Pictured: Headlights must have reeeeally pissed off Oscar the grouch.
Headlights are a Champagne, Illinois that I could have sworn was British the first time I heard them. Maybe it’s my own prejudice, but when I hear a guy singing sweetly into a microphone while all sorts of cutesy bells and shit go on around him, I just think jolly old England. Is that me being prejudiced? Probably. Am I totally right usually? Undoubtedly. Anyway, that is neither here nor there, Headlights is a fun little diversion of the band that offers plenty of groany alt-country guitars, organ pads, and even the occasional hand clap. (for a while didn’t it look like banjos were going to be the new hand clap in indie rock? What a scary time.)
Headlight’s song, “Market Girl” is the embodiment of all the good things in this genre. It rollicks from the beginning (I don’t use that term lightly) and continues to do so until the end. In between their are string parts, boy and girl vocals, and yes, even hand claps. There is a deep dark fear in my heart that this song will be used for evil, like to advertise Target or Imacs or something, but until then I think we can enjoy this song with clean conscience.
These guys have played with Now, Now Every Children before (a peervalidated favorite), if you get a chance and have a girlfriend (or boyfriend) that loves to do that awkward indie-rock half dance, this is directly up your alley.
Headlights - Market Girl
Pictured: One of the only pictures on I, Torrents myspace. Please let it not be their practice space.
I, Torrent is a local (Eau Clairian) band that kicks out bass heavy, albini-induced rockers. They’ve played a couple of shows around here, most notably opening for Alan Sparhawk’s band du jour, The Retribution Gospel Choir. These guys are all seasoned vets of the EC scene, and it is entirely visible in their live shows, which sound nearly as polished as their new EP.
The track, “She’s an Invisible Ship” stands out in my mind as a testament to what heavy music done right can be. Sean Lau’s vocals growl through the whole sh-bang of chorusy guitars and ultra low bass. I’m still not sure who she is, but evidently she’s one helluva sinkin’ ship. Look for the highlight of the song at the 1:51 mark, which is as good as anything I’ve heard in the past couple of months.
I think that sometimes all of us get caught up in these flavor of the month bands, and forget that there have been people making really quality music for the better part of a decade. It’s sometimes nice to hear what that sounds like, if only for the fact that I someday hope someone listens to something I’ve done. PSYCH. Just kidding, but that got a little heart felt at the end, and we can’t have that.
Look for I, Torrent to play shows in the midwest this summer.
I, Torrent - She’s An Invisible Ship
These guys just played in Vancouver with one of my favorite local bands, Winning. And I didn’t go because I didn’t feel like it. I’m an idiot.
Yes, this song is called “A Tell-Tale Penis”. Oh well.
Some things I like about it:
a) ride cymbal in the verses
b) triple guitar attack
c) “It’s the alaaaarm clock”
d) when the drums cut out after the chorus
e) the ending
Nothing more need be written. Is that a proper sentence? Am I mailing this post in? No. Listen.
Joan Of Arc - A Tell-Tale Penis
Click around Joan of Arc’s website, see them on tour (Maritime date in Milwaukee), and buy Boo! Human.
Pictured: Someone yearns to be loved.
This is a badass playground. Kids chanting and dancing around a burning barrel and bashing it with sticks, one of the bandies fluting and the rest demanding attention and rejecting uneven distributions of power and gender roles. Some principal somewhere made some seriously bad decisions to get to this point of mutiny.
The Do - Playground Hustle
Playground Hustle. Viva revolution.
Really though, Olivia Merilahti and Dan Levy made some seriously good music on The Dø’s debut, A Mouthful. Parts jazz, folk, classic, African beat and mother’s good lovin’ meet in the middle and lounge.
The Do - Stay (Just A Little Bit More)
The song Stay (Just a Little Bit More) is softer and probably a bit more akin to the rest of the album.
Pictured: The Small Cities are all cursed with varying degrees of bedroom eyes.
Hey all, it’s been a long while since I’ve posted on here. I really have no excuse other than the fact that I am a 100% lazy-ass, white bread boy. And the end of the semester was a big welt on my back-side, but who wants to hear that? Anyway, I hope to be posting 3-4 times a week for the rest of the summer; you know, unless lightning strikes or something. Andy is leaving tomorrow for Arizona, so hopefully we can shoot some video and get that up while he’s gone. We wish him the best of luck while on his scorpion eating tour. Sounds great.
Anyway, The Small Cities are a pretty great band from Minneapolis. They sound like David Bazan and Low blowing apart your hollow construct of reality. Oh, and their bass player is pretty durn good too. I can’t really pick which song to pick up, as all of the EP is a pretty good balance of fun and crying. The first track, “This City” is a down tempo crier with wailing guitars and, um, people. The second track, “Fargo” would’ve been on the OC if the OC was still around and set in a small midwestern town with a good sense of melodrama. The guitars are reverby, the drums are driving, just check it out.
These guys have gotten a lot of good press lately. If you are one of our friends who reads this blog and lives in the Twin Cities, be sure to check them out. These are just the tip of the iceberg.
The Small Cities - This City
The Small Cities - Fargo
Pictured: Lau Nau. Recording the first ever musical how-to album for DIY luring enthusiasts everywhere.
Laura Naukkarinen passes 5-minute long songs by like short whispers. Her Finnish words don’t quite register, but I can tell she means well. She probably means to give small secrets about the simplicity of her life. She definitely means to suggest a closer look and deeper appreciation for the natural world, things both big and small and a general blending of them all to create a grasp at understanding. And she’s all shushes and over the shoulder glances when you respond too loudly, like you might give away her favorite secret to someone passing by.
Lau Nau - Lue Kartaltar
Lau Nau just released a new album called Nukuu(Finnish for Sleep) on Locust Music. It’s full of dreamy little wonders like this song, Lue Kartalta.
Pictured: Now, Now Every Children. All pastels and droopy eyes. The way Easter should be.
There are two things we’re head over heals for at PV: really good music and local bands. So, oh my garsh if we can post about local bands making really good music! We like to think of our Minnesotan neighbors locally, especially those who make trips to play for us here in West-Central Wisconsin.
Now, Now Every Children is painfully introspective while taking in far too much of the world surrounding them. Their songs cast stories about complicated family situations or impossible friendships that give very few answers to the many questions they pose. Girly Eisley-like lead vocals ring perfectly true and clear through mounds of breathy keyboard and xylophone arrangements, clever percussion parts give much more than standard time and while guitars can feel a bit uncertain and a little chunk-chunky at times, they feel all the more genuine for it. It’s absolutely refreshing to hear a band who isn’t afraid to sound unsure of itself.
Now, Now Every Children - Everyone You Know
There are boatloads of good songs I could post for this band. This is the first song on the new In The City EP, a rockin’ cruiser, Everyone You Know.
Now, Now Every Children - Friends With My Sister
This is Friends With My Sister, the last song on the Not One, But Two EP. You must, must, must also go to Now, Now Every Children’s myspace page and listen to the demo version of the song Little Brother. So good, so, so good.
Sometimes I try to put together pieces of video that I’ve shot. I do my best to make these projects visually appealing by applying filters or slowing them down or through the use of other cheap iMovie gimmicks. It’s a pretty enjoyable process. All in all though, the most satisfying part of the whole ordeal is searching through my library and selecting a few pieces of music to accompany the video. Most of the time it only takes me a few minutes to find what I’m looking for; the themes of the footage often bring to mind albums or bands that I think would suit it perfectly.
But something weird happened last week. I heard Float, the first full-length album from Peter Broderick, and I experienced the reverse effect. This music is begging to be used as a soundtrack. Personally, I could see it as great for opening credits. As far as my own headphone usage, I would say it’s simply the ultimate walking-around-in-the-fall music. This album reminds me of being home–the Midwest–in the best way possible.
After a doing a little research and reading some interviews, I found out Peter does quite a bit of film score work, so I guess it’s not a huge shocker that this stuff is similarly constructed.
Now, I don’t like to drop names in my reviews, but if you’re like me, and geek out over modern composers like Jon Brion or (Broderick’s labelmate) Goldmund, I would highly recommend mining this dude’s catalog.
Peter Broderick - A Snowflake
Check out Peter Broderick here, purchase Float here, and if you live on the East Coast or in Europe, see him on tour with Efterklang (as the violinist) at these places.
Oh yeah, he’s only 21. You and I ought to feel pretty lazy right now…
Pictured: Craig Finn, soon to take over color commentary for the Minnesota Twins.
Usually I wouldn’t call out our readers’ comments, but the last time we wrote about The Hold Steady it only got one. One big, fat negative comment. “Aaaaaaaannnnndy! Don’t write about the Hold Steady! Nobody likes the Hold Steady. Hold Steady. Betty.” Wrong you are, Betty.
Craig Finn and Co. released the first single from their upcoming album, Stay Positive, today. It’s a three-and-a-half minute long jam called Sequestered in Memphis that’s more E-Street and full of crowd participation that we’ve heard from them before. There’s tons of organ, big finger-noodle guitar licks and plenty of gaudy saxophones. It’s really nothing revolutionary for The Hold Steady, actually it’s a fairly straight-forward rock out song in comparison, but it’s packed full of the same irresistible, dirty energy and drunken emotions. Nobody but Betty can wait for this album.
The Hold Steady - Sequestered In Memphis
Listen while enjoying your favorite beverage.
During my first two years of high school, my best friend Paul and I used to sit in bean bag chairs and listen to Weezer records. This might be the coolest thing we ever did. We weren’t doing anything else. Since those days, I’ve had my mind bent by a ton of great records, but nothing has really blown me away to the point of setting aside time to put a pair of good headphones on, lay down, close my eyes, and listen to music. I’ll admit that this is mostly my fault. I’ve been busy. It’s not necessarily that these songs didn’t deserve my full attention, I just didn’t make the time. The point is, Bobby & Blumm’s debut album, Everybody Loves… marks the first time I’ve really sat down with an album. You should too.
Well-recorded guitars are important to me. In fact, a fantastic guitar tone has, in my opinion, the ability to excuse a lot of awful things going in a song. These guitars are beautiful. Few instruments in this world can match the quality of a clean electric guitar. I’m at a point right now where I think almost everything recorded with an acoustic guitar could have been improved by substituting a clean Fender guitar.
Wait a minute. This thing also has boy-girl harmonies. Say what you will about the cheese factor of boy-girl harmonies, but these ones will destroy you, all the while being the most understated vocals you’ve heard so far this year.
This is gorgeous.
Bobby & Blumm - In Future Present
Visit Bobby & Blumm here, purchase Everybody Loves… here (or here if you buy vinyl), and go see them on tour whenever that happens.
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.
Pictured: Credit to HowWasTheShow.com for this picture that I stole. Credit to the lighting crew at the Varsity Theater for being absolutely rediculous.
The story of Picking a Lock at the Speed of Light goes something like this, I gather:
a) boy likes girl,
b) boy also likes outer space, a lot,
c) boy takes girl to outer space in a rocket ship to impress her,
d) girl doesn’t like boy or outer space,
e) crap. Gigantic u-turn.
These Modern Socks tell their tale with a fairly adventurous exploration of cheap-beat electro-pop music and bits of fuzzy, overdriven guitars. There’s plenty of star gazing, gravity-free atmospheres and weird jelly food(i.e., funk) along the way, but in the end, both love and outer space are far out of reach for skinny-legged dudes with shaggy hair and bedrooms full of keyboards.
These Modern Socks - No One’s Gonna Miss Me
Here’s the album’s light-footed first tune, No One’s Gonna Miss Me.
These Modern Socks - On The Moon
And for comparison’s sake, the closer, On the Moon, after a visit to Radio-Friendly Rock Galaxy.
‘Martha Ann’, the single from David Karsten Daniel’s new album ‘Fear of Flying’, is two minutes of evidence that everyone should write shorter songs. There is nothing innately wrong with long songs, but in my estimation it is better to leave them hanging, quality over quantity. A song doesn’t always need four identical choruses. Succinct pop songs please.
I have a couple pages outlined in my head about the lyrical content, but that seems a bit contrary to the concept of brilliance in brevity. With hints from the rest of the album (a song entitled ‘Oh, heaven isn’t real’) and some transcribed lyrics, my best guess is that ‘Martha Ann’ is about what happens when you die - nothing or everything, and the difficulty in relating either belief to someone who doesn’t buy it (”from where I stand there is no light that you and your man are walking to”). This is somehow satisfactorily expressed in eight lines.
I’m not sure who made it official, but saxophones are cool again and DKD knows it. Not when used in a tv commercial quality series of ridiculous overtone laden licks as a hammed up solo, because whole notes and shifting harmonies is clearly where it’s at. The aforementioned horns, hints of mellotron flute, strings, and swelling filling organ add depth to what is a fairly simple and straightforward song. The use of melody in the ending guitar solo is perfect and memorable. I sometimes catch myself whistling the solo. It’s not a shredder nor should it be. It’s been said, by my roommate and I’m sure by others, that female vocal harmony is almost always awesome. Yup, basically, and especially here. The astute and possibly headphone wearing listener will also appreciate the more subtle left channel male harmony.
This is the front runner in my mind for single of the year. It delivers on all levels.
David Karsten Daniels - Martha Ann
Pictured: Wye Oak. The kind of kids who acted like dinosaurs for the whole third grade.
“You know your secret’s safe with me,” promises Wye Oak’s Jenn and Andy. “If you feel young.” Their new album, If Children, feels like a Sunday morning of frolicking between bed sheets and letting just little bits of light in through the curtains. The kind of shit your too-busy mom tells you is just “wasting time,“ but is probably the best part of your Sunday morning. Simple guitar strums and duo whispery vocals control the songs’ movements with both ease and comfort, a playfulness that offers, above all else, security, in that it wouldn’t know how to harm you if it wanted to.
Wye Oak - I Don’t Feel Young
I Don’t Feel Young is just barely-there for half of the song, but it works itself up pretty well by the end. A real sweet pleaser, this one.
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.