Sorry!
With all the time spent on studies and work, there has been unfortunately, none left for critical writings on music, and so Tunes Consumed is therefore on hiatus status until some free time is available!
With Love,
The Editors
![[city in france]](http://tunes.bluesummers.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/france2.jpg)
Before even dipping into the latest Beirut offering The Flying Club Cup there’s a whole host of things to keep in mind.
For starters, while not a concept album, per se, Zach Condon was explicit with the intent of the album, and that intent is not so distant from Sufjan’s own 50 States project, on a much smaller (practical?) scale. Each song is meant to carry with it the air of a particular city in France, and as Joshua points out in his review, it makes atmospheres come alive with rich vibrancy through orchestration just the way the soundtrack for Amelie was able to. While listening to the album and trying to draw connections, it’s sometimes just as easy as a cursory glance at the track name to know which city it’s attached to, cities like “Nantes” or “Cherbourg” are directly connected to the track names (tracks #2 and #11, respectively), while others require a little more digging. Track #12, for instance commemorates the statue of Saint Appolina held at the church in Locronan, and still others are plays on French words (track #5: La Banlieu -> “banlieue” as French for “suburbs”). Translations aren’t always as fruitful, with tracks like “Un Dernier Verre (Pour La Route)” translating to “Last Drink (For The Road)” or track #8 “Forks and Knives (La Fete)” is fêteor celebration.
“Forks and Knives” celebrates with violins, and with easy-come drums that sway to-and-fro, backed by voices that almost cheer in the background, cheering for one old man easing and passing away “he means well, sang ‘I’ve got stories of wine, and of course my childhood forks and knives and then the hospital bed where I turn my life over and over again.” It is homage to the folks who live, breathe, and fade away from the lives of the cities themselves. If it wasn’t for the instrumentals, you might even well up, fortunately it is dosed up with a senile, blissful cheer and you can’t help but sway along.
Interestingly, that last track is followed up by “In The Mausoleum” which stings of piano work reminiscient of Charlie Brown, and for me at least, conjures up in those first few strokes an image of the children scurrying along concrete floors. I also can’t help but think of the famous bass-section keys from “Linus and Lucy“.
If you have a knack for Eastern-European instrumentals like I do, you’ll be delighted to know that Jeremy Barnes (A Hawk and a Hacksaw) is once again a real and strong driving force for the studio work on Club Cup, as is Owen Pallett (of Final Fantasy and Arcade Fire fame) present in supplying guest vocals and even some of the signature string arrangements he’s known for. The trio working in tandem like this is undoubtedly one of the reasons that Beirut, since Gulag has seemed to have aged nearly a decade, successfully generating a palette of decadent tracks, and without compromise can seamlessly move about between the playful and the emotional.
As a final and important note, the cover, lush with old-time beach fun (read: bold stripes and over-clothed women in lawn chairs) was Mr. Condon’s beloved inspiration that hung on his wall during his in-home composing sessions for The Flying Club Cup: “Back in the early 1900s, like the 1910s or 1920s, there used to be this hot air balloon festival in Paris– it’s titled after that and after this very bizarre 1910 photo I found. It’s one of the first color photos ever made, at the World’s Fair, and it…shows all these ancient hot air balloons about to take off in the middle of Paris. I just thought it was the most surreal image I’d seen in a long time.”
![[flying club cup]](http://tunes.bluesummers.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/flyingclubcupcover.jpg)
listen:
Beirut - Nantes
Beirut - Forks and Knives (La Fete)
Beirut - In The Mausoleum
Vince Guaraldi Trio - Linus and Lucy
The album is slated for an October 9th release on Ba Da Bing records, and Amazon has pre-orders up for when you’re ready.
[header image cropped from this photo]
![[underwater getdown]](http://tunes.bluesummers.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/underwatergetdown.jpg)
Common to whole music journalism thing is this tendency for historical throwback references. Marrying one band’s sound to another in a yadda-yadda meta-matchmaking of sounds is kind of our thing, but we don’t always stick to that.
After relating The Most Serene Republic to calculus I thought I’d be done with the mathematizing of music for a while, but almost prophetically a new release made its way to my mailbox by the name of Supersymmetry. To be brief, because even the wiki article on the subject will just be a confabbled mess of physics jargon to most people, supersymmetry was a branch to physics bourne out of the field of quantum theory. It gives us an anchor with which we can wrap our heads around multiple dimensions, and in the simplest sense allows for the possibility of multiple possibilities. It is X·Y = -Y·X. Easy, right?
My initial line of inquiry on listening to this Underwater Getdown album is on trying to decide why they would use this title: is it some physical characteristic of their sound and style? Undoubtedly they are quite liberal with giving the music a number of different spatial qualities: drums with echoes, vocal harmonies, and a general sense of fog looms over the album often quietening the main narrative in order of best fit, and darkening it as though it were illuminated by a damp street light on a moonless night.
It’s interesting to discover which parts of particular songs are highlighted with a punchy, crisp production. A song like “Monrovia” is wrought with the same sound and romantic lyricisim that made Bishop Allen famous. This song, while novel and even full of some of the same emotional urgency you might expect of Bright Eyes, it still says nothing for this Supersymmetry.
Moving on (backwards, even) past a few tracks like “Power Grid” and “Awake At Attention” - forgettable ones as the band dips into salty and unsavoury waters, we move onto their single. This is the track that lured me into the whole thing. A stargazing song, spatial and swooning the instrumentals are fantastic, and the lyrics the X on our map.
“Slingshot” is the song that makes the album name swell up with meaning and is what we’ve been digging at all along. It is whole world of simultaneity as the narrator wakes to find himself someone else. A Freaky-Friday swap this is not, and a roundabout lecture in physics it is far from. It is, on the otherhand entirely: a bleeding-heart tale of woe, one in which the band ironically finds its strengths and comes across as a musical blend of malady. Instrumentally it sounds like a blend of Arcade Fire and Radiohead - sans lyrical grandiosity and obscure accent, respectively. Being simple as the songs are is far from a criticism of the band, and after giving the album a thorough going-over it’s a relief to find that it’s not shockingly geeky or post-modern physics babble of metaphors.
subatomically split (and then listen):
Underwater Getdown - Slingshot
Underwater Getdown - Monrovia
Underwater Getdown - Patterns
Underwater Getdown are as of yet a wholly untapped talent from the southern state of Arizona, doing their own thing and selling physical copies of the album from their own site. $10 via paypal and you can get Supersymmetry to your door, with the sweet serenity of knowing that your pennies will probably go toward paying for another of their picturesque holidays.
Animal Collective wants to bring you along on this strangely surreal picnic & misdemeanor lovefest with the new video for “Peacebone”. The video does a pretty good job at dressing up the music, especially with its Aliens-inspired mid-section vying for a “best kiss” scene. (no not really).
And yes, we’re still excited about Strawberry Jam which will be in stores in little over a week (you can pre-order your copy here!).
Animal Collective - Peacebone
Animal Collective - Winter Wonder Land
Animal Collective - Safer
If you’ve been keeping up with us as we blasted you with rants of mainstream blasphemy roughing up the indie front, you may be interested to know that the Now That’s What I Call Indie! (aka This Is Next) compilation was just reviewed over at Pitchfork.
A whopping 0.0 rating with a description as follows: “In a sense, This Is Next is totally dispensible; a silly and ill-advised compendium of material freely available to anyone with the initiative to seek it out… A shoddy, transparent, and poorly packaged ploy to sell indie rock cachet to the “casual” consumer, this compilation is far more condescending than some dude who gets pissed off when he sees a Shins CD at Starbucks.”
Here’s a tip of the hat to LeMay for telling it like it is.
![[population]](http://tunes.bluesummers.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/population.jpg)
This Republic not what one might think. Musically: a powerhouse of a band that sits comfortably among the ranks of another Arts & Crafts borderline-white-noise electro-pop act Broken Social Scene, The Republic is the embodiment of tranquility in the notion of sensory overload.
Having matured since their debut, the newest offering is instrumentally a powerful series of cascades in the grandest sense one might think that layerings of drums, bass, guitars (three), piano, and horns/bowed instruments may produce.
In calculus everything is a matter of limits. The way each mathematical concept will approach infinity, and most importantly, the speed at which that is achieved. It’s no grand stretch to put music into these same terms, with white-noise as our aural anchor of infinitude we can think of music as growing, expanding, approaching its own limit. Yet, the idea is never to reach it, as we all know white noise is not a pleasant thing (think: your TV’s snowy cackle). It’s enough to drive a man into the outer-reaches of madness.
We’re not there though. The snow is absent as this Republic makes clever use of its cast of seven members, in a way that each participates in order to build toward that central point. Each instrument adds a proverbial floor, wall, and cathedral ceiling to the body of sound all the while keeping a steadfast harmony, a clear and decisive plotted course, and more often than not leaving some head-space for vocals.
“Humble Peasants” is the most illustrative track of the band’s direction. It picks up pace as you hear each member don their instrument and find a place in the sound until the inevitable climax (infinity it is not). I can imagine this track playing inside the cabin of the space-elevator as it launches clear through our bubble, emerging from a made-for-theatre dust cloud meant to represent the atmosphere (fainciful, yes).
Population is a fitting title for the album, especially with a track like “Present of Future End” which dawdles around one lowly voice harking unto the world until at around the 2:20 mark it erupts into a crowd. You know those musicals where everyone has the same fanciful dream, and everyone’s mind is running the same circle of inner monologue as their feet run imagined dance-steps around the drabness of their everyday lives? Yeah, it’s just like that, only with drums and fuzz and horns.
The album is a hard thing to describe, but as Ryan Lenssen remarks (in one awesome article):
- “[Population’s] juxtaposition between the music and the lyrics is just so grand,” Lenssen says. “The music itself sounds almost—almost—happy. People will look at the cover and see all the beautiful graphics but then they’re going to get into the philosophy of the record and that is much, much darker.” “If people were to truly understand what we were really saying and all of the musical choices and why they were there…this is way more calculated. This is murder in the first degree. This is malicious, unbridled anger and I think we’re sort of a little insane because of the way we present it. We are that scary clown. We are stabbing you in the front and smiling, brushing your cheek, saying ‘Isn’t it lovely? Isn’t it lovely?’”
It is, it really is.
listen (headphones recommended):
The Most Serene Republic - Humble Peasants
The Most Serene Republic - Present of Future End
The Most Serene Republic - Sherry And Her Butterfly Net
Population will land October 2nd, and A&C should like to have your back on the pre-ordering front soon enough.
Montreal’s own We are Wolves are pretty damn notorious. Whether we are discussing their frigging awesome live sets, their minimal yet sleek web-site, or their debut album - the inimitable Non Stop Je Te Plie en Deux - that still gets constant rotation around here… To put it bluntly: I am dying to hear their next album, Total Magique.
The good news? We don’t have long to wait… as it drops September 4th from Dare to Care Records.
But! I have even better news: a sampler for the album has started making it’s rounds to the media featuring two tracks off the forthcoming album. And, it must be said, they are definitely on par with anything on Non Stop. These songs are, quite possibly, the best shit the band has ever recorded.
And so, I am ridiculously proud to present to y’all the dirty dirty dance, scream & drinkin’ tune “Fight & Kiss” alongside the title track off Magique. Love it.
We are Wolves - Fight & Kiss.
We are Wolves - Magique.
(you’ll be able to order the album here.)
![[grizzly bear remixed]](http://tunes.bluesummers.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/grizzlremix.jpg)
Yellow House was among the top of my personal lists just based on the number of times it was heard throughout my apartment last year, and I just know when the frost encases the ground and the cold rolls around I’ll be back under a blanket accompanied by the sparsity that is Grizzly Bear, in one form or another. It does well in a cold environment, when my body isn’t so ready to brave the cold even for a dose of sunlight or energetic release. It is still summer now, and I’m going back to something that’s by no means new, but should in all regards be a seasonally appropriate take on this wintery band.
Remixes tend to break things down into simpler and more nostalgic elements, however emotionally barren they tend to be (they don’t have to!). Songs usually just get the “electronic treatment”, being jazzed up with drum machines, electronic glitch-noise, or splashes of synth. They often take on a punchy feel, and fare better on a mixtape, just by virtue of the newfound energy it takes on.
So I found my way to the remix album for Horn of Plenty (which was Grizzly Bear’s 2005 offering). I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was hoping for something palatable. It’s hard, I suppose when so much of Horn is so dark. The tracks begin soft, grow in depth of emotionality, but instrumentally don’t offer a whole lot of punch on their own, replete with delicate harmonies and atmospheric guidance. Truthfully, it could even see a broader audience if it were made to appeal to less adventurous ears, and I see that as being the inspiration for this series of remixes.
Unfortunately, it misses that mark by quite a distance. Tracks like Simon Bookish’s or Girl Talk’s are so far removed from the originals that you have to wonder, are they dressing this song up, or are they just doing something else entirely? The answer is the latter.
Simon Bookish’s track is a sad disservice to the original, almost as though it were a mockery (or at the very least, a simple weekend DIY mixing project). He followed the footsteps of many remix formulae and layed down a drum track, threw in synth, made a few spots for “Eavesdropping” vocal samples and worked his own words in. Even his words make no sense whatsoever in the context of the original song, and everything else is on par with your typical DMusic Fruity Loops artist. This is Simon Bookish doing Eavesdropping.
Girl Talk, on the other hand, takes the “where’s the original at”, over-top rap approach. It is as simple as it sounds, and they just pretty much just rap as though it were their own material, then make sure to play an awkward section of the song at the end of all their contextually huh? rapping. Fairly simple, really awkward, but somehow more respectable than Bookish’s. This is Girl Talk’s take on Knife.
Or hey, you know what. This world needs more bad lounge techno with heavily echo-filtered vocals. Thanks, Soft Pink Truth.
Among all the remixes, the ones that stand out are those from artists who actually share a common bond with Grizzly Bear, at least in terms of artistic approach. Castanets and Final Fantasy were the only two among the 17 who didn’t out-and-out butcher the music. It seems like they were the only candidates who even listened to the album at all, grasping some notion of its nature.
Silences are a terribly powerful thing in music, and they played a key role in bringing out emotional depth. The nature of the music was hidden among the thrushes of those silences, caught up in the reedy tones of the falsetto harmonies, and alight in the open drumming.
Owen Pallett saw to playing around “Don’t Ask” rather than to smother it or cover it up, and the violin and percussion definitely add something to the song that even the original could have seen, without sacrificing any of its momentum. Final Fantasy remix Don’t Ask.
While Castanets take a very different approach, attesting to the idea that the song need not be entirely in-tact in the re-versioning. Deep Sea Diver becomes somewhat of a play on concepts, and the sounds drift in and out as though, literally, you were swimming in and around an ocean of music. Castanets Remixing Deep Sea Diver.
One can only hope that if 2007 rolls around with a pile of Yellow House remixes, that the cast of players will be more conscientious, and actually do some research before embarking on their creations.
all in a line, just for you:
Deep Sea Diver (Castanets remix)
Don’t Ask (Final Fantasy remix)
A Good Place (Soft Pink Truth remix)
Eavesdropping (Simon Bookish remix)
Knife (Girl Talk remix)
![[murder mystery]](http://tunes.bluesummers.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/murdermystery.jpg)
So I just received in the mail a promo disc from Murdery Mystery. I’d been looking forward to it for a little while now, and the time spent in its snail-mail transition only served to raise my hopes even higher after one of the singles & promo tracks from their website had me hooked. “Love Astronaut” takes me back to some of the better straight-shooting unapologetic boy-girl pop, and I’d fallen in love with the 8-bit/guitar love solo so much so that seemed it was written just for me.
I was fully prepared to go flying off-the-handle with praise and resounding applause here. Something like “the horizons of my sonic palette were fully broadened by the pop sensibilities of Murder Mystery’s Are you Ready For the Heartache Cause Here It Comes” and then you know, throw in some awesome 60s references, like “Beatles-meets-Beach-Boys-meets-today’s-The-Strokes”.
So much for that. It seems the technical prowess of the members has done a number on their spontaneity, and this whole “awesome fun” that I’ve been told so much of their live shows is nowhere to be found. One thing I can’t stand in a studio production is when the director thinks it’d be swell to whitewash it, do thirty takes until it’s “perfect” and then every ounce of humanness is removed so it’s as though robots were singing to the drum machines that are playing alongside recordings of the guy that may-or-may-not have played a guitar twenty takes back. And that’s weird because I love synths and robots.
While I’d be happy to share a live video of these guys with you, and then chock it up to poor engineering & direction (Mark Dann engineer for ‘NSync was involved? ugh) I can’t seem to find anything wholly redeeming.
I don’t seem to be the only one with these sentiments: Kate over at The Glorious Hum is a little more forgiving than I am, recommending that you spread out the dosing and not take it all in one sitting, and then Matt from YANP likens it to this. I couldn’t agree more.
You may like it for what it is, and what it is may cater to your tastes for simple and highly refined pop songs, but for the whole I’d say listen to these tracks before you make up your mind, and even then: to go see them in person where the hefty weight of the producers is all but present.
listen:
Murder Mystery - Love Astronaut
Murder Mystery - Honey Come Home
And the album is on sale, if you really want it.
![[devendramix]](http://tunes.bluesummers.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/devendrabanhart.jpg)
Jerome over at Burntpiano sent along a pretty awesome remix of Devendra Banhart’s “Autumn Child” in celebration of all the mama-jama hubbub with the new album. Originally a pretty slow track for Banhart is now a sort of creamsicle of flutters as Jerome somehow picked up and refracted through that electronic prism of his, the distinct wavering of Banhart’s voice.
It comes off as somehow reminiscient of Board of Canada (in terms of the “instruments” *cough*patches*cough* used), and towards the end of the breakdown, morphs into a bit of a house-y mix.
check it:
Devendra Banhart - Autumn’s Child (Burntpiano remix)
Recent Retaliations.