Remember Luke Winslow-King and his friends, who played a song for us on a rooftop back in January when it was freaking cold and the tuba froze?! His full-length Old/New Baby, inspired by the streets of New Orleans, is coming out this month on Fox on a Hill Records. Above everything, it feels like a work of romance: when he sings “Where there’s two mocking birds”, and takes his voice up to say “mocking high”, and back down to “mocking low”, you want to leave the dishes half done, drop all your kitchen things, and go find yourself a new love story. It’s only disappointing that you can’t actually smell the flowers you know are blossoming somewhere between those notes and that your face isn’t physically warmed by the dash of sun tumbling down the fabric of horns.
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Download “If I” | Here’s some Piers Faccini music as promised. And an excerpt from an interview with Santa Barbara Independent, dated December 2006:
Does your worldly upbringing give you better insight into songwriting? The music that I do is influenced by a lot of different kinds of music from around the world. It’s a very kind of eclectic music, which I’ve been listening to ever since I was 18 really. I don’t know if I could say definitely [that it makes me a better songwriter], but the fact that I wasn’t in one country, that I moved around speaking more than one language, that made me an outsider constantly. I know how England works, I speak the language, but I don’t feel English. I go to France, I don’t feel French. I go to Italy, and I don’t feel Italian. That gave me more a sense of whit and scope for when I write songs. I don’t feel limited to any particular format.
These are the corresponding “spirit animals” of the members of The Grates— singer Patience is a seal, drummer Alana is a tadpole, and guitarist John is a grizzly bear, as I have just learnt from the special biography essay posted on the band’s website. I love the song “Burn Bridges” that is now out in video form. The album ‘Teeth Lost Hearts Won’ is coming out on August 2 in Australia. Until then, Fast Louder has Ben Lee interview the band, the band has a blog, and the blog has production photos and more.
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Download “RR vs. D” | There is a fresh pop collective on the horizon, from Portland no less, for warmer days that await us. The preview track from Au’s summer record, Verbs, is so tinged with the colors of sand, grass, the sun, parades, and crisp rolling waves, that it can only mean one thing: Behold! Summer Marches Towards Us. The group has announced some tour dates, but these don’t include the east coast yet. However, the album comes out June 26th, so I’m sure we’ll be getting our share of the feast: Verbs was recorded over three days with Luke Wyland pulling in nearly thirty collaborators from the area. Listen to “RR vs. D” — it’s an absolute blast.
When I picked up Black Mountain’sIn the Future and asked my friend Lev if he’d heard of the band, his eyes popped in such diameters of familiarity and glee that I had to ask him to write up the review. Says he:
Whether intentionally sarcastic, or accidentally honey-tongued, the title of Black Mountain’s second full-length “In The Future” is a perfectly unfitting title to describe the music contained therein. The opening chords of “Stormy High” teleport you back to the smoke-filled seventies, doused in all of the psychedelic fervor, debauchery, and flower-power that gleamed so bright some-forty-odd years ago. Large doses of whirling organ, fuzzed out Gibson SG’s, and dual vocal harmonies drowned in reverb, undoubtably, and comfortably, place this record alongside some of the dusty vinyl in your dad’s record collection. The album’s song structures stick to such a relentlessly precise formula of combing abrupt moments of energy and drudging meditative breaks that the schizophrenic rhythm of the album sometimes begs for a shorter, more impactive musical delivery. Ultimately, this album will appeal to people either attempting to relive their youth under the guise of the seventies, or those assuming the seventies never ended.
As much as it’s filled with repetitious melodies and lyrics that aren’t the full force of poetry yet, Matthew Houck’s Pride, released under the name Phosphorescent, is a beautiful album. Indeed, the repetitions evoke a sense of containment, which effects a devotion that requires little or no straying. And so the voice stays on course one wistful song after the other, borrowing their solemness from hymns, though tucked away in the background of some are movements more energetic and spontaneous. There is also a successful employment of a choir throughout, which is apt for a project that sounds like it was produced for the singer’s own salvation, and which smooths the sound surrounding his flaking voice.
As awful as weather comparisons to music are, Citay’s “First Fantasy”, off the upcoming Little Kingdom, is proving to be a soundtrack for today’s drizzle. The song is rich with voices and instruments that knot through and through in harmony, but it’s really the pace that’s remarkable. There’s a certain kind of slowness, as exemplified in a confident stride, that lacks neither drive nor movement, and as such asserts independence. Unlike the excitement of being in the middle things, of having given to the uncertainty of whichever way a process might head, including nowhere, which has its own charms of course, this pace feels like it benefits from hindsight, of having come through something that has certainly passed. Of the identifiable lyrics, there are the lines: “Last week was like a year ago/ Five years, just like yesterday”.
Dead Oceans will release Little Kingdom on November 6th.
So far as it can inferred from the sound of “Dancing Behind My Eyelids”, which you can trade for your email address on the band’s website, and “They Made Frogs Smoke Til They Exploded”, which now has an animated video, the new Mum is sounding cheerful. This, considering the album they gave us last, Summer Make Good, was not quite a summer album (if one were to make a quick, misguided guess from the title). Instead, it stretched with mournful longings, drawing pictures of dark clouds, icy water and a harsh, winter landscape. And as if the album’s dreary weather wasn’t obvious, song titles such as “Small Deaths are the Saddest” and “Weeping Rock, Rock” served as reassurances. But for now, from the upcoming Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy that comes out on September 24, something far brighter.
Engine Room Recordings hosted a contest to mark the upcoming release of a compilation featuring “15 acclaimed underground artists covering their favorite guilty pleasure pop tunes”. They are now showing winning videos and other entries at YouTube, film student Andy Cahill emerging victorious with his stop-motion piece for Devendra Banhart’s rendition of “Don’t Look Back In Anger” by Oasis. This and other two other songs revealed by way of the videos – Petra Haden’s cover of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin” and Will Oldham‘s cover of Mariah Carey‘s “Can‘t Take That Away” – surely hint at Guilt by Association being an interesting take on guilty pleasure pop tunes. Launch parties will be hosted in various cities, including two in New York: August 21 at Pianos and September 7th, “the big launch” following September 4 release, at Joe’s Pub.
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Arms Down is Get Him Eat Him’s follow-up to 2005’s Geography Cones. I’ve been letting this new one sit for a while, hoping I would either grow to love it, or figure out why I don’t. It’s not a bad record, but you know you like an album when, if it were a basket of strawberries at the market, you’d want to take at least some of it home (yes). Arms Down inspired no such greed, so I turned to the albums I do love. These tend to have an unintentional greater idea behind them, the kind that comes together as a result of other intentions and inspirations, the outcome of things falling into place. In Arms Down, that sort of idea is either missing, or, if present, not very alive.
hooves on the turf is a mostly-music blog based out of brooklyn. i can be reached at hoovesontheturf [at] gmail [dot] com - please send me your lovely music as an attached mp3 or an mp3 link. if i like what you send, i'll be sure to ask for more.
Evan Hammer: and now i’m excited too! thanks for the new band.
Jens: Where can I order t-shirts from the Tallest Man On Earth online? Is it possible at all?
nat lyon: three cheers for secret garden! it’s been too long.
jamie: Yo! You should definitely check out this awesome video MPLS.TV just shot of Dark Dark Dark this week for City...
sarahana: they were taken with the new iPhone 4 using the Hipstamatic app
Arms Down is 
