portray so much of it, but this threesome can completely fill a room with surprisingly large sounds. And, of course, we fully appreciate a band that can hold its own with witty on-stage banter.

Do the myspace thing to hear more of their songs and catch a show.

Frightened Rabbits are a cool band who plan mid-rockin’ music of the happy variety. Four members, one guitar, one bass, and a whole lot of egg shaker is pretty much the norm on their new single, Head Rolls Off. I don’t want to ruin the video for you, but it takes place in a second grade classroom, so *spoiler alert* cute kid moments abound. Enjoy everybody.

Video: One shot! Magic!

The performance of a song this simple gets twisted into something fairly complicated if it’s still stuck in your head a week afterwards. You know it’s got to be something more when your head just won’t let a melody like this escape. The come on babys and I wish you were heres dancing around only tambourines and handclaps in three part harmonies are as dense and fulfilling as most bands writing with intricate instrumentation. Somewhere in there, this light and lovely pop song is more.

As indicated in the video, The Daredevil Christopher Wright is in the process of releasing their first full length album, In Deference to a Broken Back. It is full of wonder and you would be wise to keep up with their Myspace page so you can track it down as soon as it becomes available.

Video: Cedarwell - Weirdest Places

Cedarwell’s Erik Neave well embodies his northern heritage. Sheboygan, Wisconsin, should be proud of such a wonderfully full beard, such tough flannel shirts and darkly twisted, acoustic-pop songs that seem to ride nature’s very rhythm. Crisp clarity and addicting genuineness hibernate Neave’s voice somewhere in the back of your memory, somewhere where it can stay for a long, long time, constantly reminding you that this is Wisconsin, and winter never really ends.

How ironic then, to watch him playing for a music-variety show on a balcony overlooking the hustle and bustling of a European town. The program, Balcony.tv, is up for two Webby Awards, which is thought to be something like the internet’s version of an Oscar. The talking between the show’s host and Neave is worth the admission price alone here, full of miscued sarcasm and a slight imbalance of enthusiasm. “Thank you very much for being here at the balcony,” our host says. “It was really worth flying over here…I think…from Wisconsin to play the song…” Neave smiles and nods.

Cedarwell - Black Lung

Here’s an mp3 of a new Cedarwell song, Black Lung.

Cedarwell is playing in Eau Claire with The Daredevil Christopher Wright on May 10th at the Nucleus. For details, hop over to their Myspace.

Potential energy: energy stored within a physical system; can be released or converted into other forms of energy; has the potential to change the states of objects in the system when the energy is released.

A rock band’s slowest song might seem out of place in some cases, like filler before the remainder of a louder set, or like a momentum killer after a string of high energy songs, but sometimes when a rock and roll band slows itself down, it realizes a different sort of power. It takes its deep breath and strips itself from the clutter of noise, comes to terms with the bare essentials of its own songwriting and somewhere therein releases a completely different form of energy.

A rock band isn’t realizing its full potential if it isn’t able to do this.

Our friends Matt and Kara are moving to China.

This is the second installment of a new section of Peer Validated. We’ll be posting videos often, hopefully contributing to a local need as well as exposing these bands to a greater public.

This is a traditional Italian song with emphasis on vocal performance. Please visit Spaghetti Western String Co.’s website for info on their new album, Lull and Clatter.

I have one criteria that pushes a show from good to great; if I leave feeling inspired to be creative. There is something in the human spirit that is spurred to creativity by the creativity of others. A perfect movie, a book that you flip over and start again after the last page, or something said from the heart that bypasses the brain and resonates, but particularly, at least for me, that something lives in music. In historic cases creative greatness inspired more greatness - The Beatles and The Beach Boys, Magic and Bird - but for the common man it stirs aspiration.
Hyperbole aside, that is largely how I felt after Bon Iver’s release show for ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’. It was a sight. The hometown crowd completely packed the smallish (read:intimate) venue that likely could have been sold out twice over as many were turned back into what was an abnormally cold night, even for northern Wisconsin. It was this particular incarnation of Bon Iver’s first time playing in Eau Claire, with Sean Carey on drums and backing vocals and wunderkind Mike Noyce on second guitar, auxiliary percussion, and backing vocals. And that guy Justin (Ben).
The sum of Justin’s reverb drenched vocals flanked by further reverb drenched harmonies combined with depth of instrumentation belying a three man operation produces a sound that seems bigger than the space it occupies. Simultaneously granting intimacy and evoking transcendence. Throughout show the audience was either rapt, studying the moment, or exuberantly participatory, mouthing words or chanting ‘what might have been lost’ as ‘The Wolves’ tore itself apart.
Bon Iver live is a separate but equal entity to the record, and that, in my estimation, is how it should be. The night seemed a fitting start to their first full-band national tour. Godspeed.

Here is a video of the song ‘Lump Sum’.

P.S.

As I have time and desire, I will try to post more of the show on youtube. Post your requests.

Also, here is an interview our friend Scott did with Justin for his radio show.

http://sri.uwec.edu/audio/bon-iver-interview/

The new video for Wisely’s Through Any Window features Pam! It’s a good song too, sort of reminiscent of Elliott Smith, but Jenna Fischer pretty much steals the show. She’s been quoted as saying that Through Any Window is one of her favorite songs ever. Also, Pam is a beautiful animal.

Here’s a fun lil’ song from the band, The Little Ones.  I’m always a bit skittish about bands who talk about the radio in their music, but this song is just so durn catchy.  Stay tuned for a possible album review.  Be sure to check out our Christmas show tonight either on 96.3 or at http://whysradio.org/  It’ll be streamed live from 9-10.

Merry Everything to Everyone 

Ian

P.S.  We'll be posting a large, large amount of music and doing best of lists in the next couple of weeks.  Be sure to back early and often. 

The British are messed up. 

Sometimes music and video can come together to do some pretty special things. This new video for the song Be Good or Be Gone, from Ireland’s Fionn Regan, is an example. It has no storyline or plot and there are no special effects, but the simple capturing of visual and audio of Regan playing his song in all these different places makes for a remarkable three and a half minutes.

I was going to write a review of Fionn Regan’s new album The End of History, sometime this week. I was still in the process of getting to know the songs well enough and letting them sink in, and I’ve really enjoyed the time spent with it, but I think this video will give you a good idea of what he’s doing. It’s small, subtle songwriting that finds its way into your heart and gets big while it’s there.

Download audio file (fionnreganputapennyintheslot)

This is another song off of The End of History, called Put a Penny in the Slot.

[dailymotion 6xewgnqtMVS9IfhUW]